I'm quite a bit behind the pack in coming upon Moore's film so late. I've read a good deal of commentary on the film, to help me digest what is a sad mess as argument and too mean-spirited and exploitative of others' pain to pass as entertainment.

Christopher Hitchen's piece on the film comes closest to my own critique, although he's much better informed about the particulars than I am, I'll confess. Yet, neither he or the others I've read, have touched upon Moore's most surprising move: his outright bigotry against the Saudis (and not just governing officials) as well as Arabs in general. His negative portrayals of Americans mixing with Arabs in their traditional gear uses the same sort of visual rhetoric we find in historically biased media -- the sort we are supposed to have rejected as a diverse, tolerant culture, the kind we would never expect a liberal or progressive to employ to his own ends.

Moore also shows a disregard for American soldiers when he portrays them as lusting for battle. We've all come to understand the black humor surgeons use as they operate or police use as they patrol. We're used to portrayls of surgeons playing music as they operate and ourselves sing the "Bad Boys" theme song as we discuss crime fighting, given the popular impact of Cops. We accept that such intense professions require an outlet and a focus for the otherwise overwhelming emotional stakes in their work. Yet, our soldiers are portrayed as barbarians for listening to metal strains of "burn the motherfucker down" or joking about a corpse's erection.

I don't apologize for these acts. They strike me as disgusting -- even frightening. But, I am here, comfortable in my home, safe (for the moment anyway) in my office, going about my life. While, meanwhile, these young men and women have been sent to a foreign land to deal death on our behalf. Somehow, they must work themselves up to it. Somehow, they must survive its aftermath. I don't criticize, within limits, the means they find to do that. That they have gone so far as what Moore's film depicts suggests the very strain they are under to do what does not come naturally or easily.

Moreover, I believe Moore is walking on thin ice and not water when he depicts our troops in this way, even as he interviews soldiers who talk about the pain of dealing the destruction they have and witnessing the suffering its caused to their own and the Iraqi population. And, yes, even as he chronicles the death of one young soldier from Flint and the grief of the military mother who has had a change of heart about the conflict since encouraging him to enlist. He can't reasonably shame our troops in one reel and present them as ethical ideals in the next. He shouldn't exploit the grief of a dead soldier's mother, filling her head with his belief that her son's death was meaningless when she originally believed his service was something to support with pride.

After the denigration of the troops after Vietnam, didn't we all expressly agree that we would not do the same again? That this was indeed a dark chapter in the public's response to unpopular policy? Blame the administration, protest the war, but hands off those who are fighting and dying for us. Wasn't that the lesson of Hanoi Jane? Yet, here is Moore pulling the same sort of stunt, even as his film suggests his populist support for the underprivileged miltiary recruits and those who are suffering injuries from the war.

Perhaps he would return in answer that he is simply portraying what war makes of those who serve as soldiers: it necessarily reduces their humanity -- the blame for which rests in the White House. Yet, what has it made of him, then, when he can seem to sympathize with our troops and even their griefstricken mothers only to turn their trust and emotion into what is, in the end, self-serving propaganda?

Which brings me back to Christopher Hitchens charge that Moore is not simply against the war in Iraq, but a pacifist who believes that America's enemies are only enemies because we have done them wrong or embody corrupted values (imperialist, capitalist, hedonist). For the definition of such an "intellectual pacifist," Hitchens turns to Orwell, who is well worth quoting again here:

"The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States" (Notes on Nationalism, May 1945).