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The Price of Military Tech Assistance In Movies
derekmead writes "Last week at Camp David, President Obama met up with fellow NATO leaders to discuss the road ahead in Afghanistan. Although no one there used the language of defeat, the implicit message was clear: the war has gone nowhere in the past few years and it's time to start packing up. Meanwhile, what raked in $25.5 million at the box office? Battleship. And who provided director Peter Berg with the war technology that beats the aliens? The U.S. military. He's not the only one: the past few years have seen an explosion of high-profile cooperation between the armed forces and the movie industry. If the most powerful armed force in history isn't winning in reality, it certainly is on the big screen. And like so many problematic aspects of late capitalism, the military-Hollywood complex has a grimly understandable logic."
I guess neither is going particularly well... maybe they should have sent Tony Stark to mop up the Taliban since he didn't finish that job...
Matthew Alford, film researcher and author of Reel Power: Hollywood Cinema and American Supremacy, is even harsher in his critique. “The Pentagon has a manual. Basically, it will only provide full cooperation to propaganda pieces,” he said in an interview.
Is this against the law?
Do editors here do any proofreading at all, whatsoever? Irrelevant statements, useless commentary, and almost no coherant point of the headline.
No wonder people are leaving this site in droves. Slashdot = the myspace of tech sites.
Skipping over the editorializing in the summary, I would like to point out that the Military using Hollywood for promotion is not a recent occurence.
It should be noted that Abbot and Costello's "Buck Privates" was used to help spur enlistment.
As was "The Green Berets".
As was "Top Gun".
As was a number of other films (these three jump out at me as being some of the best examples).
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
The poster is trolling on a lot of levels. Late capitalism?
Anyway, as usual, the war itself went great - it was the peace that was the problem.
How can someone write that the military is "winning" by help movies succeed and use the recent disappointment of the movie "Battleship" as a example?
At least back to WWII, or so. I don't see why the writer is surprised.
what does this have to do with capitalism? I hate it when people don't have the discipline to leave their own biases out of objective writing formats like summaries.
You forget that the military is paid by the movie studios for their 'support.' Now, I'll admit I have no idea where that money goes, but it's always a huge propaganda win for the armed forces and usually brings in a bunch of recruits to whichever service was featured in a given film.
The USA spends close to a million dollars per soldier per year. The enemy has to spend maybe 5% of that per "enemy combatant" at most. Probably a lot less. To field a force that would be numerically equal to our forces would cost them maybe $50 million. They'd need a lot more than that to defeat us in battles, because our side is better armed. But this is not about battles. There have been very few battles. In this kind of war, the resistance avoids direct confrontations and chooses to strike where and when its forces can do the most damage to the stronger side -- or just make them look ineffective. Most of the American forces are busy trying to protect every place where the enemy might strike. It's extremely inefficient. So the Taliban only needs a small fraction of our forces to keep the Americans busy -- and going broke.
Basically, this kind of war is not winnable in a traditional sense. The resistance can carry on with a small number of soldiers and on a shoestring budget almost indefinitely.
That's not to say that guerilla forces can't be defeated. They can be, if the populace cooperates with the central government to deny them aid, deny them new soldiers and help ferret them out -- and if the resistance doesn't have cooperative govenrments across the border.
That's not the situation in Afghanistan, so it's highly questionable whether we can win at any cost.
Jerk off, fantasizing about having beaten... someone... how about aliens trying to invade your old, tired, stupid bored game? (Yes, I know, "bored" because the game is stupid and boring. Not board because they're not really boards, exactly. How good of a movie can you make out of such a pedestrian, archaic time-waster?
Coming, Summer of 2013... Master Mind! A boy discovers he has psychic powers that enable him to deduce the colors of pegs used to secure a vault containing bioweapons materials... Red... red... blue... GREEN!!!
In theaters everywhere... Monopoly... the MOVIE! Staring Sarah Jessica Parker as The Shoe, Oliver Platt as the Top Hat, Danny DeVito as The Iron... and Introducing Seth Macfarlane, as... Brian the Dog... "I can't believe you bought Park Place!!! How are you going to afford it?" "I'll build houses, then hotels!" "But Ben Affleck just bought Boardwalk!" Rated PG-13
"In a world at war... 'Get ready to move! Point cannons east! EAST!!!' ... in a world divided into territories... 'But sir, they have 10 armies!!!' Some men risked everything, for conquest... Risk, the Movie!!! In select theaters, opening July 2nd."
This Summer, take your kids to see Adam Sandler and Jim Carrey in Sorry! Sorry the Movie!
The sad thing is, I can actually see them doing some of these...
>> the war has gone nowhere
That's because it's a police operation and not a war. Policing a society is a full time job.
Not even sure exactly what the summary was about. Something about a shitty movie and a shitty war still going on.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Well if they assisted in Battleship, can I get my money back?
If you haven't seen it, remember the paper and pen game where you draw a battleship on a grid, and choose a square like D5, and the opponent tells you if you've hit his battleship?
Well that's the plot of "Battleship the movie".
No seriously, I'm not kidding, the whole movie they guess squares the aliens might be at and shoot at them, declaring a hit or a miss.
Oh and at the end they have a little tack on scene, the old warship travels at like 300mph, single handedly blows up an antenna and all the aliens and everyone is saved.
The trick, my dear Hollywood movie exec, is to make B movies because that's what "good" (speaking in relative terms) alien invasion movies are all about. I'm not talking about alien abduction or posession movies like The Astronaut's Wife or the original Soviet Solaris movie, which can gain psychological depth, but movies like War of the Worlds or The Darkest Hour, where aliens descend en masse to lay waste to the Earth Lower budgets mean a tighter story and less special effects just because you can afford it.
For example, I almost liked The Darkest Hour until they materialized the seemingly wraith-like eletromagnetic aliens into something Rambo could blast into kingdom come, something that could have possibly become a cult classic turned into, well, a modest box office success (oh, well, maybe the producers wanted to play it safe since a couple of million dollars is still no joke).
The author doesn't delve further into this assertion after that intro sentence, I wonder what that's all about? The rest of the article basically "reveals" the shocking truth that the military views media as a way to invest in its image (like every government, company, individual on the planet). It seems like he's grasping for dark villainy, but pulling back fistfuls of grey self-interest.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
I believe it's called propaganda when the media, in concert with the government, churns out movie after movie about how amazing the country's military is even though recent military history has consisted of blunder after blunder resulting in us being stuck in a quagmire costing the nation trillions of dollars while doing nothing, during a time of economic crisis.
in Hollywood we get to enjoy the perceived benefits of total war, where we throw every weapon possible at the enemy without regard for making a lasting peace. i'm sure if razed Afghanistan with every weapon in our arsenal, we would have 'won' years ago, though people might be upset with the crater we left behind.
Jesus saves souls and redeems them for valuable cash prizes
I'm typing this right now, and sending to a web server on the Internet, a computer network which only exists because the US taxpayer financed the Pentagon, who in turn gave the money to military contractors like BBN, SRI and so forth.
That's what it is, and that's how it had to be. It's how Magnitogorsk was built in the USSR, how Volkswagen and the Autobahn were created in Germany, and how things like this happen here in the US and how they had to happen. There's some kind of emperor's new clothes things where people can't say the decades long creation of Internet was financed by the taxpayer via the government. I have heard so many US politicians talk about how the Internet was created by the "free market" (whatever that means), capitalism, private enterprise and so forth and how it shows the innovation that can come from that. Of course, we all know better, or at least those of us old enough to have owned 300 baud modems back in the early 1980s know that.
While we hear from the news commissars and politicians of how broke the US is, with a huge deficit, and how we have to cut back, notice how a massive military bill just sailed through Congress. Americans have to tighten their belt, and go with less garbage pickups, or shorter library hours, and that sort of thing, but there's plenty of money for military bases in Djibouti and Bulgaria and Kyrgyzstan. The US is spending a ton of money to ramp up the US military presence in the Pacific (shades of the late 1930s), on a new class of aircraft carriers and so forth. Meanwhile, all of this heavy duty equipment is completely useless against small cells of anti-imperial Arab nationalists that are willing to go on suicide missions.
How does a NATO meeting and a war in another country connect exactly with how the military handles movies? Could that have been stretched any further?
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
with the summary in the post, and I for one applaud it. How many times do we see posts about military tools / weapons / toys described without irony or critique - as if such things were normal and "OK"? People then post critiques in the comments, but this is dealing from a position of weakness - the assumption of the summary is the dominant discourse. It is a pleasure to finally see a summary state the obvious. While facts actually don't have a liberal bias, the contradictions of our present situation are such that statements of "fact" regarding the status quo become endorsements of the status quo. It is good to see the opposite for a change. And for those who don't like it, now you know what it feels like to be "on the other side".
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I've read somewhere that the military did not cooperate with the production because they found that the heroes were taking too much liberty with their (military) command represented by Nick Fury :
they were pictured too much as independent spirits.
To me it's silly to stray anywhere away from the very basic fact - any organization will be happy to contribute resources to efforts that make it look good.
Call it propaganda if you like, but it's really not that - it's common sense. True propaganda comes if the organization builds its own media (which the military does to some extent but they did not make Batlleship).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
C'mon really... STAR WARS !!! Yah nice one George, great title for a kids film! STOP WARS !!!!!!!!!!!!
It is two big American industries scratching each others backs. The average American young kid wont realise this until he gets back from his stint in Iraq, minus a limb.
Seriously... what the hell is this crap?
If you want to give us a story about how the military is supplying technical accuracies to Hollywood; that's fine. If you want to supply us a story about how a military that's set up to annihilate a real threat to America, can't defend against guerrilla tactics, that's fine. But this blatant soapboxing and political advocacy isn't why I come to slashdot. I come for news for nerds and other stuff that matters. Yes, I understand that CommanderTaco is gone. I get it. That doesn't mean this place has to degrade into people submitting summaries that are so biased neither MSNBC or Fox news would accept them.
Clearly, the DoD criteria for military movies don't include the movie making any sense. The U.S. Navy supported "Battleship".
A Navy vs. aliens movie might make sense. "Battleship" isn't it. (It does beat "The Navy vs. the Night Monsters" (1966), but it cost about 100x as much to make.) One based on a board game is an indication that Hollywood really is out of ideas. They've already done all the fairy tales (there are two Snow White movies this year), all the top-tier comic book characters, many of the second-tier comic book characters, and have made sequels to almost everything that ever turned a profit. ("Police Academy 8" is in development.)
Anyway, as usual, the war itself went great - it was the peace that was the problem.
I'm really curious as to how you define the situation in Afghanistan as "peace."
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I attended a Comic-Con panel last year where some of the military liaisons to Hollywood talked about their jobs. They were pretty open about having criteria for accepting a script. It's not clear to me why anyone would expect them to spend time and money helping filmmakers portray them in an unflattering light. The article does give a couple odd examples of rejected films (Independence Day?), but aside from that seems to make a mountain out of a molehill.
IIRC, the panelists said that the US military doesn't/can't support historical settings, which would limit this issue to movies that comment on current events.
Visit the
Anyway, as usual, the war itself went great - it was the peace that was the problem.
I'm really curious as to how you define the situation in Afghanistan as "peace."
It isn't obvious to you?
The way I saw it, he was talking about the reason why the situation in Afghanistan is so violent. If peace is the "problem" the violence is the "solution". That's the problem. In other words, the addictive part of war is that it is so good for the economy and the people who most influence the economy do not personally fight wars
The military-industrial complex needs enemies. If it does not have them, it will demand that they be found. If they cannot be found, they must be manufactured. Above all else it wants to perpetuate its existencen as a system, just as even the lowly virus tries to propagate itself. Indeed, the viruses that failed to propagate are unknown to us today, while the power structures that failed to propagate are unknown as well.
The truly shitty thing is that no one wins. It's a system that long ago assumed a life of its own, like a cancer. The masters and power-brokers who seem to have so much control are much greater slaves to it than those who can see what's wrong with it.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
The way I saw it, he was talking about the reason why the situation in Afghanistan is so violent.
I think you're giving him way too much credit.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
"Late Capitalism" -
-Maybe the poster invented some new form of human being that doesn't actually act in his own best interests. He could call him the "New Socialist Man".
(for any historical illiterates about to comment, the "New Socialist Man" was the name the Soviets constantly bandied about for the bumper crop of super citizens that were going to magically emerge from their slums and gulags sometime during the next 5 year plan.)
I've just finished and sent them a treatment for a movie where the Pentagon loses their Internet connection due to strike #6 and a joint task-force of generals decide do launch an unauthorized strike against the MPAA and RIAA headquarters. The strike is successful in the sense that the HQs are destroyed in a grandiose 3D spectacle, complete with a cheering angry street mob of "disconnects" equipped with pitchforks, but unbeknownst to them the top henchmen are away on an 'off-site' on the Bahamas.
The movie ends with a grand battle between WiFi-spying surveillance drones equipped with Hellfire missiles, black helicopters with BSA enforcers, squads of fake "home buyers", etc. against the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force.
I'm off, keeping an eye on my mailbox, expecting the approval letter soon!
I saw the movie TANK -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_(film) -- in the on-post movie theater at Ft. Hood, TX, which at the time was home to the world's largest concentration of tanks. And one of the most boring spots on this planet. Watching a theater full of young tank crew guys cheer this movie was a bit scary. How many of them would go back to their units and decide to take out a bar in Killeen (nearby town) where they'd been short-changed or something like that? Or maybe invade Mexico for the hell of it, an idea for which I actually drew up a battle plan and submitted it through the Army Suggestion Program, where it got all the way up to the Post Commander, who thought it was a fine idea and that it sounded like fun but didn't think the Pentagon or White House would approve.
Anyway, you can't really think about the cost of the military working with a film production company as a true cost. Aside from recruiting value, the military does lots of training-type stuff when a unit or ship isn't actively engaged in combat, and what the heck - they might as well make a movie while they're practicing carrier take offs and landings or clandestine insertions or whatever.
There are two countries you don't invade:
The Germans, the French, the British, etc. But did the USA learn ANYTHING from this? No. Stupid USA.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
It has been done before. For example Stargate SG1 was supported by the Air Force, and praised for the positive portrayal of the Air Force ("leave no man behind" etc.). This even lead to the lead actor Richard Dean Anderson (MacGyver) to become a honorary Air Force brigadier general. Two Air Force Chiefs of Staff, Generals Michael Ryan and John Jumper also appeared on the show.
Nothing new, move along.
The proper term would be nation-building. The problem with both Afghanistan and Iraq is that the period after the war was half-assed. Either we should have gone in and wrecked EVERYBODY remotely connected to our enemies in the area, then pulled out, or gone in as we did and then settled down for some SERIOUS nation-building. Which realistically takes a minimum of 20 years and a fuckload more resources than were put into either Afghanistan or Iraq.
The problem with both Afghanistan and Iraq is that the period after the war was half-assed.
The point is that talking about "after the war" is meaningless in Iraq and (particularly) Afghanistan. The war in Afghanistan is still going on, and the situation in Iraq is best described as a poorly enforced cease-fire.
Wars don't end when people say, "Hooray, the war is over!" They end when large bodies of armed men stop trying to kill each other. That hasn't happened in either place, and it won't for the foreseeable future.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The time for nation building in Afghanistan was at the end of the Cold War, back when America was seen as a liberator. Abandoning the country as soon as it stopped being a valuable short-term ally made the USA an easy target for negative propaganda. It looks like the rush to 'bring our boys home' is going to cause the same mistake to be repeated in Iraq...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
After I saw Battleship, I felt like going down to Mexican Town and blowing up some aliens.
The "understandable logic" is, the more alien wars the Pentagon wins on the big screen, the more omnipotent they look to average citizen. The American populace thinks winning wars is easy, and Oval Office louts are more likely to start foreign misadventures, justifying the gargantuan budget of the Pentagon juggernaut. Is consulting on movies really an appropriate use of your tax dollars? How much taxpayer money could be saved if the Pentagon were enjoined from spending their budget on such things?
Against the law? If anything it should be the law. Why should the military spend its time and money on projects which aren't relevant to recruitment or combat/training?
Because it's not "military money". It's "tax payer's money".
From a purely military perspective, you want severe propaganda, and censorship. You want information to be restricted. To the people at home, you give positive information about the military. And to those abroad (potential enemies), you show some muscle. Some Shock and Awe. That will give the best results from a purely military perspective.
However, the military still listens to the government (doesn't it?). And the government is interested in an open and free society (isn't it?). So, from that perspective, it would be necessary to have some opposition (right?). So, why not give that opposition some financial backing too?
As it was, the US defeated Japan but made a half-baked attempt to invade Europe, resulting in the Russian takeover and the Cold War. Nothing else was politically possible because, with Japan beaten, Eisenhower (and Montgomery) were not allowed high-casualty operations. This, as Max Hastings observes, is entirely correct because, if they had been, we wouldn't have been Western democracies any more.
Too many Slashdot readers don't understand that war is simply the sharp end of politics, and politics has many dimensions. Japan was a credible threat to the US West Coast and had to be stopped. People didn't see why a lot of people had to die to defeat a Germany that was losing anyway. In the same way, they can't see why (and nor can I) high casualties should be wasted on Afghanistan. The domino effect turned out to be a myth in Indo-China. Is it actually worth having you or your neighbour die in defence of your right to own SUVs versus small economical cars?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
(xi) You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and*industries.
(x) Your law is the law of the rich and wealthy people, who hold sway in their political parties, and fund their election campaigns with their gifts. Behind them stand the Jews, who control your policies, media and economy.
(xi) That which you are singled out for in the history of mankind, is that you have used your force to destroy mankind more than any other nation in history; not to defend principles and values, but to hasten to secure your interests and profits. You who dropped a nuclear bomb on Japan, even though Japan was ready to negotiate an end to the war. How many acts of oppression, tyranny and injustice have you carried out, O callers to freedom?
(xii) Let us not forget one of your major characteristics: your duality in both manners and values; your hypocrisy in manners and principles. All*manners, principles and values have two scales: one for you and one for the others.
(a)The freedom and democracy that you call to is for yourselves and for white race only; as for the rest of the world, you impose upon them your monstrous, destructive policies and Governments, which you call the 'American friends'. Yet you prevent them from establishing democracies. When the Islamic party in Algeria wanted to practice democracy and they won the election, you unleashed your agents in the Algerian army onto them, and to attack them with tanks and guns, to imprison them and torture them - a new lesson from the 'American book of democracy'!!!
(b)Your policy on prohibiting and forcibly removing weapons of mass destruction to ensure world peace: it only applies to those countries which you do not permit to possess such weapons. As for the countries you consent to, such as Israel, then they are allowed to keep and use such weapons to defend their security. Anyone else who you suspect might be manufacturing or keeping these kinds of weapons, you call them criminals and you take military action against them.
(c)You are the last ones to respect the resolutions and policies of International Law, yet you claim to want to selectively punish anyone else who does the same. Israel has for more than 50 years been pushing UN resolutions and rules against the wall with the full support of America.
(d)As for the war criminals which you censure and form criminal courts for - you shamelessly ask that your own are granted immunity!! However, history will not forget the war crimes that you committed against the Muslims and the rest of the world; those you have killed in Japan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Lebanon and Iraq will remain a shame that you will never be able to escape. It will suffice to remind you of your latest war crimes in Afghanistan, in which densely populated innocent civilian villages were destroyed, bombs were dropped on mosques causing the roof of the mosque to come crashing down on the heads of the Muslims praying inside. You are the ones who broke the agreement with the Mujahideen when they left Qunduz, bombing them in Jangi fort, and killing more than 1,000 of your prisoners through suffocation and thirst. Allah alone knows how many people have died by torture at the hands of you and your agents. Your planes remain in the Afghan skies, looking for anyone remotely suspicious.
(e)You have claimed to be the vanguards of Human Rights, and your Ministry of Foreign affairs issues annual reports containing statistics of those countries that violate any Human Rights. However, all these things vanished when the Mujahideen hit you, and you then implemented the methods of the same documented governments that you used to curse. In America, you captured thousands the Muslims and Arabs, took them into custody with neither reason, court trial, nor even disclosing their names. You issued newer, harsher laws.
What happens in Guatanamo is a historical embarrassm
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
I think this is true in general. I don't think any major war is now winnable. The sorts of tactics and strategy that won WWII (e.g. firebombing of Dresden, nuking of Hiroshima) would get a modern US president a war crimes trial.
Whoever has crashed a car at 40 Km/Hr or more, knows very well that the car can not keep going after such crash, however in Hollywood 'films', a car can have multiple crashes at extremely high speeds. In those same 'films' you can see people fighting for extended periods of time without showing exhaustion, which is not possible either. In short, Hollywood shows things that in the real world are not possible. The US army cannot win a war against a bunch of flea infected goat hoarders, but the US needs people to believe they are invincible. They are not. In the Hollywood fantasy, they are invincible. In Afghanistan, a bunch of flea infected goat hoarders keep them at bay. They don't dare to go on patrol without armoured vehicles with helicopter gunship escorts against, yes, flea infected goat hoarders.
the war itself went great - it was the peace that was the problem.
The invasion went great - it was the occupation that was problematic.
Occupation rarely works: It starts as a culture clash and ends as a dictatorship. The point of any occupation is to enforce the invader's economic model on the oppressed. In a feudal (Afghanistan) or lawless (Somalia) land, the population will agree to the theory of having a prosperous, civil country like the USA or the UK. But promoting your economic values means promoting what and how and when everything is monetized. This contradicts religion and tradition at some point and causes civil unrest. A different country will quickly refuse to be Americanized (for example). Soon, the invader replaces feel-good 'hearts and minds' charity with a gun-barrel.
Hey, Clue wasn't bad.
And I could see Hungry Hungry Hippos being an awesome SyFy movie-of-the-week.
The US Navy didn't help with Crimson Tide because of the mutiny plot point. So military technical help came from somewhere else.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimson_Tide_(film)#Production
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Maybe that's what they want.
Rihanna [pop star in her first lead movie role here] can make anything sexy - including militarism (also note the _Hard_ music video). This can be dangerous. :P
some of the assistance had to do with helping her and the other actors/actresses get in character.
Also, actual US Navy sailors were extras.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
"isn't winning in reality" .... trolling article is troll
have you even seen the movie? and i suppose Pirate of the Caribean was also crap because it was based on a theme park ride using moving puppets? i mean everyone just sits around the entire movie and calls out B4 E9 D10 and YYOU SUNK MY BATTLESHIP the whole time, just like In Pirates we take a slow ride around while puppets wave their arms at us?
What? You mean neither movie is like that at all?
You know, there's a big ass difference between inspired by and written-verbatim-as-whatever. If they called it Aliens vs Navy that would have better?
Face it. The big battleships, while not terribly relevant nowadays technologically ARE STILL and will always be seen at the baddest mofo's afloat. Theres just something about a ship with 9 to 12 giant guns hurtling shells the size of a VW bus miles away. Ever seen a battleship fire an entire salvo and actually slew sideways from it? Ever seen the hell it wreaks on a target? It's not something you'll ever forget. And it is awesome.
No its not shakespeare. But that doesnt mean its not entertaining.
Paraphrasing what I read somewhere: You can defeat an enemy with technology - air force, long-range attacks, etc. But to conquer a country, you have to occupy it. That requires boots on the ground.
The evidence seems to bear that out. Based on that premise, the only people who have a chance of conquering the Middle East are the Chinese and the Indians.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
The poster is trolling on a lot of levels. Late capitalism?
Anyway, as usual, the war itself went great - it was the peace that was the problem.
late capitalism is a standard phrase of Marxist rhetoric - you may not agree with it (because you probably think capitalism is far from done) but that doesn't automatically make it a troll.
"...If the most powerful armed force in history isn't winning in reality, it certainly is on the big screen..."
That makes sense. Because US foreign policy is certainly derived from Hollywood plots....
It's funny how the US thinks they're going to waltz in and shut down a conflict that has been going on for as long as people have lived. Really all they're doing is stroking the clitoris of conflict. You can't stop conflict in a culture where misogyny and racism are limbic functions.
The G8 was at Camp David, Nato was in Chicago. How can someone get these simple facts wrong considering the amount of media coverage.
To try and have a reasonable discussion with Osama bin Laden.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"