muvies

Fahrenheit 9/11

I guess a proper review of "Fahrenheit 9/11" would have to include a piece-by-piece analysis of all the claims, implications and insinuations Mr. Moore makes along the way, and there are QUITE a few, they just keep coming, on and on, and before you can digest the importance/degree of credibility of each one, there is another. But, um, I don't feel like doing that! ;). I will say, though that there were a couple of enticing conspiracy-type theories established in a fairly convincing manner. For me most worthy of further attention is the news that, through a Air Force Reserves buddy of his who turned into a financial advisor, George W.'s first business, Arbusto, was bankrolled by the bin Laden family.

Add to that the millions paid to George Senior by Saudi influence peddlers and George Junior's pre-9/11 blithe attitude about Al Qaeda and there's a persuasive nugget there: that the Bush family found it convenient to pay less attention than might have been merited to Osama Bin Laden because his family was a money train for them (hm, sounds more convincing when he said it! ;) ). The smoking gun for this theory is that on 9/13/01 Bush, Jr. made a special effort to fly all 24 bin Laden kinfolk who were in the US out of the country before they could be questioned by the FBI as to anything they might know about Osama's whereabouts. What would have been the reaction, Moore pointedly asks, if immediately following the Oklahoma City bombing Clinton had arranged to have the McVeigh family flown beyond the reach of the FBI?

Other segments seemed unfair, if not untrue, and bordered on the jingoistic. Particularly the discussion of a proposed pipeline through Afghanistan, much favored by the Bush Administration, who met with the Taliban pre-9/11 in Washington to sell them on it. Many aspects of this deal are surely ugly. But Moore bandies about the name of just about any potential US baddy who could have financially benefited from the pipeline - especially Cheney, because Halliburton would build it, and, egregiously, Kenneth Lay of Enron, just for good measure. No particular details were offered on Lay's connection. Hey, he's in the energy business, he must be in on it! I've been a bit skeptical on the whole Halliburton thing. I mean, yeah Cheney used to work there. But the idea that these grey hairs would wage murderous war just to backscratch a couple of their cronies is thin to me. That would make them truly monsters. Maybe they are, but I'll withhold judgement until I see stronger proof. So having this perspective, a lot of the arguments around business influence on Bush, through Halliburton, the Carlyle Group, Arbusto and the Bush family's various other Saudi-backed oil ventures seem not entirely on point to me.

If the Iraq war is about business and oil I think it's in a broader sense: geopolitically we have a very strong interest in securing the flow of cheap oil into American industry, and the Middle East is the only real source of the kind of volume we need. In other words, we wage war in that region to protect our status as oil customers, not our status as vendors of oil services. Which is what all Bush and Cheney's affiliated companies are about (oil services). In the end, this is is a smallish sector of the U.S. economy and, rationally speaking, unlikely to be able to muster the gross scale of influence that's regularly attached to it by the left.

And, if you think about it, a war for cheap oil consists of a much greater, and deeper, scandal than the one this movie addresses. It's a scandal that goes to the heart of our status as an industrial superpower and transcends any particular administration's business ties. Without cheap oil, America would almost instantly lose most of its prosperity and international influence. So we spill innocent blood to keep friendly faces manning the pumps in the Saudi Peninsula. That is really a bad, means-justify-the-ends, kind of imperialistic thing to do. Yet in truth our way of life, and our security, like it our not, currently depends on it. So what I would have liked to see is a bunch of really smart political science talking heads laying that case out, or at least evaluating it, educating me. Maybe showing me I'm wrong.

But I don't think Michael Moore is the guy to make that kind of picture. He tends to grab hold of important issues and immediately, and relentlessly, personalize them. Which is what makes his movies so successful. They're about people. People acting silly, people being venal and hypocritical. People we can laugh at. He's very good at putting a media-friendly face on left-of-center arguments, but I think that this is an issue too complex for his kind of confrontational, man-in-the-street style of discourse.

Of course we all love this style too, this shaggy, paripatetic Michael Moore; and he comes up with some very winning, emblematic sequences when he comes down to earth (where he makes frequent visits to Flint, of course). He stiches together post-9/11 video clips of mass-media terror hysteria to great effect, showing how government and business mongered panic, braying incessantly about the risk of further attacks in tones that recalled the Red Scare or "Atomic Cafe." And he spends a great deal of time on the ground in Iraq, contrasting idyllic images of Baghdad before the war with the heartbreak and horror that have come with the American soldiers.