Positive Liberty

A review of Fahrenheit 9/11.

It’s a pity that this November we will only elect a commander in chief; would that we also elected a filmmaker in chief. Then I could look forward in equal measure to voting against both George W. Bush and Michael Moore. In a better world, I’d put them both in some tiny, sealed room together, where they could fight things out between themselves and leave the rest of us in peace.

As Billmon has put it,

…fame and wealth and mindless adulation have created the Michael Moore we see now - a monster on a rampage (”Moorezilla”), hurling the propaganda equivalent of cars and lamppost and everything else he can lay a claw on at the object of his rage.

Fortunately for us, that object is George W. Bush. And if Moore has become the Ann Coulter of the left - but with a sharper wit - then I can see no better target for his considerable talents than the Man from Crawford. If ever a president deserved to be the subject of a vitriolic, one-sided, emotionally manipulative diatribe of a documentary, Bush is it.

Indeed. Moore has made what will likely become the definitive indictment against Bush, but it’s certainly not a job well done. In turn, Christopher Hitchens has written what will likely become the definitive indictment against Moore, and I could say precisely the same thing about his piece: In attacking the grossly unfair Fahrenheit 9/11, Hitchens stands knee-deep in unfairness himself. Before going to work on Moore, it might be best to offer a few critiques of Hitchens.

First, there’s a glaring fallacy of the excluded middle. Hitchens writes on Moore’s treatment of the cozy relationship between the Saudis and the Bush administration, “Either the Saudis run U.S. policy (through family ties or overwhelming economic interest), or they do not.” Clearly Hitchens believes the latter, that the Saudis have no influence; he probably thinks that the former is a bit of raving lunacy.

And yet consider the nearly one trillion dollars of Saudi money in the U.S. economy. Roughly four billion of it has gone to the Bush family alone. These sums can buy things both more subtle and more useful than naked, outright political control. While the American people would no doubt balk at the Saudis openly “running” U.S. policy, still, it’s much harder for us to detect influence, bias, willful blindness, and the occasional improper favor from the American government. Moore points these things out–while Hitchens simply asserts a fatuous, non-existent “either-or.” Score one for Moore, who did quite a decent job showing what influence these billions of Saudi dollars can buy.

Second, I think the following Hitchens speculation is way out of line:

Bush is shown frozen on his chair at the infant school in Florida, looking stunned and useless for seven whole minutes after the news of the second plane on 9/11. Many are those who say that he should have leaped from his stool, adopted a Russell Crowe stance, and gone to work. I could even wish that myself. But if he had done any such thing then (as he did with his “Let’s roll” and “dead or alive” remarks a month later), half the Michael Moore community would now be calling him a man who went to war on a hectic, crazed impulse. The other half would be saying what they already say—that he knew the attack was coming, was using it to cement himself in power, and couldn’t wait to get on with his coup.

It’s a perfectly hypothetical complaint, one with no foundation in any evidence at all. Hitchens is looking for a problem where none exists–and finding a whopper.

Most reasonable Americans do not believe a single one of the things Hitchens suggests above. We wish only that Bush had been a little prompter in the classroom–and a little more measured afterward. There’s no real contradiction between the two.

Let’s face it, Bush really did make a tremendous mistake by sitting in that classroom for so long. I could understand perhaps thirty seconds of stunned silence; I could even tolerate a minute. But seven minutes of nothing at all, while the country endures the worst foreign attack it’s ever had on its own soil? Bush couldn’t have saved the day by springing into action. But he could definitely have given a better example. Again, Moore wins this round.

Lastly, Hitchens takes Moore to task for being inconsistent on Afghanistan. In 2001-02, Moore was against attacking Afghanistan–so how come F9/11 complains that we didn’t do the invasion well enough? How can Moore complain that we sent too few troops?

Aha, says Hitchens, Moore is a hypocrite!

Not so fast, though: F9/11 makes it very clear that Moore considers a botched invasion to have been the worst of all outcomes. He then makes the case–convincingly, I think–that we blew it. We didn’t find bin Laden, we installed only a very fragile Potemkin government, and even the Taliban is still around. If we’d only used more of the effort that we spent in Iraq on Afghanistan instead, I’m confident that the entire Middle East would be a much safer place today–Except perhaps for the Iraqis, but it isn’t our job to save them from themselves. Instead, we spread ourselves far too thin and attempted far too much at once. Afghanistan has become the administration’s unwanted stepchild, and frankly I’m glad that Moore has the courage to say it.

Moore’s critiques of the USA-PATRIOT Act are also completely on target. Any educated person knows that congressmen don’t usually sit down and read bills before they sign them, so admittedly this was a bit of cheap theatrics. And yet, if a congressman could pick just one bill to read in its entirety, surely this should have been it.

Yet even for all the good he does, I find that Moore shoots himself in the foot again and again. Fahrenheit 9/11 could have made its point much more strongly if Moore had limited himself to making only those arguments against Bush that were both cogent and fair. They do exist, and Moore clearly knew enough to make quite a few of them. Yet by associating the good arguments with a number of unfair, unprincipled ones, he does little to win my sympathy.

Moore excels at making visual jokes–but the good visual jokes don’t make a good point in the process. Every time he mocked someone’s candid, unscripted remarks, I found myself wanting against all my better instincts to vote Republican. Like any reasonably-informed citizen, I accept that public figures aren’t always going to be at the top of their form. I accept that the camera is relentless and unforgiving, and that anyone, if forced to appear before it from morning to night, would stumble from time to time.

Collecting these stumbles does not make for a rational argument. Nor does comically repeating the same line from a half-dozen stump speeches. While it is true that Bush is embarrassingly bad at answering unscripted questions–and while it is true that his policies often do seem terribly simplistic–still there were better ways to show these shortcomings. One might, for instance, have replayed excerpts from the “Axis of Evil” speech, then followed it with political analysts who would pick apart the president’s policies even at their best. That would have been good political commentary; done right, it might even have been good entertainment.

We didn’t need the endless shots of Bush stammering, Bush wincing, Bush forgetting his lines, Bush repeating himself, Bush simpering and licking his lips in the moments before he goes on air. It’s funny, yes–but so what? And after a while, it wasn’t even funny anymore.

Further, Moore’s class warfare appeals neither to the right nor even to the left in today’s political climate. Poor people don’t join the armed forces because they’ve been duped. They join to better themselves, to get a decent career, or to get training for any number of other careers outside the armed forces. Poor people who enlist are not to be pitied; they are to be commended for making a wise decision. In his look at recruitment, Moore is right on one point alone: The Bush administration gave all these fine people a very raw deal by sending them off ill-prepared to an unjust war. If only Moore had left it at that.

In trying to prove too much, Moore often ends up proving nothing at all. Nowhere is this clearer than in his portrayal of Iraq before the invasion. There are kids flying kites, an amusement park–and Moore’s flat statement that Saddam Hussein had never “murdered” a single American. It’s a statement that Moore defends with equivocations that make Bill Clinton look like a straight talker. But Hussein has tried to murder Americans; he’s even succeeded at it, albeit indirectly–and this fact should neither be obscured nor denied.

We don’t need Moore’s overblown, unsupportable suggestion that there was no reason to invade Iraq. I think it’s quite clear by now that we did have some reason. But having “some” reason for war is never enough. We must only go to war for the most compelling of reasons–in response to a direct attack, for instance, or when faced with clear evidence that an attack is imminent. No such evidence has ever appeared, and this is why the war was wrong from the outset.

Yes, children die in war, and they are the exact reason why the motives behind a war must be nothing short of compelling. They are the reason why it was wrong to go to war against such a distant, indirect threat.

Moore had the footage to make this argument; he passed it up for something that may have seemed greater–but was in reality much, much less. The mere existence of children and amusement parks does not prove the innocence the government that happens to rule over them. Going to war, though, requires more than a criminal government as an enemy. Otherwise, we’d currently be at war with Iran, Syria, North Korea, Myanmar, China, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Cuba, and probably five or six of the former Soviet republics. Had Moore pointed out the many crimes of these regimes, he could have shown how Iraq was just one of many, many offensive little countries out there–countries that are ultimately not worth our global reputation, our money, or our lives.

What makes Fahrenheit 9/11 so maddening is that I agreed with probably 75% of what Moore was saying. President Bush has taken us into a war with insufficient justification, with insufficient preparedness, and with a moral authority that’s now next to zero. He’s made the world drastically less safe for Americans and damaged our relations with both our allies and with the Muslim world. The latter rift may prove unmendable–and that’s exactly what the terrorists want. Bush has utterly failed to grasp these things, and he probably never will. Even setting aside his mean-spirited domestic policies, Bush deserves to be voted out of office.

But those of us who saw Fahrenheit 9/11 were hoping to see the best possible case against Bush. We certainly deserved a better film than we got.

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