... it's important to know that before the American-led invasion to subjugate Iraq for sinister oil interests, this invasion staged as part of America's gruesome campaign to lay waste the world, daily life in Iraq was smiling and laughing and flying kites! According to Michael Moore, at least, until March 2003, Iraq was a land of happy kite-flyers, without any oppression. .... Fahrenheit 9/11 does well to remind us that U.S. forces have killed the innocent in Iraq; unlike the attackers on 9/11, it was not our intent to kill the innocent, but kill them we have, and to the dead it's all the same. That innocents have died in Iraq is rarely being mentioned in American debate, and Moore is right to find this an outrage.
I think the above well illustrates Kevin Drum's point that
that the real value of Fahrenheit 9/11 is that it serves as a pointedly political Rorschach test: you see in it primarily a reflection of yourself.
The part of the movie where Moore shows children flying kites has little commentary. Nowhere does Mooore directly say that life in Iraq is free of oppression, and all about happy kite-flying. Nowhere!
When I saw the movie, I took the sequence with the kites juxtaposed with the bodies of the dead to primarily be an indictment of the killing of innocent people. For all the attention on the 900 odd American deaths in Iraq, there's very little acknowledgement of the Iraqi death toll that's 10,000 times higher.
A strange moral calculus when you're going in there to liberate people and set them free, but I suppose that just shows how much Iraqi lives are worth in the American media.
As for Moore eliding over the story of oppression in Hussein's Iraq; it seems to me that you could view the movie as adding to what we know about our involvement in Iraq the last 2 years; the story of Hussein's oppression has been often told that it's hardly necessary for Moore to repeat it.
And the contrast with 9/11! Whether or not you think the invasion of Iraq was merited or not, contrasting American intentions in Iraq with the motivations of the 9/11 hijackers, conflates two entirely distinct moral questions.
Even if the 9/11 attacks were justified, the justification for invading Iraq would still be an entirely distinct issue, to be decided on its own strategic or moral merits.
The wrongs (9/11) others do to us (broadly conceived) are done by other people, and the people who died then are dead forever. What we do in response is done by us, is our responsibility, and cannot bring the original victims back.
Iraq can be judged in relation to 9/11 on a strategic level, but there's no way in which the immorality of others makes our actions moral or immoral. Not in a world where we believe, or claim to believe, that the taking of another human life is absolutely and always, a moral wrong.
Posted by robe0419 at July 12, 2004 5:27 PM