Green Zone directed by Paul Greengrass
Ari Gold couldn’t have cut a cannier deal: Universal Pictures gets to say the movie was “inspired by” a critically acclaimed piece of journalism, and Random House gets to put a picture of Matt Damon on the book jacket. But of course this synergistic flimflam hardly compares with the political flimflam that led the U.S. into a disgraceful war, establishing a precedent for preemptive invasion and killing at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians. To read Imperial Life in the Emerald City is to be infuriated all over again by the Bush administration’s arrogance, incompetence, and partisanship. The book opens with “Versailles on the Tigris,” a priceless sketch of the good life inside the fortified gates of the Coalition Provisional Authority’s Green Zone. Inside this cultural bubble, Republican appointees shopped, sunned themselves by the pool, and enjoyed CPA-sponsored movies, workout gyms, dance classes, and other entertainments, largely oblivious to the suffering outside the zone’s 17-foot concrete walls. As portrayed by Chandrasekaran, the place was an incubator for blind ideology, wishful thinking, and foolhardy decisions and a perfect metaphor for the neocon fantasy of transplanting capitalist democracy to Iraq.
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No one could reasonably have expected Helgeland to turn Imperial Life in the Emerald City into an action thriller, but the farther Green Zone strays from fact into fiction, the more silly and generic it becomes. Lawrie Dayne is an obvious stand-in for Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter whose flimsily sourced stories helped sell the U.S. invasion to the public. (Moving her from the liberal Times to the conservative Journal is an indefensible partisan foul.) Miller’s primary sources were later revealed to be the discredited Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi and other members of his government-in-waiting, the Iraqi National Congress. Green Zone has a stand-in for Chalabi as well—a dapper politician called Ahmed Zubaidi—but makes no connection between him and Dayne. That would obviate the need for Damon to go rogue in a daring nighttime mission to bring in General Al-Rawi, presented here as “the one man” who can prevent Iraq from sliding into civil war.
