Iraq war

Fair Game

mandy — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

In a moment of frustration toward the beginning of Doug Liman’s Fair Game, Valerie Plame points out the flaws in an overzealous CIA analyst’s interpretation of data. “Somebody had to ask the question,” says a collected Plame as she reveals evidence that shatters to pieces one of the popular arguments for invading Iraq. This moment of clarity is a microcosm for the film’s overall message and for the whole country’s frustration at an administration that lead a nation astray by providing answers before taking time to ask the questions. Americans were mislead, lied to, and ruled by fear during the years under the Bush administration and no clearer evidence may exist than the mistreatment of CIA-agent Valerie Plame.

Fair Game is based on the true story of Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts) and her husband Joe Wilson (Sean Penn) who get caught up in a chaotic and uncertain post-9/11 government. Plame works undercover for the CIA investigating Middle Eastern intelligence and has been specially tasked with finding evidence of nuclear weapons manufacturing. Plame’s husband Joe Wilson is a former Ambassador to Gabon and has experience in Africa so the agency asks him to investigate whether an illegal trade of yellow cake Uranium has occurred from Niger to Iraq. When Wilson returns with no evidence and the opinion that such a trade never occurred, he is essentially ignored by the administration as the original piece of evidence is used by President Bush in his State of the Union as a reason to invade Iraq. This infuriates Wilson and inspires him to write an article for the New York Times entitled “What I Didn’t Find in Iraq.”

The article causes a stir in the Bush Administration and starts a search for a controversy to temporarily distract the country and discredit Wilson. This results in Scooter Libby revealing Valerie Plame’s identity to the press, which destroys all of her covert operations, causes her to lose her job and any government connections, and results in the disappearance of several Iraqi scientists that Plame was helping escape Saddam’s regime. It also causes a splinter in Plame and Wilson’s relationship as they struggle to maintain a sense of familial oneness in the midst of national turmoil.

The script combined with Naomi Watts' fiery persona shows Valerie Plame to be a very capable spy, which discounts many of the theories that Plame was an unimportant sideshow within the CIA. Liman takes no qualms in vilifying the Bush Administration by using stock footage of Bush and Cheney’s speeches edited to ominous music and shocked reaction shots. Liman makes a film for the current generation and fully expects his audience to have some background information about the events. The narrative is tightly scripted and fast moving which gives the simultaneous pleasure of a thrilling spectacle and an intellectually challenging political mystery.

Watts and Penn are fantastic in two very different leading turns. Penn’s Wilson exists at more varying emotional extremes as his enormous ego leads him to wear his emotions on his sleeve. Watts is more reserved and restrained in one of her better performances that acts as a perfect balance to Penn. There is also a fantastic supporting turn from the legendary Sam Shepard as Plame’s broken, advice giving father.

The one place the film does not succeed as efficiently is in the resolution of the conflicting relationship between Wilson and Plame. Liman seems to speed up their conclusion in order to get to the film’s final call to action. That call to action is an important one, however.

Read full review at Film Misery

Written by: Alex Carlson, November 10th 2010

Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War

barbara — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Cynthia Enloe

University of California Press

The stories of eight women’s lives, four Iraqi and four American, establish the framework for an examination of the gendered phases of war. Nimo is a beauty salon owner in Baghdad who keeps her business open through blackouts and listens to what the women there really think. Emma is a mother in Texas, urged to let her second son join the military during wartime. Maha, Danielle, Safah, Kim, Shatha, and Charlene all have stories that in telling offer a deeper look into not only their circumstances, but into the state of the world and of the ravages of wartime.

I have chosen to review several books for Elevate Difference written about the war in Iraq and this has allowed me to study, through these scholarly texts, how this conflict is dividing not only the Iraqi people it was meant to “save,” but our own nation. As resources dwindle, more and more of our populations suffer the lifelong and devastating effects of war.

Statistically rich, and academically vital, this book offers a fresh look at how the Iraq war has changed through phases of occupation and what that means for the women on both sides. Alongside the uniformed soldiers trained and assigned to extremely difficult jobs: homes are destroyed, girls are kept from school for fear of violence, and widows turn to prostitution to support their children.

“As wartime strains the social order and more women from many walks of life decide to take unorthodox steps to sustain their own, and their families’ material survival, violence against women is adopted by some men as a means to restore the gendered order.”

As recruiters become more desperate for new troops, they infiltrate schools, and launch campaigns that involve psychological profiling of parents and teachers to assist them in finding the next soldier to sign. As soldiers are kept from home for longer periods of time, their families struggle to hold together, and when they return, they are often in need of serious medical and psychological assistance, that often falls to the loved ones they return to.

“The American military was loath to acknowledge the mental health consequences of war for its soldiers… these were the soldier’s everyday experiences in a combat zone. If they were treated as the cause of mental disabilities, how could any government wage a war?... Every soldier officially diagnosed with a mental disorder was a soldier whom the Defense Department could not redeploy.”

I am fascinated by war. I find it astounding. More than just an isolated incident of violence, war is entire populations of people agreeing to kill and maim. And war looks very different from a feminist perspective, much different than it does from the predominant masculine agenda.

Cynthia Enloe, Research Professor of Women’s Studies and International Development at Clark University, used only information available through the public domain to gather these stories and examine them. Interviews done by journalists gave her a close look into each woman’s experience. She did not conduct personal interviews, for fear of tilting her studies toward the American women with whom she would have better access. But even with this distance, Nimo’s War, Emma's War is revealing and riveting.

Written by: Jen Wilson Lloyd, October 9th 2010

I’m Still Standing: From Captive U.S. Soldier to Free Citizen—My Journey Home

admin — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 20:30:00 +0000

By Shoshana Johnson

Simon & Schuster

I was working in my college dining hall when I first caught wind of Jessica Lynch’s capture back in 2003. As I scraped steam trays, I compared our situations. She is a brave soldier somewhere in the sands of Iraq. I am a pansy who spent her days in purgatorial peace in the tundra of upstate New York. I didn’t know—many people didn’t know—that five other soldiers, including Shoshana Johnson, the first African-American female prisoner of war, were also being held. I’m Still Standing, recounts the capture and twenty-two-day imprisonment of Johnson and four male co-prisoners at the dawn of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Johnson is many things: an army cook, a survivor, a mother, and a brave woman who endured great hardship for her nation. She is not a professional writer, though, and it shows. Writing this book has undoubtedly been therapeutic for her, and it gave her a platform to tell the world her story, but as a reader I found myself desiring deeper contemplations on her experience than what she provided. We get a play-by-play, and I wanted a reflection.

This book presents several potentially riveting subjects, such as how the military portrays itself for the media, the ethics of keeping prisoners, the perception of the Iraqi people, and the experience of a female soldier. Being an American female solider serving in the Middle East seems like a particular double-whammy, since women remain a minority in the military and many countries in the Middle East traditionally treat women in a way many Westerners find unacceptable.

Johnson had many experiences during her ordeal that are unique to a female solider. When her gender was discovered by her captors, they stopped beating her while the beating of male soldiers continued. Johnson was held in a different room separate from her male co-prisoners for several days, and she hints about feeling ignored by the men. Later, after telling her captors that she was not married, some began to say that she should marry an Iraqi man, a comment she feared was not a joke. At one point a cloth was tossed over her body to conceal her exposed skin and she was told, “This is Iraq.” After her rescue, she found that many people assumed she was raped in captivity.

Many scenes are ripe with poignancy, but I feel she ran over them in an attempt to remember everything, and gave herself no room to meditate on what it meant. It seems every time a chance to explore subjects in depth was presented, the author merely skims the surface and moves on. I recall a quote from writer Lucy Grealy, who was asked how she remembered the details of her childhood that resulted in her book Autobiography of a Face. She replied, “I didn’t remember it. I wrote it.” Indeed, nonfiction writing needs to have that organic quality to it.

After Johnson’s rescue and return, the book morphs into a defense against accusations she says were piled upon her by the Army and the media. Many lines are unveiled attempts to send personal messages to people in her life, such as an old lover. That can be done in a private, rather than in a national publication.

Despite the limitations of the book, this soldier endured hardships, and I thank her for having the courage to fight for the nation and to tell her story.

Written by: Kelly Palka Gallagher, January 18th 2010