Green Zone
starring Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Brendan Gleeson, Amy Ryan, Yigal Naor and Khalid Abdalla
written by Brian Helgeland
directed by Paul Greengrass
Rating: ♦◊◊◊◊
Based on the book Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone by Rajiv Chandraasekaran, Green Zone is another War on Terror/Iraq Invasion story. Damon plays Chief Warrant Officer Miller who is searching locations in Iraq for reputed Weapons of Mass Destruction sites (WMDs). The poor Chief is perturbed that for all his hard work and good intentions he never finds WMDs. Complaints to his superiors are ignored. The unspoken premise is that there are no WMDs and the politicians, bureaucrats and military leaders know it. The fiction is perpetrated for reasons of politics and geopolitics. Well, we knew that, didn’t we? I was flabbergasted at the apparent attempt of this story to make something of the news that the justification of WMDs for the invasion of Iraqin March 2003 was a deliberate hoax. It was known as a lie from the start. Why did we already know it? Remember the U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix? He was on the ground there in Iraq inspecting everything. He said there were no WMDs, and he’s the one who ought to have known, because that was his business. But despite the correct expert testimony George W. Bush claimed to have his own reliable sources of information. What sources? Sorry, national security prohibited us from knowing.
And here is Matt Damon playing Warrant Officer Miller with a conscience bothered by the absence of weapons of mass destruction. I cannot feel anything but contempt for characters as naïve as that. Miller is a fictional character, so I reserve even more contempt for real people who thought/think the same - and there are plenty of them. Doesn’t everyone know that Truth is the first casualty of war? Soldiers? Civilians? Politicians? Journalists? Don’t they teach that ast West Point or wherever? If the U.S. military really wanted to find WMDs then they ought to have looked in the Midwest, not the Mideast.