Defending Michael Moore, sort of

2004.07.07 — Culture | News | Movie Analysis | by Derek Jensen

Christopher Hitchens, a writer I admire, has written a scathing review of Michael Moore's latest documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 for Slate. It attacks Moore very specifically for certain misrepresentations and filmmaker's tricks that paint a deceptive picture of the Bush administration. Hitchens' hawkish argument goes well beyond the bounds of good journalism to take Moore to task. So here I defend Michael Moore, not because I love him or his film but because Hitchens is so wrong. Settle into an easy chair; Hitchens' article was a filibuster.

One of the many problems with the American left, and indeed of the American left, has been its image and self-image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring.

This is an odd claim made by a few others, like Tucker Carlson, perhaps because the only liberals they think of belong to NPR and PETA. Certainly some liberals are as boring or strident and indignant as arch-conservatives, but most comedians and comic actors are quite liberal, anti-establishment thinkers. I think conservatives suffer a stuffed-shirt image even more so, and more deservedly so. Regardless, it is immaterial to Moore's film, which is liberal and funny, in different amounts.

I exempt Al Franken's unintentionally funny Air America network.

I've already weighed in on them; they're pretty good.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery.

Actually, it's crudely disguised as an exercise in satire. And "abject political cowardice" is a phrase that better suits Disney, who backed out of distributing it. What were they thinking he would produce when they got involved with him? An anti-litter movie?

In late 2002, almost a year after the al-Qaida assault on American society, I had an onstage debate with Michael Moore at the Telluride Film Festival. In the course of this exchange, he stated his view that Osama Bin Laden should be considered innocent until proven guilty. This was, he said, the American way. The intervention in Afghanistan, he maintained, had been at least to that extent unjustified.

Without knowing the context of his comment (perhaps he was being facetiously provocative), I can't defend this. It's a silly idea entirely negated when bin Laden began releasing his series of terrorist self-help videos, How I Terrorized America (and You Can Too!), to Al-Jazeera. Moore's attitude in the film is appropriately condemning of bin Laden as the obvious mastermind.

Fahrenheit 9/11 makes the following points about Bin Laden and about Afghanistan, and makes them in this order:

1) The Bin Laden family (if not exactly Osama himself) had a close if convoluted business relationship with the Bush family, through the Carlyle Group.

Which is true and undisputed.

2) Saudi capital in general is a very large element of foreign investment in the United States.

Which is more or less true, altho probably somewhat exaggerated by the person Moore asks about it.

3) The Unocal company in Texas had been willing to discuss a gas pipeline across Afghanistan with the Taliban, as had other vested interests.

This is true, altho Moore is stretching it to imply that GWB was still involved with Unocal at that time. On the other hand, he has pretty funny footage of the Taliban rep being nasty to a female reporter.

4) The Bush administration sent far too few ground troops to Afghanistan and thus allowed far too many Taliban and al-Qaida members to escape.

We sent 12,000 troops to Afghanistan and have recently increased the number to 20,000. Why didn't we send the other 130,000 troops to Afghanistan instead of to Iraq? The job wasn't—and still isn't—finished. The Bush administration gave up and turned to its real target.

5) The Afghan government, in supporting the coalition in Iraq, was purely risible in that its non-army was purely American.

Come on. It's pretty funny that Afghanistan is a member of the "Coalition of the Willing" (COW) while we still have 12,000 troops there occupying them.

6) The American lives lost in Afghanistan have been wasted. (This I divine from the fact that this supposedly "antiwar" film is dedicated ruefully to all those killed there, as well as in Iraq.)

That's preposterously unfair. It may actually turn out that American lives have been wasted in Afghanistan, but Moore doesn't imply that. He hardly discusses Afghanistan, but, when he does, he tacitly acknowledges that invading it and destroying the Taliban and al Qaeda was the right thing to do. He only wishes it were carried out to completion.

Imagine if we back out of Afghanistan and the Taliban returns, crawling out of the woodwork, to quietly take control again. Then imagine that bin Laden surfaces right alongside them. We'd be back to square one.

Either the Saudis run U.S. policy (through family ties or overwhelming economic interest), or they do not. As allies and patrons of the Taliban regime, they either opposed Bush's removal of it, or they did not. (They opposed the removal, all right: They wouldn't even let Tony Blair land his own plane on their soil at the time of the operation.)

Moore proposes that the Bushes are heavily influenced by the Saudis (unfairly, if you ask me, literally questioning their patriotic loyalty by comparing presidential salary to Saudi investments), but doesn't suggest they completely run US policy. The truth is that all the neocons would like to get out from under the thumb of the Saudis, which is why they dreamed up the Bush Doctrine, which required taking over Iraq with its central location and massive oil reserves. They're negotiating for military bases there so we won't have to rely on the Saudis (or the Turks) anymore.

Either we sent too many troops, or were wrong to send any at all—the latter was Moore's view as late as 2002—or we sent too few. If we were going to make sure no Taliban or al-Qaida forces survived or escaped, we would have had to be more ruthless than I suspect that Mr. Moore is really recommending.

Moore's earlier remark didn't suggest that we shouldn't have sent troops to Afghanistan at all. The film does clearly suggest that we didn't do enough in Afghanistan, altho ruthlessness is not recommended. That's the neocon answer to every security problem. More troops would have been more effective by being more thoro and more selective in their targets, not more ruthless.

[SNIP positive developments in Afghanistan]

I don't think a pipeline is being constructed yet, not that Afghanistan couldn't do with a pipeline. But a highway from Kabul to Kandahar—an insurance against warlordism and a condition of nation-building—is nearing completion with infinite labor and risk. We also discover that the parties of the Afghan secular left—like the parties of the Iraqi secular left—are strongly in favor of the regime change.

Again, Moore doesn't really address Afghanistan much except to say that we haven't done enough there. We should hope that the gas pipeline doesn't fall into Taliban hands, but the highway is encouraging. Of course, I would suggest that a democratically elected government is more of a condition of nation-building than a highway is, but let's not quibble.

In a long and paranoid (and tedious) section at the opening of the film, he makes heavy innuendoes about the flights that took members of the Bin Laden family out of the country after Sept. 11.

[SNIP confession that he did the same]

However, recent developments have not been kind to our Mike [or Chris]. In the interval between Moore's triumph at Cannes and the release of the film in the United States, the 9/11 commission has found nothing to complain of in the timing or arrangement of the flights. And Richard Clarke, Bush's former chief of counterterrorism, has come forward to say that he, and he alone, took the responsibility for authorizing those Saudi departures.

Thanks for noting that this information was released in response to Moore's film and not before. Also, excellent citation. It points out that 1) Clark originally said something quite different and changed his tune after the film debuted and 2) the Bush administration was who was making the "request" that Clarke "authorized." Clarke refuses to admit that this was a mistake, but it was nevertheless. Clarke mentions that the bin Ladens were allowed to leave largely because they had been under surveillance by the FBI for years, as if that makes them less suspicious.

This might not matter so much to the ethos of Fahrenheit 9/11, except that—as you might expect—Clarke is presented throughout as the brow-furrowed ethical hero of the entire post-9/11 moment.

What movie were you watching? Clarke is barely mentioned. His famous apology to 9/11 victims' families, damning indictment-by-proxy of the Bush administration, is not even shown.

President Bush is accused of taking too many lazy vacations. (What is that about, by the way? Isn't he supposed to be an unceasing planner for future aggressive wars?)

Bush took a huge amount of vacation, nearly half his time in office before 9/11 and continued to take time off regularly afterwards. Meeting with Tony Blair is not goofing off, but golfing and fishing are and clearing brush on the ranch is. Every president takes working vacations of a sort, but Bush's people have explicitly said that the president was generally unavailable to them while he was on vacation and they were in Washington, including the entire month of August, 2001, after the infamous bin Laden PDB but when terrorism was still not even on his agenda.

With regard to unceasing planning for future aggressive wars, you're thinking of Cheney and Rumsfeld. They'd been planning for years.

The president is also captured in a well-worn TV news clip, on a golf course, making a boilerplate response to a question on terrorism and then asking the reporters to watch his drive. Well, that's what you get if you catch the president on a golf course. If Eisenhower had done this, as he often did, it would have been presented as calm statesmanship. If Clinton had done it, as he often did, it would have shown his charm.

Actually, Ike was frequently criticized for taking too much time off to golf. And Clinton was criticized for everything. Moreover, Bush deserves more criticism because the situation is different. Remember how the Bushies love to say that "everything changed on 9/11"? Well that clip shows that things didn't change much for GWB. He was still taking time out for R&R, even as he was trying to rally the world to fight a new war on terrorism. You can make general policy statements and then hit a golfball. You can't outline an intense and unceasing worldwide effort to fight scattered cells of suicide bombers and then hit a golfball.

More interesting is the moment where Bush is shown frozen on his chair at the infant school in Florida, looking stunned and useless for seven whole minutes after the news of the second plane on 9/11.

Why didn't his chief of staff pull him out of the classroom? It's astonishing. Andy Card told the president "A second plane hit the World Trade Center. America is under attack" and then walks away. Bush just sits there, distracted, eyes glazed, minute after minute. Moore does not show that he stayed in the classroom until all the reporters had left, chatting with kids and posing with the teacher.

Many are those who say that he should have leaped from his stool, adopted a Russell Crowe stance, and gone to work. I could even wish that myself. But if he had done any such thing then (as he did with his "Let's roll" and "dead or alive" remarks a month later), half the Michael Moore community would now be calling him a man who went to war on a hectic, crazed impulse.

Going to work doesn't mean going to war. The president should have been on the phone, ordering all aircraft grounded, ordering a shoot-down of non-responsive planes, ordering a lock-down of all airports until they could be searched. He should have been leading the response to the attacks, not being briefed on it later.

We are introduced to Iraq, "a sovereign nation." (In fact, Iraq's "sovereignty" was heavily qualified by international sanctions, however questionable, which reflected its noncompliance with important U.N. resolutions.)

Saddam's government could make treaties and raise a military. It was much more sovereign than the current bastard child of military democracy.

In this peaceable kingdom, according to Moore's flabbergasting choice of film shots, children are flying little kites, shoppers are smiling in the sunshine, and the gentle rhythms of life are undisturbed. Then—wham! From the night sky come the terror weapons of American imperialism.

Moore's apparent tribute to duck-and-cover air raid films from the cold war era truly is bizarre. No argument here.

I'll just say that the "insurgent" side is presented in this film as justifiably outraged, whereas the 30-year record of Baathist war crimes and repression and aggression is not mentioned once. (Actually, that's not quite right. It is briefly mentioned but only, and smarmily, because of the bad period when Washington preferred Saddam to the likewise unmentioned Ayatollah Khomeini.)

Well, the grief of Iraqi civilians is justified. Moore dwells on this to excess, but the point is that the air strikes were not precision attacks against military installations. They targeted any location even rumored to harbor Iraqi leaders. Rumsfeld's visit and the support of the Reagan administration in the 80s is a legitimate subject for debate. Saddam was a worse despot at that time than he was in 2003; but he was a useful despot then.

Moore asserts that Iraq under Saddam had never attacked or killed or even threatened (his words) any American.

[SNIP long list of examples of Saddam's assaults on Americans]

This claim is quite bizarre and was very jarring to me as I watched. Moore is well out in left field here, unless he simply failed to qualify the remark with a timeframe. Even Moore would concede that Saddam had killed Americans during the Gulf War and had ordered American planes shot down (unsuccessfully) over his country in the intevening years.

Its official media regularly spewed out a stream of anti-Semitic incitement. I think one might describe that as "threatening," even if one was narrow enough to think that anti-Semitism only menaces Jews.

Okay, that's just stupid, Christopher. That doesn't even make sense.

And it was after, and not before, the 9/11 attacks that Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi moved from Afghanistan to Baghdad and began to plan his now very open and lethal design for a holy and ethnic civil war.

According to our own government, Zarqawi is an independent terrorist, not affiliated with Saddam Hussein or al Qaeda.

On Dec. 1, 2003, the New York Times reported—and the David Kay report had established—that Saddam had been secretly negotiating with the "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il in a series of secret meetings in Syria, as late as the spring of 2003, to buy a North Korean missile system...

Washinton Times said the same. Apparently Saddam got ripped off. If he had succeeded in purchasing such weapons, presuming they were the sort outlawed to him by the UN, then there would have been a good case for getting the UN to back an alliance to oust him. That wasn't the case.

Thus, in spite of the film's loaded bias against the work of the mind, you can grasp even while watching it that Michael Moore has just said, in so many words, the one thing that no reflective or informed person can possibly believe: that Saddam Hussein was no problem. No problem at all.

Moore didn't need to say it. Powell, Rice, and others had been saying it... until they changed their tune to harmonize with the hawks. What had changed? The hawks had manufactured a bunch of phony evidence of illegal weapons. Was Saddam a danger? Of course he was. But was he an immediate threat to the United States? No. Like Qadaffi, he had been contained.

From being accused of overlooking too many warnings—not exactly an original point—the administration is now lavishly taunted for issuing too many.

Moore doesn't really dwell on the intelligence that could have stopped the 9/11 attacks. They were probably preventable, but not by the White House. The administration might have helped by continuing the Clinton policies of demanding frequent terrorism-related case updates from the FBI and CIA. But the frequent, vague rumor-mongering by the Justice Department and others has helped no one; it may even have encouraged terrorists to hide better. The DOJ might have caught more bad buys if they kept their warnings to law enforcement and transportation organizations.

Then we are immediately shown underfunded police departments that don't have the means or the manpower to do any stop-and-search: a power suddenly demanded by Moore on their behalf that we know by definition would at least lead to some ridiculous interrogations.

Moore does not recommend random stops and searches. He only laments the fact that budget cuts have meant that too few troopers are available to patrol (in his example) Oregon's coastal highways. That's an obvious problem.

Finally, Moore complains that there isn't enough intrusion and confiscation at airports and says that it is appalling that every air traveler is not forcibly relieved of all matches and lighters. (Cue mood music for sinister influence of Big Tobacco.)

Two butane lighters and several books of matches is a lot of potential for damage considering that airport security regularly confiscated fingernail clippers and the like. Moore was pointing out the hypocrisy of the security measures, which were meant to make us feel safe, regardless of their efficacy.

If the Bush family and the al-Saud dynasty live in each other's pockets, as is alleged in a sort of vulgar sub-Brechtian scene with Arab headdresses replacing top hats, then how come the most reactionary regime in the region has been powerless to stop Bush from demolishing its clone in Kabul and its buffer regime in Baghdad?

Moore doesn't allege they live in each other's pockets. He alleges that the Bushes live in the Saudis' pockets. And they want out. Installing a friendly regime in Iraq will give them access to cheap oil and military bases without the messy necessity of chumming around with fascist fundamenalists (well, fascist non-Christian fundamentalists, anyway; they'll still chum around with the Christian kind).

Perhaps Moore prefers the pro-Saudi Kissinger/Scowcroft plan for the Middle East, where stability trumps every other consideration and where one dare not upset the local house of cards, or killing-field of Kurds?

I think he prefers the containment-and-gradual-regime-change Clinton/Gore plan for the Middle East.

I have already said that Moore's film has the staunch courage to mock Bush for his verbal infelicity.

Why not? The man is an inarticulate boob. I wish Moore had used a few more. They livened up the diatribe.

Poor people often volunteer to join the army, and some of them are duskier than others.

Christopher, can you honestly say that seeing those Marine recruiters hunting young, disadvantaged men and feeding them ridiculous lines about sports and music in the Marine Corps didn't make you queasy? It reminded me of the opening lines from "The Devil Went Down to Georgia": "The devil went down to Georgia/He was lookin' for a soul to steal/He was in a bind 'cause he was way behind/And he was willin' to make a deal."

In the film, Moore says loudly and repeatedly that not enough troops were sent to garrison Afghanistan and Iraq. (This is now a favorite cleverness of those who were, in the first place, against sending any soldiers at all.)

Right. The administration was wrong to send troops to Iraq. And when they did, they sent too few to do the job right. As Al Franken likes to point out, they are both stupid and incompetent. We don't have to choose.

Well, where does he think those needful heroes and heroines would have come from? Does he favor a draft—the most statist and oppressive solution? Does he think that only hapless and gullible proles sign up for the Marines? Does he think—as he seems to suggest—that parents can "send" their children, as he stupidly asks elected members of Congress to do?

I imagine he wished that many more would have come from other countries, which would have happened if we had had a global concensus that it was necessary.

In a recent interview, he yelled that if the hijacked civilians of 9/11 had been black, they would have fought back, unlike the stupid and presumably cowardly white men and women (and children).

Apparently true, and disusting behavior.

I notice from the New York Times of June 20 that he has pompously established a rapid response team, and a fact-checking staff, and some tough lawyers, to bulwark himself against attack.

This seems fairly reasonable if you're being attacked all the time.

So I know, thanks, before you tell me, that a documentary must have a "POV" or point of view and that it must also impose a narrative line. But if you leave out absolutely everything that might give your "narrative" a problem and throw in any old rubbish that might support it, and you don't even care that one bit of that rubbish flatly contradicts the next bit, and you give no chance to those who might differ, then you have betrayed your craft.

The one who is peddling rubbish here, Christopher, is you. At every turn, you have set up and knocked down straw men based on your strained theories of Moore's opinions rather than on the facts that Moore presents.

Having said that, I think Moore did betray his craft. He does not set up Bush's positions and counter them with fact. Instead, again and again, he shows how things came to be without actually demonstrating that those things are bad. The Bushes and Saudis are friends? What exactly is wrong with that, Michael? The Bushies say Saddam had WMDs? Show us that he didn't.

Instead Moore assumes that we already agree with him and never actually proves his case. I do agree with him, but if his presentation is a failure, it is for that reason, not for the reasons you claim.

At no point does Michael Moore make the smallest effort to be objective. At no moment does he pass up the chance of a cheap sneer or a jeer.

Moore admits that he is not objective, but he is nevertheless obligated to be fair. If he's fair and can prove his argument, then he can sneer and jeer all he wants. The same goes for conservative pundits. If Limbaugh and Hannity could prove their cases, I'd accept their self-righteousness.

He pitilessly focuses his camera, for minutes after he should have turned it off, on a distraught and bereaved mother whose grief we have already shared.

Agreed. Excessive.

(But then, this is the guy who thought it so clever and amusing to catch Charlton Heston, in Bowling for Columbine, at the onset of his senile dementia.)

You had a go at the old guy, too, Chris, back during the Gulf War in 91, when he wasn't much better off.

Moore concludes with a sonorous reading of some words from George Orwell. The words are taken from 1984 and consist of a third-person analysis of a hypothetical, endless, and contrived war between three superpowers.The clear intention, as clumsily excerpted like this (...) is to suggest that there is no moral distinction between the United States, the Taliban, and the Baath Party and that the war against jihad is about nothing.

The clear intention is to point out that the Bush administration has opportunistically used 9/11 as an excuse to millitary dominate the Middle East and that it is likely to last a very long time. The Bushies know they can't solve it, and they don't really care. They're getting what they want: hegemony over the region and its oil and, by extension, the world.

If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly with the slave state of North Korea for WMD.

I don't know enough about Moore to know if he has made such suggestions. I supported the peacekeeping mission in the Balkans. It worked, and no Americans were killed in combat there.

Moore supported the invasion of Afghanistan and complete destruction of the Taliban and al Qaeda. Too bad the Bush administration didn't.

Iraq would still be in the hands of a brutal dictator, as it had been for more than twenty years, as Cuba has been for longer, and as many other countries have been for many years. But also, 1,000 coalition troops would still be alive. Thousands more would still have all their limbs. Our government would still have the respect and goodwill of the free world. And our economy would still have $150 billion. Most Americans agree that it was not worth it. Don't you, Christopher?

It's too bad to see anti-statist Hitchens go off on anti-establishment Moore like this. If they could only find the right project, I'm sure they could make beautiful music together.

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