Random Michael Moore Deceits [#35]

Iraq before Liberation [from Fahrenheit 9/11]

Moore shows scenes of Baghdad before the invasion (read: liberation) and in his weltanschauung, it’s a place filled with nothing but happy, smiling, giggly, overjoyed Baghdadis. No pain and suffering there. No rape, murder, gassing, imprisoning, silencing of the citizens in these scenes. When he exploits and lingers on the tears of a mother who lost her soldier-son in Iraq, and she wails, "Why did you have to take him?" Moore does not cut to images of the murderers/terrorists (pardon me, "insurgents") in Iraq…or even to God; he cuts to George Bush. When the soldier’s father says the young man died and "for what?", Moore doesn’t show liberated Iraqis to reply, he cuts instead to an image of Halliburton.

Jeff Jarvis, "Watching Michael Moore," Buzz Machine weblog, June 24, 2004.

The most offensive sequence in "Fahrenheit 9/11"’s long two hours lasts only a few minutes. It’s Moore’s file-footage depiction of happy Iraq before the Americans began their supposedly pointless invasion. You see men sitting in cafes, kids flying kites, women shopping. Cut to bombs exploding at night.

What Moore presumably doesn’t know, or simply doesn’t care about, is that the building you see being blown up is the Iraqi Ministry of Defense in Baghdad. Not many children flew kites there. It was in a part of the city that ordinary Iraqis weren’t allowed to visit—on pain of death.

…Iraq was ruled by a regime that had forced a sixth of its population into fearful exile, that hanged dissidents (real dissidents, not people like Susan Sontag and Tim Robbins) from meathooks and tortured them with blowtorches, and filled thousands of mass graves with the bodies of its massacred citizens.

Yes, children played, women shopped and men sat in cafes while that stuff went on—just as people did all those normal things in Somoza’s Nicaragua, Duvalier’s Haiti and for that matter Nazi Germany, and as they do just about everywhere, including in Iraq today.

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In one of his love letters to Saddam’s homicidal regime, Michael Moore presents prewar Iraq as an idyll of kite-flying children, happy newlyweds and just regular folks living their lives. Then he jolts his audience with a display of precision bombing as a building is reduced to rubble. The Moore message: America is a nasty intruder in Paradise. What Moore is careful to keep secret from his audience is that the building being hit is the Iraqi Ministry of Defense in Baghdad, the longtime central command for genocide and mass murder in Iraq. There were no kite-flying children nearby; the ministry building was in a section of Baghdad that was off limits to the average Iraqi . . . on penalty of death. Moore makes no mention of Saddam’s children’s prisons where five and seven-year-old children were held captive; neither does he mention the children who were tortured in front of their parents. Now reflect on the fact that Moore made certain to exclude from Fahrenheit 9/11 any images of the terrorist jetliner fuel-bombs striking the World Trade towers. That’s because any reminder that we were provoked by a surprise attack launched by Muslim bigots would undermine Moore’s brainless thesis that the only reason America overran Osama bin Laden’s base of operations in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan was to enhance the prospects for a long-defunct pipeline proposal that had been scrapped way back in 1998. That’s how truly stupid this movie is. It’s a political Looney Tune.

It should be noted that during the Battle of Baghdad civilian areas of the city were showered with Iraqi anti-aircraft shells that had missed their intended targets and had fallen back into Baghdad neighborhoods. Moore uses Iraqi footage of civilian injuries inflicted by these errant shells in new contexts that suggest that these injuries were inflicted by indiscriminate American bombardment.

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After showing us footage of armaments cut together with footage of President Bush preparing for a speech, Moore makes one of the most outrageous and despicable moves of the entire film—second only to his decision not to show the attacks of September 11th. For his depiction of Iraq under the rule of Saddam Hussein, Moore does not show poison gas attacks against civilians, aggression against neighbors, atrocious human rights violations on a scale barely conceivable (see, for instance, http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/tales.html, and http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2003-04-13-saddam-secrets-usat_x.htm), he does not show Saddam’s palaces, or his son’s perverted torture chambers. He makes no mention of political oppression, or of a regime that funded suicide bombers and offered shelter to terrorists who had murdered Americans, or even just of Saddam Hussein’s violation of his international agreements or the sanctions regimes. Instead, amazingly, Moore shows us happy scenes of children at play, families celebrating weddings, busy restaurants—as if to say there was nothing wrong with Iraq until we, for no apparent reason, started bombing it. As we watch a child flying a kite, we hear President Bush say, “At this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger. On my orders, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance to undermine Saddam Hussein’s ability to wage war.” We then see rockets launching, and explosions over Baghdad, as if the children flying kites and playing on a slide were the targets of the bombs rather than (as is actually the case in the footage he shows) Saddam Hussein’s defense ministry.

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