I finally saw Moore’s anti-bush agitprop (I’m not going to say how I saw it, let’s just say I didn’t pay and I had a fresh bag of microwave popcorn with me), so I feel that I can discuss it. A full review will follow in a few days, but for now I am just going to discuss a first impression that I had. That of how willfully ignorant you have to be to buy Moore’s line.
We have all heard how people who bought Bush’s “Iraq is a threat” line were themselves willfully ignorant (falsly believing that Saddam was behind 9/11 or that there were Iraqi’s among the terrorists) but one thing we never hear is those on the opposite extreme can also be ignorant. One piece of ignorance I have known since before watching F9/11 is the old socialist mindset of “terrorism is caused by the oppression and poverty of the west!”, which is demonstrably false in this case. Anyone who knows anything about the 9/11 hijakers knows they were mostly Saudi (and therefore received free money and education from the Saudi Kingdom), and that they were educated, middle-income men.
But back to Moore and 9/11. One serious allegation he makes in his film is the web of ties between Bush and the House of Saud, and how that heavily influences the Bush teams foreign policy. Sound damning? It is if you engage in sweeping genralizations of the Mid-east and are ignorant of the facts on the ground. If this were true, then how do you explain the major foreign policy event in the second part of the film, the Iraq war? While Saudi Arabia and Saddam’s Iraq were not the best of buds, Iraq served the House of Saud’s interest by providing a barrier between the mullah’s in Iran and their conquering of the holy places in Saudi. So the contradiction is clear and damning for anyone who believes the Bush-Saudi influence theory.
P.S. One thing not covered much in the film but damning to those Paleo-Cons and lefitsts who believe in the Bush-Saudi theory is their co-belief in the NeoCon-Isreali connection in the Bush Admin. Anyone who could hold these two mutually exclusive theories in their head must have a superhuman ability to withstand cognitive dissonance.
Posted by scottm at 05:50 PM