So, that’s another bust for this windy and bloated cinematic “key to all mythologies.” And it does not seem very likely that, in his open admission about the Bin Laden family evacuation, Clarke is taking a fall, or a spear in the chest, for the Bush administration. This might not matter so much to the ethos of Fahrenheit 9/11, except that-as you might expect-Clarke is presented throughout as the brow-furrowed ethical hero of the entire post-9/11 moment. And Richard Clarke, Bush’s former chief of counterterrorism, has come forward to say that he, and he alone, took the responsibility for authorizing those Saudi departures. In the interval between Moore’s triumph at Cannes and the release of the film in the United States, the 9/11 commission has found nothing to complain of in the timing or arrangement of the flights. However, recent developments have not been kind to our Mike. I banged on about this myself at the time and wrote a Nation column drawing attention to the groveling Larry King interview with the insufferable Prince Bandar, which Moore excerpts. In a long and paranoid (and tedious) section at the opening of the film, he makes heavy innuendoes about the flights that took members of the Bin Laden family out of the country after Sept. He prefers leaden sarcasm to irony and, indeed, may not appreciate the distinction. But this is not the sort of irony in which Moore chooses to deal. We also discover that the parties of the Afghan secular left-like the parties of the Iraqi secular left-are strongly in favor of the regime change. But a highway from Kabul to Kandahar-an insurance against warlordism and a condition of nation-building-is nearing completion with infinite labor and risk. I don’t think a pipeline is being constructed yet, not that Afghanistan couldn’t do with a pipeline.
If we turn to the facts that are deliberately left out, we discover that there is an emerging Afghan army, that the country is now a joint NATO responsibility and thus under the protection of the broadest military alliance in history, that it has a new constitution and is preparing against hellish odds to hold a general election, and that at least a million and a half of its former refugees have opted to return.
And these are simply observations on what is “in” the film. If we were going to make sure no Taliban or al-Qaida forces survived or escaped, we would have had to be more ruthless than I suspect that Mr. (They opposed the removal, all right: They wouldn’t even let Tony Blair land his own plane on their soil at the time of the operation.) Either we sent too many troops, or were wrong to send any at all-the latter was Moore’s view as late as 2002-or we sent too few. As allies and patrons of the Taliban regime, they either opposed Bush’s removal of it, or they did not. policy (through family ties or overwhelming economic interest), or they do not. It must be evident to anyone, despite the rapid-fire way in which Moore’s direction eases the audience hastily past the contradictions, that these discrepant scatter shots do not cohere at any point.
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