How Not To Show Your Love For The Troops

From the "we support the troops" crowd.

"Redacted" stuns Venice, reported Reuters:

VENICE (Reuters) - A new film about the real-life rape and killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers who also murdered her family stunned the Venice festival, with shocking images that left some viewers in tears.

This is no brooding art house drama. DePalma turned his filmmaking skills to exploit a misdeed by American troops for purely political purposes. In other words, he hopes to change American foreign policy and coerce public sentiment on the backs of the convicted soldiers who committed the crime, in the mean time shamelessly dragging the U.S. military through the mud.

Pat Dollard, for one, is pissed. To illustrate one example of celebrity ignorance, he cites a Weekly Standard article that quoted Tim Robbins saying U.S. troops have killed over 400,000 Iraqis. That's 300 a day.

Dollard also writes of Mark Cuban, the film's financier:

Cuban has a full producer credit on the film, and DePalma shot it on HiDef video at Cuban’s request, in order for it to qualify as fodder for Cuban’s hi-def cable channel. So far neither he or DePalma have explained how they can be “bringing the truth of the Iraq war to the American people”, as Louie DePalma has said, when neither of them have ever been to Iraq, filmed any of “Redacted” in Iraq, or spent one minute with any soldier in Iraq. Clearly they are only bringing you their imagined propagandists’ reality of Iraq. Both had the opportunity to go, both declined.

Dollard continues. Nauseating:

DePalma said that going in it was his intention to make a film that would nauseate the American people, and thereby lead to a US withdrawal from Iraq. Well the only way for him to pull that off is if his film makes the case that the anomalous rape it fictionalizes is not actually an anomaly, but a “typical” snapshot of the US military’s behavior. In short, he would have to make his “troops-as-monsters” conceit appear to be typical of the troops, not atypical. This reveals a desire to create something that is nothing short of a willful and intentional smear built upon a lie. It also means that he decided not to look at Iraq for what it was, but to find something - anything - in it that would allow him to advance his propaganda campaign. Well Louie DePalma gave the game away when he confessed his excitement at his initial discovery of the rape story: “I knew I had a story!”. Now if that doesn’t mean “A story to suit my propaganda interests!”, then what does it mean?

Meanwhile, Ace looks at Movies De Palma Should Have Made. Where's the outrage???

Instapundit links to "war movies then and now," and asks what changed.

John Podhoretz rightly calls it "Anti-War Porn" over at the corner.

Needless to say, it's infinitely ironic that a man such as Brian DePalma, who has made a career of creating brutally violent films for public consumption, has now proclaimed himself the standard-bearer for all things righteously peaceful.

How can DePalma, Cuban, or any other supporters on the left look a sober person in the eye, and say that they support the troops. They'll do it with a wink and a nod, and if backed in the corner probably claim that by trying to end the war, they are supporting the troops," as a frothy anti-war blogger once said to me.

Yeah, right.