We just published a terrific
article by Spack tracking the political evolution of the Iron Man series. Take the film's plot in which Stark finds that his underlings are selling weaponry on the black market and arming some of the world's most brutal thugs. Stark is shocked, and sets off on the world's most impressive gun control campaign."I finally know what I have to do," says Stark, "and I know in my heart that it's right." Spack replies:
Spoken like a true imperialist. Heroism, when applied to foreign policy, is a moral vanity that usually prescribes a cure more corrosive than the disease it confronts. It will always be good celluloid for Iron Man to incinerate terrorists who -- living out their own imperial perversions -- overrun villages full of innocents. But the real world does not contain magic suits that kill the bad guys without harming the civilians and let the good guy fly away without a scratch on him. In that world, the actual answer to the Iron Man complex is one of two things. America either needs to submit the Iron Man armor to a series of institutions to govern its just use, or it needs to take off the suit once and for all.
But if the solution is simplistic, the prologue is wrong. In Stark Enterprises, the sale of arms to insurgents was an instance of boardroom criminality. A couple bad apples looking to amp up profits. If only the president had known! Insofar as this acts as a metaphor for American foreign policy, however, our efforts to arm thuggish insurgents have been anything but rogue acts conducted by a handful of uncontrollable miscreants. Support for Saddam Hussein was official US policy throughout the 80s, when he was at his most brutal. Support for the revolutionaries in Afghanistan was similarly celebrated within our political system. Even now, the Republican nominee for president
subscribes to a theory called "rogue state rollback" which entails "supporting indigenous and outside forces that desire to overthrow the odious regimes that rule these states." You need not be a particularly deep student of history to guess how that one will end up. Ironman, in other words, is less critique than absolution. Where these policies are generally an example of moral rot that reaches right to the top of the power structure, Ironman subscribes to the "few bad apples" theory of American misbehavior. It's wrong on both ends. We arm insurgents and warlords and thugs on purpose, not by accident. And, as we're seeing in Iraq, or with al Qaeda, we have no suit of armor that allows us to neutralize the long-term repercussions of yesterday's short-sighted foreign policy decisions. We may be the world's last superpower, but we are far from a superhero, and we often find ourselves underpowered.
Image used under a Creative Commons license from GR Jones. 
