Michael Moore's 9-11

The film the Disney Corporation didn’t want you to see is doing quite well at the box-office. Fahrenheit 9/11, filmmaker Michael Moore’s indictment of the Bush administration’s mishandling of the war on terrorism and the invasion of Iraq, is the number one film in America; with its first weekend release receipts exceeding the $21.6 million total gross of Moore’s Bowling for Columbine.

Fahrenheit 9/11 has already earned the wrath of some right-wing political groups, such as Citizens United, which contend that television commercials for the film violate campaign finance restrictions regarding the broadcasts of commercials paid by unregulated money from corporations or unions. The Federal Election Commission has yet to rule on the matter, but one may rest assured that Citizens United had no objections to the continuous coverage of the Reagan state funeral in which the Bush administration shamelessly attempted to wrap itself in the mantle of the former president.

So what’s all the fuss about? Documentary films are hardly objective, and Moore has publicly observed that his intention with this film is to assure President Bush’s electoral defeat this fall. So the real question is not whether Moore is partisan in his politics, but how strong is his case against the president?

Moore begins his film with the disputed election of 2000, a topic which the filmmaker explored in some depth with his best-selling book Stupid White Men. The film depicts a bumbling president whose legitimacy is tainted. However, everything changed on the morning of September 11 as planes crashed into the Pentagon and World Trade Center. Moore does not contend, as some conspiracy theorists allege, that the Bush administration orchestrated the attacks. But Fahrenheit 9/11 does assert that the president and his advisers were negligent in their response to the Al Qaeda threat. While his conclusions here are in agreement with many of the reservations expressed by the 9/11 Commission and former terror czar Richard Clarke, Moore chooses to make his point visually through focusing upon the dazed expression on the president’s face as he continued to read along with Florida school children for nearly ten minutes after being informed that the nation was under attack.

Moore, however, does appear to drift a little more into the conspiracy camp as he examines the relationship between the Bush family and Saudi dynasty. Retracing the ground plowed by authors Kevin Phillips and Craig Unger, Moore establishes that the Saudis have personal and financial ties to the Bush family through such international conglomerates as the Carlyle Group. The filmmaker suggests that the Bush family may have more loyalty to the Saudis than the American people, but it is somewhat unclear as to where all of this is leading. Moore seems to conclude that there is a connection between 9/11 and the Saudis (after all, most of the terrorists were Saudis, not Iraqis), but here Moore is perhaps more akin to director Oliver Stone’s JFK. Motivations for conspiracy are established, but little convincing evidence is offered.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is on a firmer foundation when Moore turns his focus upon the Bush fixation with Iraq. The film convincingly argues that the Bush administration manipulated the terrorist threat to foster fear among the American people and build support for an invasion of Iraq. Moore documents the misrepresentations, or dare we say lies, of the president and his advisers regarding Saddam Hussein’s acquisition of weapons of mass destruction and alleged ties between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi dictator, a notion whose veracity has supposedly been put to rest by the bipartisan 9/11 Commission. Moore also goes after corporations such as Halliburton, which have secured lucrative government contracts for supplying troops and rebuilding Iraq. Evidently such attacks are beginning to hit their targets. When Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy took aim at Halliburton on the floor of the Senate, former Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney responded that the senator should engage in an anatomically impossible action.

In addition, Moore provides viewers with the grisly war footage of maimed Iraqis and American soldiers which has been missing from Pentagon-manipulated media coverage of the war. The face of war is not pretty, and Moore disturbs and challenges us with these images.

The filmmaker also returns to his home town of Flint, Michigan to support his contention that the war in Iraq is also being waged against the poor in this country. Especially disconcerting is a scene in which two Marine recruiters prey upon unemployed African-American youth. Denied other opportunities, these young men believe they have no other escape from poverty than the military. Moore does seem to exploit the grief of Leila Lipscomb, whose son was killed in Iraq, but it is difficult to deny his argument that the poor are bearing the brunt of the Iraqi conflict. This point is cleverly brought home when Moore stands outside the Capitol steps and encourages members of Congress to enlist their sons and daughters in the war. Needless to say, he gets no takers. Only one member of Congress has a child serving in Iraq.

Moore concludes his film by asserting that we should never again risk the lives of our young people in wars which are not essential for the country’s security. The last shot is one of the president’s bumbling speeches in which he asserts if you are fooled twice, then shame on you. The film then fades to black, and the credits begin to roll to the sound of Neil Young’s Rocking in the Free World. Many audiences, including the one in which I screened the film, then burst into spontaneous cheering and applause.

What will be the impact of Moore’s film? It is playing to larger than anticipated audiences. But is the filmmaker simply preaching to the converted as did Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ? At the least, Moore’s film is galvanizing the anti-Bush base to work harder for the president’s electoral defeat. On the other hand, fragmentary and anecdotal newspaper accounts suggest that the film is raising some reservations among swing voters. Whether or not one completely buys into the political ideology of Moore, Fahrenheit 9/11 does raise some troubling questions which should be part of the political discourse in a democracy which values free speech and artistic freedom.