The war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan and the "war on terror" (to use the increasingly forgotten Rumsfeldian formulation) never really got their John Wayne/Green Berets moment in Hollywood: a big movie whose unembarrassed purpose is to endorse the military action. Most of the serious responses have been liberal-patriot fence-straddlers, multistranded stories urgently set in Washington, the Middle East, south Asia and elsewhere, tying themselves in knots in an attempt to acknowledge a dovey point of view while covertly leaning to the hawk's – pictures such as Stephen Gaghan's Syriana, which showed torture in terms of CIA man George Clooney being tortured by an Arab, Robert Redford's mealy-mouthed Lions for Lambs, Gavin Hood's issue-fudging Rendition, and Peter Berg's The Kingdom, with its feeble moral equivalence between jihadist zealots and the US army.
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