Yesterday, Ross Douthat criticized the new Matt Damon movie Green Zone, which contains an unsympathetic portrayal of the Bush administration's disastrous invasion of Iraq. Douthat feels as though the film reduces the Bush administration to two-dimensional cartoon villainy, arguing that the nuances of the story demand the kind of texture one finds in Shakespearean tragedies:
Our nation might be less divided, and our debates less poisonous, if more artists were capable of showing us the ironies, ambiguities and tragedies inherent in our politics — rather than comforting us with portraits of a world divided cleanly into good and evil.
Daniel Larison, in a classic post, notes the irony of Douthat calling for nuance in the portrayal of people who made the case for war by dividing the world cleanly into good and evil, and casting anyone who opposed the war on the side of the demons. I won't excerpt too much here because it really should be read in its entirety:
Perhaps one reason there is not much interest in exploring the tragic side of our politics is that Nemesis is ever-elusive. The ambition and pride of political leaders may lead to disaster, but the men whose ambition and pride fueled the calamity escape relatively unscathed. We have an abundance of hubris in our politics, and there are more than enough sins that invite punishment, but unlike the famous figures of tragedy our leaders never answer for what they have done. It is always “History” that is supposed to judge them. In the meantime, they walk away, and often enough they head off to a comfortable retirement. They remain unaccountable and surrounded by a small army of revisionists just waiting to rehabilitate their reputations in a few years' time.
I agree with everything Larison says above. There's no appetite for accountability in government; what we have is a kind of bipartisan detente in which the Republican Party bristles at any notion of high-level accountability for Republican officials as, uh, "tyranny" and Democrats agree to this point out of political expedience, in the hopes that Republicans will one day return the favor.
The reason Douthat pines for the "Shakespearean" treatment for the Bushies is that such tragedies are mostly nonideological -- they are stories about the dark flaws that emerge as a consequence of human desires. Treating the war in Iraq as a Shakespearan tragedy would divorce it from the ideological dogma that made the administration focus on invading Iraq in the first place.
The other problem is that properly told, the story of Iraq is not merely the personal tragedy of hapless leaders. It's the story of a wounded country that sought to lash out and punish those who had attacked it, without enough regard for whom we were actually aiming at. It was only in the red haze of September 11's aftermath that a case for war in Iraq would have garnered public support, and the Bush administration skillfully harvested that fear and anger, concocting what they knew was a flawed case for war against a country that had no ties to al-Qaeda and no weapons of mass destruction to menace us with. But they could not have had war without American consent, and in our fury, we were all too ready to grant it.
Shakespeare's tragic figures were often monarchs and military leaders; the consent of their subjects didn't matter as much as it does in a democracy. What's tragic about the Iraq War isn't that the Bush administration wanted to invade Iraq -- it's that Americans agreed to it for all the wrong reasons. Shakespeare's tragic figures are leaders by birth or strength of force. We vote ours into office, which is a much bigger tragedy but a much harder story to tell.
-- A. Serwer
