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The War on Fiction

Added: July 22, 2007

As I waded neck-deep through the insane world of American torture and terror since 9/11, I came across an amazing number of pro-torture arguments that made direct reference to movies and TV in supporting their position. Various scenes in The Untouchables were referenced, including the scene where Sean Connery's character asks Kevin Costner's character if he is ready to "do whatever it takes" to bring in Al Capone. There were also several mentions of the "...if he draws a knife, we draw a gun..." speech as well. More than five - probably.

I first encountered this in the outer blogsphere, and it was easy to disregard, but then I came across several instances in which events in The Untouchables were used in very high-level civilian discussions inside the Pentagon. Discussions that ultimately decided American policy - in real-life places like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

Ay yi yi.

"So like Sean Connery, who's like, this real like tough old cop, he like says to Kevin Costner "he draws a knife, we draw a gun, they send one of ours to the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue" you know, like he's saying that when you're fighting real bad guys, you know, you gotta get like mean, you know? or like, the bad guy will just laugh at you and keep being mean, you know?

Barbershop conversation - fine.

High-level policy discussion in the Pentagon that will effect millions of people around the globe - not fine.

Then I came across this article, talking about how much trouble they are having at West Point with students referencing the TV show "24" in military ethics classes. The kids are watching Jack Bauer break some towelhead's fingers so he will tell him which subway the dirty bomb is on - and thinking that it has something to do with reality. Gary Solis, a retired law professor who designed and taught the Law of War for Commanders curriculum at West Point, says that it was "like trying to stomp out an anthill" convincing his students that torturing prisoners was the wrong thing to do.

As I read these accounts, I thought, "Good Lord, these morons, going around using fictional examples to support their half-assed theories, getting us all into trouble - its a good thing I don't have any completely fantastical perceptions of reality governing my decision making."

Unfortunately, this internal assurance did not stand up to much scrutiny. Applying the unforgiving lens of "anti-make-believe", I discovered all kinds of fantastical stuff mixed in with my perceptions and opinions about various very important things. Military service, the functioning of government, warfare, diplomacy, law enforcement, combat, deep-sea diving, sinking luxury liners and big-game hunting are all things where fictional experience outweighs actual experience by a ratio of 1000:1 in the national consciousness.

99% of our perception of these things is based on events that never happened.

Ever.

Most of this is stuff is no big deal. I mean, who cares if our perception of disaster is based on The Towering Inferno? Disaster just happens, ready or not, and is not a matter of public policy. Folks might be a little surprised by what burning bodies actually smell like, but otherwise what does it matter?

There are a few key areas, however, in which the fantasy element in our collective thinking really needs an overhaul.

First up: Intelligence Gathering.

The gulf that separates real actual intelligence gathering and fictional intelligence gathering is gargantuan. Intelligence work, as everyone who has actually done it in real life knows, is insanely boring. 99.9% of it involves sitting alone watching TV, looking at photographs, reading massive stacks of old newspapers and sifting through big piles of exceptionally uninteresting things. No yelling, no sneaking, no arguing, no danger. It is, in its essence, as undramatic as painting a house or going to the store to get some milk. Real-life interrogation is equally unsuited to high-intensity drama, as it involves building "rapport", a subtle and time consuming process - which by definition avoids any type of heated exchange. Real "ticking bomb" scenarios are extremely rare and there is probably as much dramatic interrogation in one episode of 24 as their was in the entire 20th century - seriously.

Torture works great on TV. The edgy rogue agent who doesn't play by the rules, walking in and doing what has to be done (and paying a heavy personal price) while all the constitutionally hamstrung G-men are wringing their hands wondering what to do with the stone-faced Al-Qaeda operator who won't talk no matter how many times they say "please". Great stuff for the one-hour format - hell yeah!

Unfortunately, in real life, torture is worthless for intelligence - completely. Getting someone to talk is easy, but getting them to give you useful intelligence is almost impossible. If you are Stalin or Saddam Hussein and all you want to do is terrorize your enemies and extract confessions, then torture is great. If you are trying to figure out where the IED is on the road outside of Baghdad, torture is worse than useless. Aside from being illegal and wrong (as if that isn't enough), it generates extremely unreliable information, destroys morale among the troops and eliminates any chance of ever winning hearts and minds. In other words, it has a gigantic, profound and multi-faceted downside while having virtually no upside. For more info on this, check the torture links page, which has extensive resources by dozens of high-ranking military commanders explaining at length just how profoundly bad it is for us to torture prisoners. The Al-Qaeda guys we are torturing right now are just trying to figure out what exactly we want them to confess to - the idea that we are after actual information is completely absurd. What could they possibly know at this point? Within 5 minutes of getting bagged, their name is crossed off the membership list and all operations they were involved with are permanently canceled. Small, compartmentalized terrorist organizations can turn on a dime, while the U.S. military/intelligence apparatus steers like a battleship. That is one of the central precepts of asymmetrical warfare and pretending otherwise is the sure road to disaster.

So, here are the choices of who to believe:

1. Career politicians who avoided military service at all costs and clearly have something to gain from cultivating an environment of hate and fear towards the enemy.

2. TV producers and writers with zero point zero reason to even briefly consider reality in creating their portrayals.

3. Several dozen Generals and Admirals with direct tactical and strategic experience in real actual military matters in which real actual people died horribly whenever they made wrong decisions.

Take your pick, but I know who I'm going with.

Next up: War!

Our fictional perception of war is exactly the same as our fictional perception of intelligence work - except opposite. Where intelligence gathering is tearfully boring in reality, combat is ten trillion times more insane and horrifying than any movie could ever portray - which makes it just as undramatic.

My only direct experience with what could be called "war" was running around Manhattan during 9/11. No movie could possibly capture even a 100th of that experience. Some weird future technology that could pump the theater full of the smell of burning bodies, blow up sections of the building and send huge groups of screaming people up through the audience would start to get close. Oh yeah, at the end the roof would have to collapse and kill everyone. That would do a pretty good job of getting across what it was like.

Of course, no movie like that will ever be made, because it wouldn't be any fun and nobody would go. The whole point of an action movie is to give you enough of a scare to feel like you are in danger, while at the same time knowing that you aren't in any actual danger. The only way to accurately recreate the experience of Pearl Harbor or Vietnam or 9/11 would be to actually blow things up and kill people. In the best case, "accurate" movies like Saving Private Ryan are honest portrayals that can help us gain a greater respect for history. In the worst case, war movies create a sense of order and purpose in warfare that is a delusion of monstrous proportions.

Here is my plot for my war movie:

The wide-eyed kid from the farm, the hard boiled Sergeant, the bookish but cool headed Lieutenant, the crack shot hillbilly and the smart ass from Brooklyn all head out on a dramatic cross country mission in war torn France. They pack their packs, load up on extra ammo, and hitch a ride on a jeep convoy heading for the front lines. After traveling 200 feet down the road, the jeep they are riding in is annihilated by an anti-tank mine and they all die horribly. The hunks of steaming meat that were once such interesting dramatic characters are pushed off the road along with the twisted carcass of the jeep and the convoy continues, soon disappearing over the horizon. Scene fades to black and stays black. The doors are locked and the audience is forced to stay and watch a black screen in a black room for the next five years.

The end.

Now that would be a blockbuster.

In a few rare cases in real war the bookish kid actually does find his courage at the crucial moment, the sergeant overcomes the ghosts of his past, and the smart ass from Brooklyn reconciles things with his father. But most of the time everyone just dies. Lots and lots of life stories abruptly ended, without even a trace of resolution or greater meaning.

This is not the stuff of drama folks.

Since the purpose of movies is to entertain, they don't dwell too much on these deeply troubling and immensely undramatic elements of war. The writers keep the interesting characters alive until their inner conflicts are resolved just before the final battle and then kill half of them gloriously so they can be remembered fondly by the surviving half. Simple enough.

So movies will continue to portray this weird "movie" version of war and disaster leaving people with no idea what any of those things are really like.

As far as disaster goes its not really a problem - we don't slowly escalate an undeclared earthquake in Southeast Asia or unilaterally invade the middle eastern country of "Hurricane Katrina".

However, we do slowly escalate undeclared wars in Southeast Asia and invade poorly run Middle Eastern countries sitting on billions of barrels of oil - and our collective perception of what we are doing is based completely on fairy tales.

We need some kind of collective reality-based refresher course on warfare. But how?

Obviously, we can't impress the horrific reality of war on our young people by killing half of them. It is also not the goal to traumatize people so badly (using some kind of Clockwork Orange eyelid retention system and a combat footage marathon) that war becomes unthinkable. War is a hard reality of the world, and every nation must have the capacity to go to war if the necessity arises. The trick is infusing the populace with a very healthy respect for war so that there is a very high bar for actually pulling the trigger.

If the necessity of war arises, we want to cultivate steely determination - not rabid enthusiasm.

Looking at history, we find a perfect example in the collective attitudes that existed in the years immediately following WWII. As the haggard survivors surveyed the smoking ruins of Europe, the 50 million dead, the 200 million refugees, the devastated economies and the large craters left by two huge nuclear weapons, there was very strong motivation to find another way of resolving conflict between nations. "Anything but that" was the theme. Whatever fantasy version of warfare that might have existed in people's minds was obliterated and replaced with a 24/7, 3-D Sensurround blast of undeniable reality that left everyone's jaws hanging open.

As Eisenhower famously said

"I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity."

Go Ike!

With this in mind, western leaders set about trying to establish institutions and policies intended to prevent anything like WWII from ever happening again. Instead of pressing its military advantage, the United States settled for "containment" of the rising Soviet threat and set about rebuilding the defeated Axis nations into prosperous democracies. Rather than focusing on supposedly irreconcilable racial and cultural differences, leaders tried to focus on the shared interests of all people, notably the desire for freedom, justice and opportunity. The United Nations and other organizations were created as forums for compromise and negotiation. The advent of nuclear weapons added a nice touch of extra motivation as well, by sending a very clear message that the next big global conflagration between industrial powers would almost certainly mean the death of every single living thing on Earth.

War had not become unthinkable, but it had dropped way down the "to do" list for most western nations. It didn't stop Korea, it didn't stop Vietnam and the countless brushfire wars of the second half of the century, but the culture of belligerence that had dominated European society for centuries lost its sway on governance, Germany and Japan were rebuilt into peaceful and prosperous democracies and WWIII didn't happen.

At least we can say that.

Now, however, the hard-earned wisdom of WWII has faded into irrelevance. The shock and uncertainty caused by 9/11 was very real, but it was no excuse for the failure of Congress and the public to stop the Iraq war. The complete lack of comprehension about what we were getting into was the real culprit. There is a lot of talk now about "if we would have known then what we know now" by people who are retracting their support for the war. Well, its true that there were a few things we didn't know in February of 2003, like whether or not Saddam really had WMD's or not, or who was going to win the World Series that year, but we had a mile-high stack of evidence sitting right in front of us that leaves no doubt, today, 3 years ago, or in the year 2569 that invading Iraq was a bad idea.


We knew it was a nation the size of California with 24 million people, we knew it had deep sectarian antagonisms held together by a very strong central leader, we knew it had massive unsecured borders, we knew it had neighbors hostile to the U.S. on all sides and we knew it had big urban areas ideally suited for guerilla warfare. In other words - anyone with any sense of history could see a disaster coming a mile away.

The war has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage.
-Emperor Hirohito, April 1945

One group of people notably absent from the pro-war bandwagon was the uniformed military. The dissent was very subtle, but the JCS and the senior commanders in all four branches of the service were extremely luke-warm towards the prospect of invading Iraq. Why? Well, for one, they have an excellent sense of history, namely Korea and Vietnam. These disastrous, open-ended land invasions are permanently seared into the American military mind, and it will take centuries before they are forgotten. Read more about what makes our generals so conservative here.

In the end, there was nothing they could do - they just had to salute and do the job as best they could. The Framers never imagined a future day when the military command would be far more conservative than the civilian president. Who could have foreseen something as freakish as the Bush administration in 1787?

So, the whole thing crumbled. All of the carefully crafted safeguards in our society designed to keep a renegade executive from doing something disastrous failed, and we got ourselves into a gigantic, expensive, bloody, mess in Mesopotamia.

Fuck.

In my opinion, our collective fantastical grasp of war's reality was the main culprit. Sure, 9/11 threw everyone for a loop and we could have still done all kinds of stupid and counterproductive things in response to 9/11, but with even a basic collective grasp of history, the actual land invasion of Iraq would have never happened.

So...I have a plan.

I call it the "No Child Left Behind to be an Ignorant Warmonger" program. It has three parts - academic, final exam and a capstone field trip.

Academic
This is pretty easy - the curriculum already exists at the West Point military academy - its called "Armed Conflict in the 20th Century" and is a two semester survey of WWI, WWII, Korea and Vietnam. This is the core material that makes our military commanders so careful about getting into land wars. Just the straight facts on this stuff will make a pacifist out of anybody. Everyone will have to take this class (and pass it!) before graduating high school.

Final Exam
The final exam will be simple. Students will be shown 100 flashcards in rapid succession with various imaginary military concepts printed on them, such as "Surgical Strike", "Precision Munitions", "Shock and Awe", "Smart Bombs", "Hearts and Minds", "Pre-emptive Warfare", "Global Military Pre-Eminence", "Illegal Combatants", "The Geneva Conventions are Quaint" etc. All they need to do to pass the test is involuntarily laugh out loud as each concept flashes in front of their eyes (those more emotionally reserved can get a special waiver to allow a derisive smile to suffice for actually laughing). Simple and short - but a 100% score is required or they have to take the class over again during summer school. After passing the final exam they all get to graduate and then take an all expenses paid trip to beautiful Hamburg Germany!

When I hear the word "precision munitions" I head for the bunker
-Colin Powell

The Hamburg Field Trip
Well, not exactly modern Hamburg. At an as-yet unchosen location in the German countryside, we need to rebuild a full scale model of Hamburg as it stood on July 29, 1944 - the morning after it was utterly annihilated by the single most destructive firebombing raid of the war. As I said before, this is not intended as an act of cruelty. We don't need to recreate any stacks of bodies or wailing women or anything really dramatic. The most powerful image of the Hamburg disaster I ever saw was completely silent aerial footage. You couldn't see any bodies or anything gruesome - the destruction just went on and on and on for about 10 minutes - silently.



Germany will either be a world power or will not be at all.
-Adolf Hitler

On the morning of July 29, about 30 square miles of Hamburg lay in complete ruins - recreating this should suffice to get the point across I think. The tour doesn't even have to touch the ground, they can just take an hour long aerial tour, covering the entire city, just so they can get the effect of complete devastation stretching out in every direction as far as the eye can see.

Once again, this is not an act of cruelty, just an exercise to elicit the proper respect. The goal is that everyone will hopefully file the Hamburg memory away in a separate folder marked "reality" that will hopefully serve as a spoiler to their lifetime of fantastical representations of warfare.

The result?

Well, hopefully the result will be a populace and a Congress (and maybe even an executive) that always has lurking in the back of their minds that memory of the Hamburg field trip, which will in turn remind them of that funny class they had to take in high school which in turn will remind them of a time in the not-to-distant past when the domination of public policy by militarism almost resulted in the complete destruction of humanity.

Also, if we stop screwing around in places like Iraq, we'll have to get used to having a lot of extra money laying around, which I'm sure is going to be extremely stressful (we could send everyone to Harvard 3 times each, implement a complete national health care system, or just cut everyone's taxes in half - take your pick). We'll also have to get used to living without fear and insanity as part of our daily lives, and also we'll have to figure out what to do with all the great ideas, inventions, works of art and medical cures that all the thousands of kids who don't go off and die pointlessly in ridiculous wars come up with in their long and productive lives.

Its going to be tough, but I'm sure we'll figure out a way to make it through.

That's my plan.

Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.
-Sir Winston Churchill




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