Deliberate

After his unexpected and extraordinary Ft. Hood speech yesterday and his equally grave Veteran's Day speech today, President Barack Obama appears to be taking the risking of American military lives more seriously than any President in recent memory:

President Barack Obama does not plan to accept any of the Afghanistan war options presented by his national security team, pushing instead for revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government, a senior administration official said Wednesday.

That stance comes in the midst of forceful reservations about a possible troop buildup from the U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, according to a second top administration official.

In strongly worded classified cables to Washington, Eikenberry said he had misgivings about sending in new troops while there are still so many questions about the leadership of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Obama is still close to announcing his revamped war strategy — most likely shortly after he returns from a trip to Asia that ends on Nov. 19.

But the president raised questions at a war council meeting Wednesday that could alter the dynamic of both how many additional troops are sent to Afghanistan and what the timeline would be for their presence in the war zone, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss Obama's thinking.

Military officials said Obama has asked for a rewrite before and resisted what one official called a one-way highway toward war commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal's recommendations for more troops. The sense that he was being rushed and railroaded has stiffened Obama's resolve to seek information and options beyond military planning, officials said, though a substantial troop increase is still likely.

The whole article is worth reading, as our President appears working hard to avoid the key mistake of America's involvement in Vietnam -- supporting a corrupt regime doing our servicemen and women no favors.

Bravo, and here's to a wise, considered, responsible and effective decision.

McNamara's Dead

Robert McNamara, he corporate leader who became architect of the failed U.S. war policy in Vietnam for Kennedy and Johnson from 1961-1968, is dead at 97 years old:

Half a million American soldiers went to war on his watch. More than 16,000 died; 42,000 more would fall in the seven years to come.

The war became his personal nightmare. Nothing he did, none of the tools at his command — the power of American weapons, the forces of technology and logic, or the strength of American soldiers — could stop the armies of North Vietnam and their South Vietnamese allies, the Vietcong. He concluded well before leaving the Pentagon that the war was futile, but he did not share that insight with the public until late in life.

In 1995, he took a stand against his own conduct of the war, confessing in a memoir that it was “wrong, terribly wrong.” In return, he faced a firestorm of scorn.

He lived long enough to get multiple helpings. Check out Errol Morris' masterpiece of McNamara intimate and unsettling non-confession, The Fog of War. A cautionary tale for the ages, but also what Derosaworld says about Robert Strange McNamara:

President John F. Kennedy was surrounded by some very strange men. Men who were the ‘best and brightest’, but who also had dark secrets and responsibilities beyond what previous generations of government leaders had experienced.

The atomic bomb ended World War Two, but it also ended a sense of terrain: mountains and seas, protecting people and countries from the total devastation of warfare.

Now, we were all potential victims of the bomb. We could blow up the entire planet in a day if we wanted to.

--

The best and the brightest. Robert McNamara looked the part. Young, nerdy, glasses, slicked back hair, the President of The Ford Motor Company. The New Frontier was here. Camelot was bivouacked in Washington, D.C.

A question for historians is why was McNamara selected to be the Secretary of Defense. Was it a Kennedy strategy to bring the various defense departments (air, sea, land) under White House managerial control? Was McNamara the loyal corporate man who would take orders from his Commander in Chief?

--

The Johnson/McNamara era of the Vietnam War brings out the demons that brought America on the brink of insanity and Richard Nixon. The many locked doors in the White House became too scary for McNamara to open by 1968. He had to get out or was asked to leave. The nastiness was not over. Another Kennedy was going to be killed.

--

Robert McNamara was in the center of the American maelstrom from 1961 to 1968. Decisions made on his watch have led us to the place in history we stand now, on a precarious precipice. Robert McNamara was a watchman at the gate and he let too many bad things slip under our defenses…either by accident, mismanagement or on purpose.

To give the man credit for even having thought about this stuff after committing it and coming up with the prescription the Cheney Administration was too Nixon to follow:

R.S. McNamara's eleven life lessons

1. Empathize with your enemy
2. Rationality will not save us
3. There's something beyond one's self
4. Maximize efficiency
5. Proportionality should be a guideline in war
6. Get the data
7. Belief and seeing are often both wrong
8. Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning
9. In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil
10. Never say never
11. You can't change human nature

Guaranteed as much my parents generation hated McNamara when he was in office and the boys started coming home in boxes, I'll bet he comes out looking at least more reflective than this war criminal.

Pervasive

American Gangster is my kind of mainstream Hollywood movie. Money well-spent on a sprawling cast of fantastic actors and successfully recreating a fascinating time in the late Twentieth Century. Add some quality shoot 'em up. Stir.

Although build around an arguably obvious rise of a drug lord/pursuit by a cop plot, it scores by depicting how thoroughly drugs permeated U.S. culture from the 1960's through the entire 1970's setting, and how so much of it was fueled by the Vietnam War -- both the desperate degradation bourne by the constant images on the television screen and the actual opium highway via U.S. military transport.

But the real story the rides like a bandit throughout American Gangster is that of corruption. American was a drugged up nation by that time, what with all the legal speed, barbs, alcohol and cigarette society that developed from WWII through to the 1980's, then LSD developed by the CIA and released to the streets (legal in the early 1960's), pot (although not as widespread as today, treated like a narcotic), some coke (more late 70's-late 80's, Reagan era drug including it's bastard child, crack), and a whole influx of heroin. While this movie doesn't show every single person on some sort of mood alterer -- Denzel Washington's drug boss Frank Lucas doesn't partake in more than the social drink -- it chooses instead to portray a variated landscape of corruption.

Early in the picture we learn that Russell Crowe's Det. Richie Roberts, is a mess with his personal life -- the exact opposite of family man Frank -- but scrupulously honest as a cop. Lucas, of course, is supplying the city and northern New Jersey with life-sucking heroin, but we just get a couple of horrific, passing junkie montages, nothing following a junkie character all the way to empathy. And at the far end of the moral scales is brazenly corrupt Detective Trupo (a second great turn this season for No Country's Josh Brolin), who moves around with a posse of corrupt coppers in suits.

The movie implies that virtually all of the NYC/NJ metro area police force was on one take or another, hence the physical danger to Richie for not taking money. The resultant facts bear out similarly. But the question is always asked, what's the price for that character. How much money, how much respect, how much self-respect, how much hero worship to come aboard. How much family.

And for almost every character, it's not a tough decision. Whether it's already being corrupt or entering into the family business, it's just everyday evil. In some cases it's the blind eye tolerance, most notably with Frank Lucas' mother, played by Ruby Dee.

What's great about her performance is that at first you think maybe she's in this very small role just because she's the valedictorian, the long beloved breakthrough career with her husband, the late great Ossie Davis. Then, late in the picture, there's a scene where you realize why she was hired. It's because she can stand up to Denzel. No problem. And not many can.

You can see what it does for him to be opposite her, where with everyone else but Crowe, with whom he spends most of the movie separate, he's the mature, esteemed, royal guy in the room, the motor completely driving his half of the movie, star power.

Crowe, on the other hand, does another one of his chameleon performances, channeling a very boyish, unpretentiously earnest working class cop who's striving to make a little more of himself. As with Michael Mann's Heat, these are two equivalent leading men (Washington gets his name first in the titles, fittingly as the title character) each owning half the movie building up to finally meeting, what we're waiting for, the two facing off, even a showdown.

With Heat is was the scene in the restaurant between DeNiro and Pacino, which was engaging without being cathartic. In American Gangster, it's a much bigger release when they first appear in a shot together, and the ensuing act-off is almost less important.

Very cinematic, very big screen stuff. And what may be director Ridley Scott's greatest accomplishment is that he's subsumed his more obvious trademark stylizations. You'd be forgiven for thinking this might have been directed by any one of a dozen other directors, but it's his confidence to just "shoot the story" this time (no doubt eased by service to the pro Steven Zaillian script) that makes it work. The movie benefits from his gift for big images, big performances and iconic performances, but the movement is so fleet, without feeling either jumpy or overly graphic, that it feels unforced, as hip like the era.

I even forgave the play of "Across 110th Street" after it was on both the original 1972 classic and Tarantino's Jackie Brown, because that Bobby Womack song is so damned cool.

With any resonating period piece one has what the metaphoric connection to our times, what element of our contemporary psyche is it stroking, what's the reflection of. I do think analogies can be too stretched (is No Country for Old Men really construable as a metaphor for the Iraq War? ) but I can also see how we believe the world of Scott's movie, even our hollowed American Past, because of the rife corruption of the current Administration and the GOP Congress that was so long working in tandem. We've had those months this year, last year, the year before, when it seemed like a country of a scandal a day.

Sure, all those cops were on the take. America was on the take. And we want that celluloid catharsis because we're trying to convince ourselves that somehow, someday, we'll clean up our collective act.

For a moment.

Coup D'Iraq

Bush is right, Iraq is just like Vietnam. And if the Cheney/Bush Administration is now setting into motion a coup d'etat designed to replace democratically elected Prime Minister Maliki with Ayad Allawi, just like the U.S. did in 1963 in South Vietnam when that war was going badly.

I think they're trying to prepare us for major upheaval, the sudden and open-ended suspension, perhaps end, of the democratic project. You know, Bush's great "vision."

I think it's going to happen over Labor Day weekend, when they think no one here will be watching the news. Allawi just started spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a Republican lobbying firm in D.C., obviously to have his message outlet to build support among the GOP. And he's got the support of a C.I.A.-controlled intelligence operation in Iraq. There's his army.

They're dreaming that he's the new strongman who can keep a lid on the country and let us control their natural resources (oil & water). He tried before to execute a coup under Saddam Hussein. Second time's the charm.

They're laying the groundwork -- Allawi's secular faction (him and two other ministers) just dropped out of the Maliki government. You think it was any accident that they did it on a Friday night, after the news cycle?

My biggest fear is that since Maliki has been talking to Iran and Syria, this is a move in the Joe Lieberdouche direction, and Cheney/Bush will get their wish to enlarge the war into Iran, and set off the region. Bush is already talking about Cambodia -- I guess he hasn't taken enough souls yet.

Ah, well, at least we have our own Tet to look forward to. And since Rove/Bush set in motion the Vietnam parallels, it's only fair to compare dates.

If 2007 = 1963,

then we'll be helicoptering our people out of Iraq in 2017.

Escapist

It took me a day to realize that just like all the earlier Werner Herzog pictures I've seen, whether the brutal German productions that established his international reputation back in the 1970's or the ensuing documentaries generally about extreme individuals, Rescue Dawn is not a normal movie. It is, of course, something different and, I'll argue, something more.

I was deceived by the trappings -- it's Herzog's first English-language non-documentary feature, it stars Christian "Batman" Bale while featuring other major actors (Steve Zahn, Jeremy Davies) in key supporting roles, and the genre is a guy favorite: escape from a POW camp. Think The Great Escape but without the soundstages, without the fake-y emotional moments, without the cleanliness.

The two biggest differences, and this is where the financial success of the film becomes a betting man's questions, are the production style and the character development.

Based on his excellent 1997 short documentary, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, this narrative version tells the same story, of a German-born U.S. bomber pilot shot down behind enemy lines in Laos during the Vietnam War. (You know, the last war we didn't need to fight, couldn't win, and took many more years than it should have to admit our bamboozlement and get out.) Dieter (Bale) has wanted to fly ever since the Americans bombed his house, nearly killing him and his family, during World War II when he was a child.

Bale plays Dieter exactly this way, as an amiable, apolitical individual who possesses some necessary tools for escape: deathless optimism and an organized mind. While the two main POW camp veterans he's thrown in with when captured, Zahn and Davies (both brilliant and having undergone arresting physical transformations for the roles), evince different degrees of hopelessness, Dieter doesn't give up. He plans an amazing escape, and if anyone is going to trudge barefoot through the endlessly dense jungle as his empty stomach turns in on itself, you know it's gotta be Dieter.

The most impressive thing that sets Herzog apart from other filmmakers is his extreme production style. He's been to the jungle before (Aguirre: The Wrath of God, with Klaus Kinski in the title role of a Portugese conquistador going beyond extreme to crazy is one of the best movies ever made, astonishing) and seems to thrive on a certain kind of chaos. He wants it to be real, to bring back something you can't get through computer graphics or any other falsified staging, more in line with the great adventurist filmmakers of the 1920's like Merian Cooper and Ernest Shoedsack. This is what makes Rescue Dawn highly recommendable, although likely to draw more of a male audience. Quite simply, it sets a new standard for entertainingly brutal realism in the escape film genre.

On the other hand, while the travails of the POWs and all the points of Dieter's journey are totally gripping, from his powerfully shot and staged airplane crash through his various breakthroughs and trials, his character is essentially the same at the end of the picture as when it began, in a manner atypical for a Hollywood feature. There's not even a sense of ruefulness, that masculine-movie closing where the character is "sadder but wiser" which provides a satisfying and customary type of closure, one we expect from every war movie going back to The Big Parade (1925) and before.

I'd like to think this is a choice for Herzog rather than a predilection or, to some, a failing. It's an essentially Brechtian approach to character, one that's justified if the film (or play) has more than escapism on its mind, but instead has a political point to make within the theatrical framework. Instead of getting lost in an actor's performance through seamless identification, we're meant to have a degree of critical distance, forcing a kind of consciousness that (when it works best) makes the work ultimately more meaningful, more powerful, and an indictment.

Going to Rescue Dawn for the thrill of adventure and sweet agony of suspense is fine, but there's that chance of disappointment in how the physical journey is so much more compelling than the character journey, which is not what we are usually served.

But if Herzog's made that sacrifice for Brechtian effect, what is his political point?

The answer is found in how Herzog opens the film. He uses a very long, very gripping aerial tracking shot, real documentary footage (or so it sure seemed) from the Vietnam War, out of the back of an aircraft flying in a straight line over countless fields, rice paddies, farmhouses and little villages, watching remorselessly as American bomber planes drop all kinds of hell and tear the shit out of the landscape. Out of people's homes, livelihoods, lives.

It's like all that Iraq War footage our mainstream news media never shows us. You know, where the shots where we're the bad guys.

At a time when Mister Bush, President Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove and their enablers have plunged our international reputation into the sewer through careless and bloodthirsty destruction, directly or indirectly snuffing or crushing hundreds of thousands of innocent lives, the first act of Rescue Dawn is clearly the world's view:

Dieter deserves to be shot down and captured.

He's an undeniable cog in America's war machine, and I believe Herzog is condemning him for his apolitical ignorance, just as any Americans tacitly going along with our criminally disastrous Iraq War can appear, in the eyes of the rest of the world, tacitly guilty as sin. You don't care to examine how your actions are demolishing innocent families forever? You deserve a bamboo prison, your ankles locked in stocks while you sleep, eating living slugs from a bowl provided by your captors.

The funny thing is, by the end of the movie Herzog doesn't seem to be passing judgment on his protagonist at all. While little Dieter may not have had his political consciousness raised, he has proven something impressive of the human spirit, in a way that may be more real than dramatically compelling.

I'd call it the mystery of Dieter's character, the conundrum to be unlocked in every post-screening conversation, but in the end it seems more like Herzog just wanting to portray the real (now deceased) Dieter's story and character just as he observed it in his documentary. The story of a guy he ultimately identifies with and really likes.

So what you're left with is the overwhelmingly physical journey. If you're psyched to be taken on that very extraordinary trip itself, do yourself a favor and go buy a ticket before it leaves the theaters.

On TV it'll be a gripping adventure story. It's the big screen that puts you right there with Werner, Christian, Steve and Jeremy.

In the jungle.