Know (and love) thine enemy

Hot Air pointed today to a New York Times video promo for the new movie "Meeting Resistance", yet another anti-war movie set to open soon. It tracks several anonymous members of the Iraq insurgency during 2003 as they plot to kill US troops.

As Allahpundit said, the film doesn't offer much news and is endorsed by a Clintonista who offered this stock boilerplate about it, undoubtedly counting as crack for publications like the NY Times. Check it out and see if you don't think the "enemy" they refer to is actually us.

The film, which will probably be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize next year under some newly created subcategory, claims the insurgency just popped up like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters. In other words, there was very little delay between the day the statue fell and the first insurgency cells.

Actually, this lines up pretty well with reports suggesting Saddam and his RCC leaders had planned the insurgency from the get-go:

A NEWSWEEK investigation shows that long before U.S. and other Coalition troops blasted across the border into Iraq on March 20, 2003, Saddam had put aside hundreds of millions of dollars (some sources claim billions) and enormous weapons caches to support a guerrilla war. Since the aftermath of his defeat in the 1991 gulf war, Saddam had started preparing secret cells of younger officers from his military and intelligence services, according to Ali Ballout, a Lebanese journalist who had close ties to the former dictator. They were meant, at first, to help him defend against a coup. "He was very good at that," says Ballout, who often acted as an intermediary between Saddam and foreign leaders. Later, some of these officers would provide core leadership in the resistance.

The filmmakers will disagree, since they claim neither the Saddamists nor AQ were instrumental in starting it. Somebody is lying.

Ironically, the Times video page also featured a clip from another film called "No End in Sight", which essentially blames Paul Bremer for losing the war (see if you can find the veiled chickenhawk assertion). Not disputing them, but it's quite interesting since we began hiring the army and police back not too long afterwards under new uniforms and command structure. Historians will also recall that insurgents were blowing themselves up in the recruiting centers as this was taking place.

While it's not out of the question to believe the dissolution of Saddam's Army might have had a negative effect on the population at large (which fed the insurgency) hindsight is 20/20. Bremer should not be treated like scum in the historical record for making a judgment call that was Bush's anyway. Mistakes are made in war. Besides, anything since amounts to rank speculation--it's impossible to say whether these same soldiers wouldn't have been coerced into joining the insurgency anyway. Saddam was still at large and Syria and other countries were helping fan the flames.

Whether these type of movies are honest post mortems or rank propaganda is hard to say. Conventional wisdom already says Bush was snookered by people like Curveball and Chalabi, a theory pushed by those who refuse to outright claim he lied, yet some folk are easy as Sunday morning when it comes to believing their own questionable characters--so long as America takes a hit in the end.

That's not to say we can do no wrong, we can and do. But the vigor with which some pursue the blame illustrates an underlying ideology, one often shared (consciously or unconsciously) by many in the mainstream media borne of Nixon. Ask people what they remember about the decade of Reagan and you'll get a similar disparity on who the good guys were. In contrast, not even the looniest of far right loons believes America was the bad guy in the Balkans war despite Clinton being the president and with no history of threats from Milosevic.

Still, as time marches on the chances of seeing any significant John Wayne type flicks extolling the virtues of our heroes fighting this GWoT are approaching zero. We're hamstrung by an uber-liberal Hollywood and a culture of political correctness so deep it won't even allow public acknowledgment of the enemy. The left has managed to shape Iraq as a colossal failure and Afghanistan is next, none of which portends an impending victory. But please, whatever you do, don't tell these guys.