Sound and fury

I've generally appreciated Alex Garland's films over the years. I'm not a devoted fan, in that I'll run out to see whatever he does. But he hit a high point for me with Ex Machina and adding to that writing the screenplays for 28 Days Later (the best modern rendition of the zombie genre) and Dredd (the only decent adaptation of the legendary OTT British comic series) means I'll generally at least take a look at whatever else he gets involved in. That reputation took a minor hit for me with Annihilation (just another version of The Colour Out of Space) and Men, which I talked about here and an even larger hit with Civil War, which I didn't bother to cover. That review of Men was similar to this one in that, again, it's an interesting premise but there are various flaws which make it something less than a must-see or something I'd be eager to watch again (or own, in the way that I do Ex Machina.) In all of those respects, Warfare is no different.

Garland co-wrote and co-directed the film with Ray Mendoza, a former Navy SEAL, based on the latter's experiences in the Iraq War; specifically, the Battle of Ramadi and a couple of hours that Mendoza and his team spent trapped in a house while resistance fighters tried to extirpate them. On a technical level it is, as Garland's films almost always are, very well done. It's told almost completely in "real time", following every movement of and moment that the squad occupied the house and uses ground-level perspective on all of the characters involved, so that we see and hear what they do, with broader looks at the scene represented only by views of the screens of spotter planes as they track enemy movements around the city. It doesn't spare any of the tactical actions or approaches to the situation (multiple "shows of force" (where an F-16 comes in low enough to make everyone want to duck for cover), proper stacking of infantry, etc.) and it also doesn't spare the effect of those tactical actions. This is one of the films that I would generally refer to as "ferociously violent", like The Northman but even moreso. And that, of course, is all well and good if you lack any empathy whatsoever for the human beings that experienced all of this and were the ones behind the blood and the screams of agony and so forth, which presents us with the real problem in all of this...

The Iraq War was one of the more contemptible and stupid actions in this nation's history (almost surely to be surpassed by the current idiot in the White House any day now, which is saying quite a lot.) It was one of the purest expressions of imperialism ("You're sitting on our oil!") and complete obliviousness to the reality infusing the region. Indeed, we had spent decades supporting Saddam Hussein, not least because he was radically opposed to just the kind of fanatical Islamic tendencies that were unleashed as soon as he was toppled. We had a president who had decided on his own "show of force" and that was to unleash the US military machine on a nation that had absolutely nothing to do with the terrorist acts carried out by Al-Qaeda but which made him feel like a tough guy and, therefore, consequences (and millions of Iraqi lives) be damned. Just like other films about the period like American Sniper, this film does nothing to express any of that political reality. It's just an action moment that ends up lionizing the people involved and which will be responded to by much of the American audience with a "Thank you for your service!" obeisance and a complete neglect of the outright crimes committed throughout that period of time. Indeed, it's just a memoir of someone involved in a terrifying moment that doesn't reflect whatsoever on, for example, the terrorizing of the two families that lived in the house that the SEALs occupied. The end of the film even shows the return of members of the unit to that same address as if all is forgiven and now it's just a curio box for former soldiers to remember "those days."

Does it show the brutality of war? Sure does. Does it show the enormous amount of pain, terror, anguish, and trauma that accompanies combat? Absolutely. Does it deliver any kind of message about why any of that should be avoided like in movies such as 1917 and All Quiet on the Western Front? No. It's just an action moment. Certainly, some humans will be spooked by being that close to stuff they've only seen as sanitized news reports before, but just as many will think it's cool to see a JTAC in action and seeing someone hit the clicker to blow the Claymores and so on. In the end, I just don't see the point, despite my appreciation of its technical merits, and my disdain for the central story of this film and the way it's presented is why I still haven't seen things like American Sniper and why my opinion of Garland is continuing to diminish, seemingly with every further step he takes these days.

There is no door but the revolving one

The latest escapade of the Idiot's administration is both amusing and frustrating for one very significant factor that precisely none of the current major actors in our public farce will admit: This is not new. This is the same old story played out once again in front of a public only too willing to jump up and scream "Save the children!", even if the consequence of this action will be that many, many more children will die, and probably even American ones when they're sent over there from backwoods Alabama, since joining up was the best employment prospect they had. The fact that most of said dead children that the GOP is howling about saving are precisely the ones that they've insisted shouldn't be allowed into the country is just the kind of thing that wouldn't be brought up at the right parties.

There are the usual politically-driven complaints about acts against a sovereign nation and/or doing so without Congressional approval for an overt act of war, but that's all window dressing. The concepts of "sovereign nation" and "Congressional approval" are both irrelevant to US foreign policy at this time and have been since 1915 for the former and the early 60s for the latter (Haiti and Vietnam, respectively.) The US military goes where it wants and does what it wants and dares anyone to say otherwise. The fact that the US Navy has 19 aircraft carriers while the rest of the world, combined, has 22 should symbolize just how often anyone would be willing to take that dare or be capable of doing so. Democrats, Republicans, and the media are all falling in line with said military because of the usual hysteria over CHEMICAL WEAPONS, which is laughable on its face because the US has not only encouraged puppets to use said weapons frequently in the past (Let's use Iraq in the 80s, just as a casual, not even relevant to the situation at hand example...) but enabled the sale of materials to said puppets by signing off on various pharmaceutical producers doing business with them. 

But it's not really about that. This is the continuation of the grand game that hasn't changed under administrations going back to FDR. It's a bunch of old white guys who meet up in their various orgs with names like "Committee for the Restoration of Iran" or some such thing. They're still fighting the Crusades, 1000 years later, not for some spiritual god, but for the real god: money, and the oil and weapons which it is based upon. This agenda has not changed nor will it ever change until massive corporations and old white guys are no longer the predominant owners of our government. Obama did nothing to dissuade them. The Clintons were both ardent hawks. If anything, Trump was less of a hawk on the campaign trail than Clinton was, although it's certainly debatable whether he was so because he didn't have a clue about Syria or anything that's farther than three miles from one of his hotels (likely) and she was so because she had to be "tough" as a woman in a man's world of politics (also likely, although that doesn't excuse it.) This is the real agenda. All this noise over the past few months about Trump's incompetence and his family grafting off the government and health care and blah blah blah; none of that is the real story. This is. It always is. The ownership class signs off on presidential candidates only with the implicit understanding that said story will continue as it has for the last 100 years. Trump has finally engaged his 15-second attention span and signed on to the real agenda because he saw a news report about a chemical attack and, less than a day later, decided to follow the time-honored tradition of boosting his poll numbers with an act of war. It's the same thing every president has done for the last 50 years (Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Serbia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Libya, and many more.) They all do this. The fact that it gains them some political capital at the same time is an ancillary benefit. But this was destined to happen.

Now, granted, it's slightly more of a concern when the world's largest arsenal is in the hands of a person with the maturity and impulse control of a five-year-old (read: none whatsoever) but it doesn't change the inevitability of something like this occurring. Those rich, old, white guys still own the government, no matter who's sitting in the Oval Office. This is their agenda. This is how the system works and both Democrats and Republicans have long since signed onto it. So has the voting public, who always flock to the idea of the glorious American Heroes stepping out onto the world stage to murder someone. Americans who actually read the history often like to laugh at the idea of so many happy people watching their soldiers parade off to certain grinding death in 1914, but the same thing happens here for a certain segment of the population every time this event occurs, no matter where it occurs.

The usual response to any protest is: "So you're saying it's OK to use chemical weapons?!! On women and children?!!" No. That's not what I'm saying. That's what you're saying to serve your political favoritism or demonstrate your outright ignorance of the situation at hand. What I'm saying is that the United States should not be killing anyone to either benefit someone's poll numbers, justify the Pentagon's ridiculous budget and the corporations who feed at that trough, or enhance Chevron's bottom line. Not now. Not ever. If anyone really cared about the human beings involved in the midst of this, that would be the message they'd deliver.

How to completely misinterpret the news

As all of you know, a recent development in the Middle East has been an upsurge of popular revolt. In addition to the rampant use of psychotropics among Libyan teenagers, popular revolts have ended the long-standing regimes of Tunisia and Egypt, seem to be on the verge of extracting major concessions from the king of Bahrain and toppling the presidency in Yemen, and have emerged in Algeria, Morocco, Jordan, the Palestinian territories, and now even Saudi Arabia.

What always tends to follow in the wake of such geopolitical trends are people claiming that "things would have been different IF" their advice had been followed by the people who ruled such nations and apparently were neither as enlightened or commercial as the little world within the DC Beltway. This rambling discourse is one of those claims. It's titled "A crisis of legitimacy". Unfortunately for the author, the only question of legitimacy is the one aimed at his own grasp of history over the past 100 years.

1. Demographics: He cites a population explosion based on "reduced opportunities for women." Of course, opportunities for women have never been widespread in some of these regimes, going back centuries. There's also an easy counterpoint to this cultural claim in that one of the largest population explosions in US history accompanied a steady expansion of opportunities for women in the 1950s and 60s (the so-called Baby Boom; perhaps you've heard of it, often spoken of in dreadful tones concerning the impending implosion of the US economy given our farce of a public pension system.) But I'm just quibbling here.

2. The so-called "resource curse": Here's where we really get rolling with the Western-centric viewpoint. According to the "resource curse" theory, nations with abundant natural resources are more prone to corruption and a lack of economic, social, and cultural development. Smith is quick to tag the "Ruling Elites" (why is it that so many social entities or theories that are intended to be targets of repugnance are capitalized by conservative writers? Must be an insidious form of Socialism...) with the lion's share of the blame for this phenomenon. Said elites are the type of heinous criminals most Westerners assume must inhabit all of the Middle East, as they keep their downtrodden people impoverished and powerless to prevent their rulers from extracting whatever resources are available and enriching themselves and only themselves with the sale of those materials. But, of course, sale implies having a customer. One doesn't just pump oil from the ground and ship it off to a Swiss bank account. And once you have customers, they're going to be interested in getting the sweetest deal they can find for those resources in order to further the growth of their own economies and enrich whichever corporation is "in theater" (to borrow his phrase) and fomenting this joyous transaction.

Now, which entity has been the largest customer for the primary resource of the Middle East for most of the last century? Which customer has been only too happy to support various despots and dictators to ensure a free flow of that substance to its shores; that support usually being comprised of cash, guns, and the training to use those guns? Which customer has acted swiftly to deter any forces of change within these various crudely drawn states, presuming (rightly) that said forces might not be so pleased to be giving the milk away so easily and might actually have an interest in developing their own nations? Let me think... Oh, yeah...

That last link is to a page written by my friend, William Blum, a former employee of the State Department who has spent much of the last 40 years detailing exactly how the US has gone a bit farther than the "fledgling wannabe-Empire" that Smith claims. From Chiang-Kai-Shek to the Duvaliers and Noriega, the US gladly supported strongmen and vicious criminals around the world. From Mossadegh to the Sandinistas, the US moved quickly to destabilize, isolate, or outright overthrow popular and legitimately elected regimes that conflicted with US economic and private corporate interests. The Middle East is, of course, one of the foci of this global effort, since most of the people living there have the misfortune to have settled on top of our oil.

Those Ruling Elites have existed at the behest of the US to keep their populations in check and to keep the oil flowing. El-Zein? Turned a blind eye. Mubarak? $1 billion per annum in military support and training. The Gulf states and the Saud kingdom? We're the biggest guard dog you've ever seen. Saddam Hussein? Our fair-haired boy until he exhibited a little too much pride. The lone real exception is Qaddafi, but since Libya doesn't really produce that much oil and wasn't invading Egypt, those people could just do without any of that liberty stuff. And now they're using drugs. Degenerates.

The idea that cultural trappings or a weak-willed populace or any of the other speculative answers implied by Smith's essay are what kept the Ruling Elites in power and have ensured the "backwardness" of their respective nations is one put forth by someone who may never have set foot outside the United States. The tepid response by the current administration to the transformations taking place is indicative of changes in that policy brought about by the public's waning interest in conducting extra-national adventures in the name of "national security" (read: Chevron's profits) and the fact that, uh, we have some issues here in Der Vaterland that are more prominent than usual.

But this is my favorite part:

Regardless of their purported ideological flavor, the ruling Elites all relied on the same system of governance: offer a simulacrum of public purpose to the world and the populace, and ceaselessly pursue private confiscation of national income and resources.

Huh. Where have I heard that before? Oh. The iron fist of Empire has, indeed, been covered with the attractive glove of freedom, but not where Smith thinks.

Oh, and his presentation of Pakistan as an example of colonial interference creating unstable new nations is patently ridiculous, given that the British argued to keep the dominion of British India whole, but unimportant people like Gandhi, Nehru, and Jinnah knew that would be impossible. You can blame the British for a lot of things (including Mossadegh, in part) but not that. It's all here. He clearly knows of the existence of Wikipedia, but obviously not for even cursory research.