1. What a state of affairs when the only realistic hope of punishment for the crime of the Iraq War is fully and properly disgracing the architects. I am now reduced to praying that it happens during their lifetimes. Once they’re dead (assuming Dick Cheney can die), I’ll raise my expectation to un-indicted co-conspirator.

2. Democrats have had the common decency not to try to rehabilitate LBJ, but they are “rewarded” by being thought not sufficiently pro-war.

And when Douthat says this…

“If you want art that calls our leaders to account, then it needs to call them to account for what they have actually done. And its critique needs to be persuasive, in the case of the Iraq War, not only to people who were opposed to the invasion from the beginning, but to the many, many Americans who thought that George W. Bush was doing not only the right thing, but the obvious thing.”

What he’s calling for are films that make excuses for supporters of the Iraq War and nothing else. He wants an Iraq War movie that doesn’t make him feel bad about the gigantic disaster for which he’s partially responsible. He wants stories about how the Ross Douthat’s of the world were these noble, well intentioned souls who only wanted the best for Iraq.

Mike

All of this was fantasy unmoored from reality.

I remember that time period (particularly 2002). It was just appalling, looking back – constant hysteria, “we can’t wait for proof in the form of a mushroom cloud”, critics of the proposed invasion being called “un-American”, and so forth. Say what you will about those neo-conservatives, they roped a whole mass of paranoia and fear after 9/11 in an extremely effective way to start a war (if only they’d had one-hundredth of that effectiveness in executing that same war).

Syriana isn’t too shabby, though it also isn’t really about Iraq – more Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.

Syriana was definitely one of the good ones. Lions for Lambs was also about Afghanistan, not Iraq, but it was appallingly bad and slow.