The recent slew of documentaries and literature prompted by post-9/11 events and the excesses of the Bush administration has been bracing and heartening, but they’ve often taken a stylised, even heavy-handed approach that might alienate their target audience. There’s a feeling, for example, that Michael Moore’s overbearing presence tends to cast a shadow over the point he’s trying to make, that he pisses off even those who fundamentally agree with him.
Uncovered: The War On Iraq, a film by Robert Greenwald, who also made Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War On Journalism, is an altogether different proposition. No radical trimmings, no polemical posturing, no browbeating, no hip devices. Its contributors are establishment, or ex-establishment people?defence officials, foreign service experts, ambassadors. This film reeks of respectability, is absolutely unspun and is all the more convincing for that. For here, laid out plainly, logically and soberly, is the truth about the Iraq war. That there were no WMDs, that Saddam posed no threat to the outside world, that he had no links with Al-Qaeda, that indeed they were mutually hostile, that the Bush administration had earmarked Iraq for invasion as part of a crazed and declared neo-con plan for the “Americanisation” of the globe, and that they deliberatively contrived, spun and selectively edited intelligence concerning Iraq’s weapons capability when making their case to the public.
This is illustrated through archive footage of the various culprits?Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Wolfowitz, as well as some of their more moronic media cheerleaders. Their weasel words are neatly exposed. Not for nothing does one interviewee talk of the American nation being in the grip of a “historical and political lobotomy”.
Go see this film.