Nighttime. Baghdad. March 19, 2003. The city bursts into light as “Shock and Awe” sweeps across the desert. Director Paul Greengrass (United 93, The Bourne Ultimatum) begins his latest release, Green Zone, with a black screen as the sounds of air-raid warnings and the crescendo of American bombs slowly fills the theater. After a riveting skyline view of Iraq’s capitol city under siege in the opening hours of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the viewer is thrown into the terrifying perspective of an Iraqi awoken in the night to the sounds of war.

The scene cuts, and now the viewer is in the company of Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (a stoic Matt Damon), as he frantically searches a Baghdad facility for weapons of mass destruction. Greengrass’s characteristic slingshot camerawork and skilled pacing masterfully convey a sense of immediacy. In the first two scenes alone, Green Zone creates a world that more closely resembles the maelstrom of Iraq than any film yet.

Unfortunately, the film’s bracingly realistic style is soon put into the service of a caricature-laden plot and a thinly veiled leftist politics. This turn for the worse is disappointing but not all that surprising. Green Zone continues a long line of recent Hollywood films that fail to engage politics and war in all their grim and tragic complexity—resorting to one-dimensional characters, clichéd monologues, and a conspiracy theory-based plot.

Where are the Weapons?

Roy Miller and his squad keep coming up empty-handed at every potential WMD site they visit. Suspicious and frustrated, Miller teams up with Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson), a veteran CIA officer, and the two begin a rogue mission to determine the reason for the intelligence failures. Their efforts place them in opposition to Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear), a top official in the Department of Defense, and a composite figure clearly drawn from L. Paul Bremer, Donald Rumsfeld, and Douglas Feith. Poundstone is a quintessentially Machiavellian bureaucrat. His every move seems choreographed to provoke the viewer’s disdain.

Miller’s investigation also leads him to a close encounter with General Al Rawi, Saddam Hussein’s top general. Al Rawi becomes the missing link in Miller’s investigation. As he slowly puts the pieces together with the help of Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan), a Wall Street Journal reporter who was Poundstone’s mouthpiece in the run-up to the war, he begins to realize that Poundstone is hiding something about the missing WMDs. Predictably, to get to the bottom of things, Miller has to defy orders and take matters into his own hands—for a moment, one almost expects Poundstone to shout “Bourne’s gone rogue!” into a satellite phone.

Greengrass returns to form with a brilliant chase scene at the end of the film. As Miller and one of Poundstone’s cronies from Special Forces (Jason Isaacs) chase General Al Rawi through the streets of Baghdad, an American helicopter follows them from above as they weave and wind through the city’s tight neighborhoods amid a barrage of bullets. The editing in this scene is amazing, as the viewer switches between the three parties at a nearly inconceivable pace. When the dust has cleared, Baghdad is ablaze and the descent towards sectarian violence has begun. The sequence will remind fans of Greengrass’s admirable work in the last two Jason Bourne movies.

The Lessons of War

Nearly seven years have passed since the futile search for WMDs portrayed in Green Zone. With almost 4,400 American soldiers and countless Iraqi civilians dead, the country has witnessed the tragic and bitter consequences of war. Yet for some, the war provides the opportunity to promote a simplistic agenda. Green Zone’s paranoid plot does little to dispel the perception that Hollywood liberals can’t think of anything more sophisticated to say about Iraq than “Bush lied, people died.”

There is no doubt that a huge intelligence failure occurred in the run-up to the Iraq War. However, Greengrass turns the intelligence community into a locus of preposterous corruption, purposely constructed to justify American imperialism. Greengrass’s Iraq war is a game in which powerful officials push misinformation in order to lead innocent soldiers into a vicious, deadly quagmire. Reasonable critics and supporters of the war might enjoy the film, but they need not accept its maddeningly simplistic political message.

Jeffrey Lerman ‘13 is a Contributing Writer.

Photo Credit: The U.S. Army

Crisis and Command, by John Yoo, Kaplan Publishing, 2009. $29.95, 544 pp.

On Sept. 11, 2001, all but a few employees were required to evacuate the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. Among the select personnel asked to remain behind was John Yoo, a young Harvard- and Yale-educated lawyer. In the weeks and months that followed, Yoo and his OLC colleagues played a central role in crafting the legal basis for the most controversial tactics employed by President George W. Bush in the war on terror—coercive interrogation techniques, which many call torture, and the indefinite detainment of suspected terrorists. In Crisis and Command, Yoo offers a defense of his legal interpretations and argues that wars and national-security crises not only warrant but even require the broad expansion of executive power. Yoo draws from a deep well of history in making his argument, tracing the expansion and use of executive power in times of crisis. Despite an overly selective reading of the past, Yoo presents an apology for executive power that must be seriously reckoned with.

A History of Power

Yoo starts his history at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, where James Madison proposed an executive beholden to the legislative branch, while Alexander Hamilton proposed an executive with broad powers and life tenure. The executive branch that emerged, Yoo argues, was much closer in practice to Hamilton’s vision than Madison’s. This became evident as early as George Washington’s first term, when questions lingered as to whether the various executive departments would be autonomous or whether the president alone held executive authority. Though “the constitutional text is silent as to whether cabinet officers must obey presidential orders,” Yoo writes, Washington subordinated executive-branch officials to the role of assistants and thus assumed unitary authority for the president.

Yoo contends that from this point onward, there was a distinct trend towards the expansion of executive power in moments of crisis, from Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase through Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and Roosevelt’s New Deal. Yoo uses this history to justify Bush’s assumption of enormous executive power. “President Bush’s actions relied on broad claims of presidential power,” he writes, “but again they fell within the precedents set by earlier presidents.” Those who find Bush’s use of presidential authority galling, Yoo suggests, must also find fault with Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Jefferson’s uses of executive power.

Choosing History

Yoo’s history, however, is weakened by its underemphasis of certain key events. For instance, Yoo emphasizes Roosevelt’s willingness to assume broad constitutional authority in addressing the Great Depression and WWII. However, Yoo devotes a mere six pages of his book to the notorious Executive Order 9066, with which Roosevelt violated the civil liberties of more than 120,000 law-abiding Japanese-Americans.

Yoo also chronicles Roosevelt’s wiretapping of all communications into and out of the United States after 1940. While Yoo concedes that these policies were misguided, he does not seem to take seriously the dangerous precedents they set. Yoo’s scant coverage of these and other ill-conceived presidential actions makes the reader question his critical balance.

Commission and Omission

In his final defense of the Bush administration, Yoo argues that the greatest American presidents took on broad authority and were “responsible for some of the most explosive constitutional confrontations in American history.” But Bush could have been reckless and unsuccessful in addition to bold, a possibility Yoo does not really address. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon seem the perfect counterexamples to Lincoln and Jefferson. Presidential greatness is invariably determined by the outcomes of executive policies, not by their constitutional novelty.

The broader message of Yoo’s work is that no executive will ever execute his authority will complete judiciousness. As Yoo noted in a recent interview with Jon Stewart, “the Constitution doesn’t prevent [executives] from making poor decisions.” And Yoo believes that “mistakes of commission” are always better than “mistakes of omission.” Put plainly, Yoo concludes that it is better for a president to act decisively to protect his country, even if he is later rebuffed by history, than for a president not to act at all when his country is in danger. This is Yoo’s most forceful argument: in crisis moments a passive president may be the last thing we want.

Jeffrey Lerman ’13 is a Contributing Writer.

The Death of Conservatism, by Sam Tanenhaus, Random House, 2009.  $17, 144 pp.

In 1962, legendary ABC News anchor Howard Smith ran an hour-long segment titled “The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon.” Smith proclaimed Nixon, who had just lost the race for Governor of California only two years after narrowly losing the 1960 Presidential election to John F. Kennedy, to be politically finished. Six years later Nixon would capture the White House.

American politics is lit with these stories of self-reinvention and political turnarounds, yet Sam Tanenhaus, in The Death of Conservatism, decrees a political obituary for the entire conservative movement. Tanenhaus, who has once called himself “a chastened liberal,” traces the conservative movement from its roots in Edmund Burke to its modern leaders like William Buckley Jr. and Ronald Reagan, and finally its death: the 2008 presidential election. Ultimately, Tanenhaus’s obituary comes much too soon, and proclaims an end to a movement that is very much alive.

Whither Conservatism?

The book follows from an essay Tanenhaus wrote in The New Republic in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s election, and it is the ascendancy of Barack Obama which overshadows the author’s argument. Obama’s victory, Tanenhaus argues, was not so much a positive referendum on liberal ideology as it was a negative referendum on eight years of the Bush administration. “During two terms of George W. Bush,” he writes, “conservative ideas were not merely tested but also pursued with dogmatic fixity.” Tanenhaus holds up the resounding failure of the Bush administration and its policies, as evidence of conservatism’s demise and rejects the role of a new liberal energy in that election.

Tanenhaus’s definition of conservatism is central to his concise book. Tanenhaus divides conservatism into two groups: ‘revanchist’ conservatives and realist conservatives. Revanchist conservatism is rooted in the politics of revenge and extremism, and the author argues that this wing of conservatism has overtaken the realist wing and suffocated true conservative principles.  The issue arising from this division of conservatism is that Tanenhaus lumps the Bush years among the revanchist aspect of the party. Yet Bush was seen in the conservative wing of the party as an ideological betrayer, especially on the growth of government and deficits and immigration.

Looking Ahead

“In each instance [of conservative losses], crushing defeat gave the movement new strength and pushed it further along the route to ultimate victory,” Tanenhaus writes. “Today it is impossible to make this case.” The future Tanenhaus sees for the conservative movement is a bleak one, in which the intellectual base of the party, found in “journals like Commentary, National Review, and The Weekly Standard,” slowly deteriorates until it becomes a “mouthpiece of the Republican Party at its most revanchist.” For Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review and the New York Times Week in Review, this claim is all too predictable, and his critiques of his conservative counterparts sound far more partisan than analytic, often relying on finger-pointing at conservative celebrities such as Rush Limbaugh.

“Today’s conservatives resemble the exhumed figures of Pompeii,” Tanenhaus writes, “trapped in postures of frozen flight, clenched in the rigor mortis of a defunct ideology.” This grandiose statement is typical of Tanenhaus’s literary flair -but today’s conservative landscape is no Pompeii. Although conservatism has paled next to the energized progressivism of Obama, it is far from the ghastly death Tanenhaus diagnoses.  A quick examination of conservative leaders today finds plenty of vital signs. Tim Pawlenty remains a popular conservative, while Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney are considered among the leaders of the Republican Party despite their heterodoxies on key ideological points like abortion. The conservative movement today is more steeped in realism and compromise than Tanenhaus acknowledges.

Tanenhaus is not entirely off-base. The uncompromising extremism of the Bush administration, rooted in men like Dick Cheney, John Bolton and John Ashcroft, and a hard-line neoconservative foreign policy, has certainly passed, and perhaps this is the obituary Tanenhaus meant to write. But the movement itself is still alive, and will continue to be for quite some time. Movements and leaders are never finished in America-they are just waiting to make a comeback.