Lions for Lambs, the new movie directed by and starring Robert Redford, is designed to move us away from the "black-and-white" rhetoric of the war on terror and instead draw our focus to the "gray areas." This is necessary so that there can be a debate on issues--a debate we have been "denied" over the past six years.
I know this because I heard Robert Redford say it before a screening of Lions for Lambs at the Museum of Modern Art, where the movie was met with rapturous applause by an audience studded with has-beens, including a Mohawk-sporting Randy Quaid, Andrew (Pretty in Pink) McCarthy, Adam (Counting Crows) Duritz, and Janine (Northern Exposure) Turner. Redford's main hope, he said just before his film unspooled itself over the course of 88 of the most barren minutes anyone has ever spent at MOMA, is that his new film will make us think. That is, indeed, a noble purpose. So let me say on behalf of the American filmgoing public that we collectively owe an inexpressible debt to Redford for deigning to slalom down from his pristine Utah mountaintop to compel us to make unaccustomed use of our underutilized gray matter.
There hasn't been debate in this country about Iraq?
You may think this claim is nonsense since we've been debating and thinking about Iraq since 1990 and that debate includes two authorizations to use force against Saddam's Iraq (1991 and 2003) and Congressional passage of a law signed by the President in 1998 that stated overthrowing Saddam Hussein was our nation's official policy. It seems obvious to you. We debated. We even thought about the subject.
But you neglect the Left's definition of "debate" and "think."
For our Left, which continues to debate the question of whether we should invade Iraq in March 2003 as if it is February 2003, a debate never really ends until their conservative opponents give up and the Left's arguments are accepted. By their definition, if you haven't agreed with the Left's view, you couldn't possibly have thought about the issue at all. And if you haven't agreed with the Left, it is because there hasn't been a proper debate.
Of course, that means that a thinking debate can only be judged to have occurred once you agree with the Left. At that point--and that point only--the Left will admit that their opponents have finally thought about the issue. And then the debate is closed. For good.
That is why as evidence of winning in Iraq continues to grow, their argument is shifting to the cost--asserting that our achievement isn't worth the price we have paid.
And eventually, no matter what we achieve in Iraq and the region, they will argue that we really didn't win at all.
Lions for Lambs? Please. More like Sh*t for Sheep.
