Gunner Palace

This has become their movie, not mine—each person with their own reference. For the older officers and NCOs it's M*A*S*H. They brought aloha shirts for poolside BBQs. For others, it's Platoon and Full Metal Jacket. You can see it in the way they ride in their Humvees: one foot hanging out the door—helicopters with wheels. For the teenagers, it's Jackass Goes to War.

There is a documentary showing in theatres now called Gunner Palace. I'll leave the description to the writer below. The Gunner Palace web site has some interesting pictures and stories.

--------------
March 03, 2005
The Rap on Freedom
Dictators and despots may believe that Washington’s rhetoric on democracy is just another American fad. But the political climate really has changed in the Middle East.

Christopher Dickey, Newsweek

March 2 - The gut-wrenching, sad, funny, depressing, seemingly semi-demented documentary “Gunner Palace” begins during a forgotten street fight in a forgotten corner of Baghdad in the forgotten summer of 2003, when everything was supposed to be getting a whole lot better for everyone in Iraq, and American soldiers started getting killed with stunning regularity. The rap music track by some of those soldiers in the shooting gallery—“I don’t give a f---, I think I’m stuck in hell”—sets the tone. So does the narrator-director, Mike Tucker: “Most of us don’t see this on the news anymore,” he says over the staccato of Kalashnikovs. “We have reality TV instead. ‘Millionaire.’ ‘Survivor.’ Well, survive this: a year in Baghdad without changing the channel.”

One after another the soldiers tell Tucker, who codirected the film with his wife, Petra Epperlein, that the folks back home just don’t have any idea what troops are going through in Iraq. The sunny optimism of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the "M*A*S*H"-like language of U.S. government communiqués seems utterly surreal, if not sinister. If you go to see “Gunner Palace,” which opens in American theaters this weekend, you’ll get a solid dose of the fear and craziness that surrounded any of us who were in Baghdad back in 2003—when those streets were a lot less mean than they are right now.

But, you know, I first saw this film last year, when Tucker sent me a tape. And this afternoon it looked different to me when I popped it in the VCR. What’s changed is the context. The excitement about democracy and freedom that’s been felt in the Middle East over the last few weeks makes what the soldiers in “Gunner Palace” went through seem a whole lot more worthwhile now than it appeared back in 2003. Then, they were still looking for the weapons of mass destruction that they’d been told were the reason for the war. Now, if soldiers in Iraq say they’re fighting for democracy, it doesn’t just sound like the communiqué of the day.

As I listened to the troops in front of Tucker’s lens talking about the short attention spans of the folks back home, it struck me that the dictators and despots of the Middle East have learned to rely on our impatience and indifference. In the many decades that they or their fathers have been in power, they’ve seen American attention to human rights and democracy come and go like a cyclical fad, not a firm commitment. And they have many cautionary tales to tell about the policies of starry-eyed idealists that went awry. Did President Jimmy Carter promote human rights? You bet. And as a result, our friend, the unpopular Shah of Iran, was replaced by the charismatic Ayatollah Khomeini. What happened when Algeria moved toward democracy in the early 1990s? It almost got taken over by radical Muslim fundamentalists and quickly slid into a horrific civil war.

So, say the despots, this wave of rising expectations about freedom and democracy will pass. They’ve seen it all before. Americans forget these bursts of democratic enthusiasm, and American leaders even learn to regret them. All the despots have to do, they think, is buy a little time.

Well, not this time. The whole political environment has changed in the Middle East. Partly that’s because of 9/11; partly it’s because of President George W. Bush’s policies; partly it’s in spite of them. Bush, after all, not send grunts like the men and women in “Gunner Palace” on a crusade for freedom. He sent them to Iraq to eliminate the supposedly clear and present danger Saddam Hussein posed with all that WMD, which wasn’t there, and the terror networks, which didn’t exist. (At least, not then.) So by late 2003 and early 2004, when “Gunner Palace” was shot, our troops were becoming rebel targets without a cause.

It’s true that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz might have dreamed about spreading democracy through the region, but none of the administration’s policies really backed that up. Not until Iraq’s Sunni Arab insurgents started inflicting heavy casualties on American troops in November 2003 did the United States decide it might be a good idea to set a deadline for returning sovereignty to an Iraqi government. Not until Washington faced the possibility that the redoubtable Ayatollah Ali Sistani would back a Shiite insurrection last year did it finally agree to the elections he’d been demanding since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s statue. And after the Abu Ghraib scandal last spring, who could take the Bush administration seriously when it talked about freedom and human rights? Few Arabs did, certainly.

But Bush’s stay-the-course rhetoric, which sometimes sounded like an end in itself, meant the troops had to keep fighting. And gradually, even grudgingly, they found their cause. Or, better said, their cause found them. Now that Bush has embraced freedom and democracy in the Middle East publicly, repeatedly, unequivocally—in his Inaugural Address, his State of the Union Message and his speech in Brussels—and now that he’s saying this is what 1,500 Americans have died for in Iraq, this is not a cause he can easily turn away from.

Yet a lot of Arab leaders don’t seem to get it. When the government of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak decided to throw prominent opposition figure Ayman Nour in prison on bizarre charges of forging affidavits for the legalization of his political party, a State Department official saw the coming confrontation between Cairo and Washington clearly: “a real train wreck,” he said. After some very public snubs by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (and a lot of behind-the-scenes confrontations with other American officials) Mubarak decided to make what sounded like a major reform. After 24 years in power, he’ll allow the possibility of opposition in presidential elections rather than a simple referendum ratifying his next term. In fact, the political deck is still stacked against opponents. And Nour (whom I’ve known for years, and whose wife has worked for NEWSWEEK) remains in prison.

In Lebanon, the Valentine’s Day massacre that killed former prime minister Rafiq Hariri brought on change much faster than anyone ever expected, and Syrian President Bashar Assad has been caught flat-footed by the response. The streets of Beirut are filled with protestors. The Lebanese government staffed by Syria’s cronies has collapsed. The moribund Taif Accord of 1989 and last year’s United Nations Security Council Resolution 1559 have been more than revived as the United States and France (yes, France!) issue joint statements demanding the full withdrawal of all Syrian troops and all of Syria’s secret services from Lebanese territory.

I don’t think the Bush administration will back down on any of this. I don’t think it should. And I don’t think it can. Now that American soldiers like the ones in “Gunner Palace” have a cause they can be proud of, no American politician is going to take it away from them. There’s some reality TV for you, and the likes of Mubarak and Assad had better start watching.

Newsweek