War Ink
The trailer for War, Inc. was all over the place. And indeed, so is the film, playing as a sloppy mix of hyper-kinetic farce, on-the-nose political satire, and Gen-X dark comedy. Even though it doesn’t quite work, it still feels like an important movie — or at least the kind of thing we should support.
John Cusack plays Brand Hauser, an ex-CIA hitman who’s sent to Turaqistan (an obvious stand-in for Iraq) by a corporation called Tamerlane (Halliburton). Various hijinks ensue, involving a Middle Eastern pop-star (Hilary Duff), Hauser’s shadowy ex-boss (Ben Kingsley), and an attractive reporter (Marisa Tomei). Hauser has a crisis of conscious, after which he begins to have doubts about his mission.
Certain parts of it are hilarious. A group of terrorists who are also aspiring filmmakers reference films like My Darling Clementine while preparing to shoot a beheading video (right after they work out the distribution rights). Then there’s Hauser’s on-board navigator, who in addition to giving directions also serves as his psychiatrist.
The film’s major flaw is Hauser’s character. The hitman-growing-a-conscience storyline is a trope that’s been used a few too many time in cinema: The Professional, The Matador, Bangkok Dangerous , and Grosse Point Blank , which also starred Cusack, and actually feels like a close cousin of this film. Hauser’s psychological breakdown never seems particularly convincing, especially since one of the things he does to cope with his depression is drink shots of hot sauce.
Some of the satire, however, is spot on — like the press briefings, which are virtual-reality theme park rides (a la Star Tours) that simulate being in battle. Other bits feel over-the-top — like the tanks that have billboards on them.
At one point in the film, Hauser points out that they’ve already destroyed the place so they might as well take a look at all the entrepreneurial possibilities — business, as he sees it, is a uniquely human response to a moral or cosmic crisis. “Whether it’s a tsunami or a sustained aerial bombardment,” Hauser says, without much sincerity, “there’s the same urgent call for urban renewal.”
War, Inc. is said to have been inspired by an article Naomi Klein wrote for Harper’s Magazine in 2004 called Baghdad Year Zero. In it, Klein refuted the notion that Neocons had no post-war plan, stating that instead they planned to create a sort of free-market Utopia: taxes were cut, regulations lifted, and government agencies disbanded and privatized.
Many people will no doubt see this as a sort of economic pillaging — indeed, that’s how the insurgents saw it. But Klein’s article suggests that the post-war strategy, which was based on the economic principles of Milton Friedman , was ideologically driven. Necons thought that the easiest way to rebuild Iraq would be to create an environment where private corporations could do it — that is, they wanted to privatize the reconstruction. To paraphrase Gordon Gecko, greed would save Iraq.
It seems obvious now how doomed this plan was. State employees were laid off in droves and tariffs were completely eliminated. This led to massive unemployment, which fueled the then-fledgling insurgency.
When people suggest that the motive behind the Iraq war was profit, they miss the point. The Necons really believed that this post-war idea worked, and the fact that it failed as miserably as it did needs to be publicized. The capitalist system may be great but it has serious limitations, and liberals would do well to discuss these limits and not just label the other side as corrupt.
Because ultimately, corrupt politicians are less dangerous than ideologically-driven ones. Compare the damage done by Ted Stevens with the damage done by Dick Cheney: one allegedly swindled hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money while the other led us into a war that, aside from costing hundreds of millions of dollars, is also responsible for thousands of casualties.
