Blog #2

When the US first entered the War in Iraq, there was overwhelming support for it.  After just having had a major terrorist attack on the US, the idea that there could be weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq made it more than necessary to go find them.  However, we didn’t find any.

The movie Green Zone is about US soldiers searching for WMDs in Iraq, and a conspiracy that led to the US actually entering Iraq.  The plot focuses around Officer Roy Miller played by Matt Damon.  When Miller’s unit investigates areas around Iraq but consistently comes up empty handed, he begins to become suspicious.  With the help of a CIA officer, Miller begins to find the truth.  He learns that an Iraqi code-named Magellan had been providing the info about possible WMD sites to the army.  However, Miller later discovers that Magellan was actually an Iraqi politician that told the US that there never were WMDs.

For years, Americans supported the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but as these wars dragged on longer and longer, less people supported them.  More people began to blame the wars for our current economic troubles.  Green Zone came out at the peak of this disgust for the wars, matching the ideological hatred of the wars that many Americans had.  While Green Zone is considered a fictional story, it likely reassured many people that there might really have been a conspiracy.

The range of reviews on this movie is pretty incredible.  There are reviewers that loved the movie for it’s suspense as an overall quality action movie with some interesting political commentary, and then there are other’s that consider Green Zone to just be liberal propaganda trying to make excuses of why we entered Iraq.  One of the negative reviews came from The Denver Post.

Green Zone fits the current view that Americans have of the War in Iraq: something went wrong.  If a movie like Green Zone came out recently after we entered the war, I think the response of the movie would have been overwhelmingly negative.  However, after years of being at war, the ideology of the American people had changed.  The ideology was just right for Americans to love this movie.