 Regular readers of The Republic will find it difficult to fathom what all the fuss is surrounding Michael Moore's new documentary film, Fahrenheit 911. The film briefly touches on such now-commonly known themes—at least common to readers of British media, The Republic, and other independent media—as the Bush family's business connections to the bin Laden family, the pre-September 11 Bush White House plans to attack Iraq, and the origins of the hastily-passed civil rights-eroding Patriot Act.
Moore's film could have gone far deeper into these and other themes if its aim was to educate its American audience about the true nature of their government. Instead, the film goes too far into the personal grief of a mother who lost her army volunteer son in Karbala.
It's a wonder this film won the top award at Cannes--it surely is a mystery to anyone outside America how it can be viewed as so tragic when an adult who willingly volunteers to fight on behalf of an army illegally invading and occupying a foreign nation, is shot for doing so. But Moore is an American after all; what other nationality would feel compelled to confess his love of country in a documentary film critical of the current leaders of that country?
A more critical documentary maker might have mentioned how the Patriot Act was passed through Congress when the Congressional building was conveniently, and without precedence, mostly closed due to the still-unsolved anthrax attacks, anthrax since proved to have originated on a secret US military base, according to the New York Times.
A more investigative documentary film maker might also have found a moment to mention that the document proving that members of the cabinet planned the Iraq attack long before September 11 is called Project for a New American Century, a document which spills far more ink discussing America's renewed reliance on nuclear weapons, not as a deterrence, but as a tactical battlefield weapon.
And a more curious film maker might also have found time to mention that after September 11, reliable witnesses watched CIA officers visit the very room in a Saudi Arabian hospital where Osama bin Laden was receiving treatment for a kidney condition, as reported by the BBC.
Mention might also have been made about how several of the alleged hijackers of September 11 subsequently presented themselves to US embassies in Tunisia and Saudi Arabia, attempting to clear their names. It remains as a matter of record, also amazingly but unmentioned in Moore's film, that one of the chief FBI pieces of evidence linking Mohamad Atta to the attack is Atta's paper passport allegedly found in the streets among the rubble surrounding the World Trade Center--a paper document that apparently survived impact, explosion, incineration, and 88 floors of pummeling, to arrive intact amongst thousands of tons of debris in the streets of Manhattan, and to be conveniently located there by FBI officials amongst reams of paper within 18 hours of the crash. The extraordinary luck of this find has, suspiciously, not been celebrated to the extent it deserves--if it actually happened, that is.
The best part of Fahrenheit 911 comes in the last two minutes where a new subject is introduced that should have come around the middle of the film and should have carried at least half the film. In this too-brief a moment, Moore points out that perhaps the so-called War on Terror is actually all for the American domestic audience, and not for the foreign audience at all. This is probably the only place in the film Moore allows himself to speculate, but it comes too late and one gets the feeling not even Moore is prepared to consider the evidence before him with the clear enough eye this story's investigation requires.
As he himself narrates, perhaps the true-to-life enactment of George Orwell's imagined constant war is more about maintaining a strict hierarchical social order within the warring nation than it is about defeating the enemy abroad, which in Orwell's story, and as The Republic has argued in the past, does not actually exist.
Moore is likely right in his speculations here. But that leaves an inquiring audience with a very big question, one not picked up by Moore: what threat is there to the existing hierarchy of social order in America today? For what possible reason would a leadership cabal in America go to such grave and expensive trouble, if the purpose of so destructive a war is only to sustain an apparently stable--perhaps the world's most stable--social order? Maybe the social order of America is not as stable as it appears, and maybe there are threats to that order that only designers of America's War on Terror know about.
And maybe they are alone privy to that knowledge because they are the perpetrators of the threat to that social order themselves. It's a possibility Moore won't contemplate. But imagine the bru-ha-ha had Moore delved into the fanatical Christian millenarianism that clouds the mind of the president as well as, more notably because he actually has a mind, vice president Dick Cheney. In a speech at the University of Toronto in 2002 (later published in a small book called Coercing Virtue), right wing stalwart, former US Solicitor General, and failed Ronald Reagan candidate for the Supreme Court, Judge Robert Bork, spoke of the threat to civilization itself presented by “moral relativists” who had poisoned the minds of a generation of American university students who now no longer understood America's role as keeper of God's light in the world.
In this speech, Bork suggested four events were required to cleanse the American soul of the poison poured on it in the 1960s feminist and civil rights revolutions. The first two events had to do with the raising of a new cadre of intellectuals who could stage a rear-guard action to re-take the university campuses away from the moral relativists who captured them in the previous generation, during what he calls “ the cultural war,” which is “an international phenomenon” still taking place “in America, Europe, Canada, and Israel .”
The other two “necessary” events were: A massive collapse of the American economy, and a new set of intensely serious and long-lasting foreign wars, including real suffering brought to American soil. These are, to remind, welcome and necessary events, not to be regretted at all, but to be hastened if at all possible, according to Bork, one of the American right's intellectual anchors, author of the hugely influential book, Slouching Toward Gomorrah.
On the one hand, one could argue that Moore's film is enough for now; after all, there is scarcely any dissent in America still, and Americans need to have news of the utter destruction of their nation broken to them slowly.
On the other hand, lack of any sign of an American public awareness taking hold of what monstrous schemes their polity has unleashed into the world has so dispirited people around the world that it now seems prudent just to try to ensure the safe passage of those volunteer US military forces on their way out of yet another nation they have utterly destroyed. This seems to be the conclusion of the French, German, and Russian leaderships.
But any resolution of the Iraqi debacle that leaves the American military intact enough to launch another unilateral action against another sovereign country smacks of criminal collusion with the monsters of Pennsylvania Avenue. The thousands of deaths of Afghans and Iraqis should not be in vain: the US should be left to go it alone when it comes to consequences of its thoughtless actions no less than that country wished to be alone in launching them. To help now is to appease—and to invite yet further tragedy.
Similarly, sympathy for Americans, which Moore spent half his film soliciting, would be catastrophically misplaced at this time. Recall that Americans returned both a Republican House and a Republican Senate in the 2002 midterm elections, long after the reality of what monsters there were in the Republican White House could have been widely known, had inquiring minds only sought the truth, available to them like no other people on Earth via the internet.
Furthermore, Moore's crocodile tears over the public trust the White House betrayed by concocting lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Hussein's ties to Al Qeada terrorism, fall on a cold floor when one recalls the “lessons” of Vietnam. Only a people congenitally pre-disposed to a massive collapse of memory could imagine that 30 years after Watergate, a President could never lie about reasons to send their young off to a foreign war.
Moore's documentary is only part of the constant American proliferation of favourable propaganda piped all over the world “24-7” as they say. This is the first foray of American propaganda into the realm of apology for their most recent horrible mistakes. As such, it falls flat, for it doesn't go nearly far enough in examining the sins perpetrated by that deeply troubled nation, and no sincere apology by an American to the world is found in the film. There is instead a lot of self-sympathy.
The world is not looking for the guiltily mumbling ruminations of a clown like Moore. To forgive the price of America's ill-conceived gambit for world supremacy, nothing short of war crimes trials for the entire Bush cabal will do, including, if found guilty, the usual Nuremberg-style results. Then, and only then, might the world community find cause to re-consider the meaning, and the usefulness, of America in the world.
The film that makes this clear to American audiences has yet to be made, and likely cannot ever be made by the likes of milquetoast Moore. Still, the world seems willing to offer America the chance to apologize, as was evidenced in Europe's filmmaking community awarding Moore top honours. We world awaits that apology, but not with held breath.
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