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This is not a Wikipedia article. This is only a personal first rough draft of American Sniper (film) controversies

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The 2014 film American Sniper, directed by Clint Eastwood, has been criticized by ex-soldiers, film directors, academics, investigative journalists, authors and other scholars, media figures, political figures, and watchdog groups for its inaccuracies and misleading portrayal of US Navy Seal Chris Kyle.

The controversies involve political, historical, social, cultural, philosophical, ethical, moral, religious, racial/ethnic and other aspects of society.

Criticism of political, historical, social, cultural, philosophical, moral, ethical, religious, racial and ethnic aspects of the film

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee said that the release of the movie coincided with increased threats against Arabs and Muslims. It has also accused Eastwood of dishonestly linking the September 11 attacks with Iraq.

Michael Moore tweeted, in response to American Sniper, "My uncle [was] killed by [a] sniper in WW2. We were taught snipers were cowards. Will shoot you in the back. Snipers aren't heroes. And invaders are worse." [sic]

Noam Chomsky criticized "what the worship of a movie about a cold-blooded killer says about the American people."

Lindy West of The Guardian wrote: "In his memoir, Kyle reportedly described killing as “fun”, something he “loved”; he was unwavering in his belief that everyone he shot was a “bad guy”. “I hate the damn savages,” he wrote. “I couldn’t give a flying fuck about the Iraqis.”" and: "If he (Eastwood), intentionally or not, makes a hero out of Kyle – who, bare minimum, was a racist who took pleasure in dehumanising and killing brown people – is he responsible for validating racism, murder, and dehumanisation? Is he a propagandist if people use his work as propaganda?"

Zack Beauchamp of Vox felt that the film's greatest sin was condescending "to Americans and American troops by acting as if we could not possibly handle moral ambiguity about America's mission in Iraq. But it did, and that is a disservice not just to film's viewers, but to the millions of Americans who were affected by the war and deserve to have that story told honestly."

John Wight, writing for Russia Today and CounterPunch, strongly criticized the film and its reception. He said, "The moral depravity into which the US is sinking is shown by American Sniper glorifying the exploits of a racist killer receiving six Oscar nominations, whereas Selma depicting Martin Luther King's struggle against racism has been largely ignored." He also wrote: "American Sniper and Selma each offer a different perspective of America and US society. The former depicts the war in Iraq via the prism of US exceptionalism, a ‘window’ inviting its audience to participate or collude in a revisionist history in which the Iraqis are portrayed as a barbaric horde and the US troops as patriots trying to bring civilization and democracy to an ungrateful populace. Selma, meanwhile, holds a ‘mirror’ up to the ugly truth of America’s past, a recent past whose wounds remain open."

Matt Taibbi wrote that "Sniper is a movie whose politics are so ludicrous and idiotic that under normal circumstances it would be beneath criticism" and that "Eastwood plays for cheap applause and goes super-dumb even by Hollywood standards."

Chris Hedges, in an article titled "Killing Ragheads for Jesus", wrote that "American Sniper lionizes the most despicable aspects of U.S. society—the gun culture, the blind adoration of the military, the belief that we have an innate right as a 'Christian' nation to exterminate the 'lesser breeds' of the earth, a grotesque hypermasculinity that banishes compassion and pity, a denial of inconvenient facts and historical truth, and a belittling of critical thinking and artistic expression. Many Americans, especially white Americans trapped in a stagnant economy and a dysfunctional political system, yearn for the supposed moral renewal and rigid, militarized control the movie venerates."

Zaid Jilani attacked American Sniper's inaccuracies, arguing both the film and Kyle's reputation "are all built on a set of half-truths, myths and outright lies." He first criticized Eastwood's direction of a sequence in which Kyle is serving in Iraq right after he is shown watching news footage of the September 11 attacks, suggesting the Iraq War was in direct response to the attacks. Jilani also argued the film glossed over certain fabrications in Kyle's autobiography, including the claims most of the book's proceeds would go to veterans' charity and that Kyle had killed 30 people in post-Katrina New Orleans. Jilani focused the most, however, on the film's portrayal of Kyle as a man tormented by and remorseful for his actions, writing such torment is "completely absent from the book the film is based on," quoting passages from Kyle's autobiography in which Kyle wrote he enjoyed his occupation and would have killed more people.

Max Blumenthal compared decorated Navy SEAL Chris Kyle to mass murderer Lee Malvo via Twitter, and in an interview on The Real News, criticized the film American Sniper, saying the movie heavily distorts the historical, political and social truth of the war on Iraq, that the film falsely portrays all Iraqis including even children and women as "endemic terrorists." He added the film is "filled with lies and distortion from start to finish," makes a hero out of "a pathological liar and a mass killer" and promotes falsehoods about Chris Kyle along with the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. Blumenthal said the film is a "bogus whitewash of the atrocities committed by American troops in Iraq."

Seth Rogen tweeted that the film reminded him of the Nazi sniper propaganda movie showing in the third act of Quentin Tarantino's 2009 film Inglourious Basterds. After Rogen was accused of criticizing the film, he stated that he was not criticizing the film but making a comparison.

Sophia A. McClennen, a Professor of International Affairs and Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University, said there are "insanities and fantasies at the heart of" American Sniper and that "despite the fact that the film depicts Kyle as a hero and a martyr, the real American sniper was heartless and cruel. Rather than struggle with moral dilemmas as we see in the film, the actual man had no such hesitation and no such conscience. But to focus on American Sniper's depiction of Kyle is to miss the larger problems of the film. In addition to sugarcoating Kyle, the film suffers from major myopia — from a complete inability to see the larger picture. And that is why criticism of the film has to look at its director, Clint Eastwood, and the troubling ways he represents a dark, disturbing feature of the GOP mind-set."

Ross Caputi, a former marine who participated in the US's second siege of Fallujah, criticized American Sniper, writing that "What American Sniper offers us — more than a heart-wrenching tale about Chris Kyle's struggle to be a soldier, a husband, and a father; more than an action packed story about America's most lethal sniper — is an exposure of the often hidden side of American war culture. The criminality that has characterized American military engagements since the American Indian Wars, and most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan, is hardly noticeable in this film."

Comedian Bill Maher stated "He's a psychopath patriot, and we love him," and "'I hate the damn savages' doesn't seem like a very Christian thing to say," comparing Kyle disfavourably to anti-war general Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Journalist Eamon Murphy wrote on Mondoweiss that "it's hard to know, when watching Eastwood's Iraq War, where doltish film conventions end and rotten politics begins. (Bushism was an awful lot like an idiotic blockbuster in the first place.) The bits of military exposition are outrageously at odds with the facts, but they also sound so hokey it seems almost stupid to object by citing reality."

Peter Maass wrote the film "ignores history" and that the film makes no attempt to provide "anything beyond Kyle’s limited comprehension of what was happening." He added that the movie is "utterly false to the experience of millions of Iraqis and to the historical record. Further, it’s no act of patriotism to celebrate, without context or discussion, a grunt’s view that the people killed in Iraq were animals deserving their six-feet-under fate." Maass also wrote public statements made by Bradley Cooper, the film’s star and co-producer, appear to show Cooper may "fail to understand how war movies operate in popular culture. When a film venerates an American sniper but portrays as sub-human the Iraqis whose country we were occupying—the film has one Iraqi who seems sympathetic but turns out to be hiding a cache of insurgent weapons—it conveys a political message that is flat wrong. Among other things, it ignores and dishonors the scores of thousands of Iraqis who fought alongside American forces and the hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians who were killed or injured in the crossfire." Maass added, "While it is about a certain type of bravery, the film itself is not brave."

Dan Sanchez wrote: "The most harrowing scene in American Sniper involves an Iraqi character nicknamed “The Butcher” torturing and executing an Iraqi child by taking a power drill to his skull. The scene lends credibility to the narrative of Chris Kyle as basically a hero facing villains. In the film, “The Butcher” is a lieutenant of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Sunni insurgent, terrorist, and founder of Al Qaeda in Iraq, which later became ISIS. However, in the Iraq of the real world, power drilling human heads is more of a predilection, not of Sunni insurgents, but of their enemies in the Shiite militias." ... "Both of these Iran-sponsored real-life head-drilling “butchers” of Iraq rose to power thanks to the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, and are now commanding forces either in the US-backed Iraqi government, or under its protection, fighting alongside the US military against the now ISIS-lead Sunni insurgency. At the end of the day, the American Sniper was not the enemy of the Iraqi Butchers, but their benefactor.   As radio host Scott Horton never tires reminding his listeners, the chief role of the American troops in Iraq was to fight a bloody civil war on behalf of the Shiite side and to install Iran-backed Shiite militias in power. These militias used death squads to ethnically cleanse Baghdad and other cities of Sunnis, and, as Will Grigg never tires reminding his readers, imposed a Sharia-compliant constitution over a once-secular country. This Shiite jihad was, in effect, Chris Kyle’s true mission, for which millions of American Christians now lionize him."

Another article by Dan Sanchez: "“There are four types of people who join the military. For some, it’s a family trade. Others are patriots, eager to serve. Next you have those who just need a job. Then there’s the kind who want a legal means of killing other people.” – The title character of the 2012 movie Jack Reacher, played by Tom Cruise. (photo: Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher, listing the "four types" to Rosamund Pike's Helen Rodin.) As for the fourth type, Reacher was referring to another character in the film, an American sniper prosecuted for murders both in Iraq and the US. Jack Reacher's "American Sniper": James Barr, played by Joseph Sikora. Judging from Kyle’s own words, this character is a much more accurate portrayal of Chris Kyle’s psyche than the one created by Clint Eastwood and Bradley Cooper. “But after you kill your enemy, you see it’s okay. You say, Great. You do it again. And again. (…) I loved what I did. I still do. If circumstances were different–if my family didn’t need me–I’d be back in a heartbeat. I’m not lying or exaggerating to say it was fun.” – Chris Kyle, American Sniper. Here’s an idea: Clint Eastwood could make American Sniper the first movie in a trilogy about heroes who gleefully murder people in other countries from a safe distance. Next up: “American Drone Operator” and “American Neocon Laptop Bombardier.” American Drone Operator, Scene 1: Bradley Cooper into a cellphone: “I’m ready to come home baby!” Sienna Miller: “Okay… then come home.” Cooper steps out into a parking lot in Indian Springs, Nevada. In a sane and moral world, it wouldn’t be American Sniper raking in tens of millions, but Citizenfour. (Photos of Edward Snowden and Chris Kyle: “one of these men risked his life to help protect your freedom. The other is Chris Kyle.”) Finally, be sure to watch for comparison the Nazi version of American Sniper (the one controversially referenced by Seth Rogen), this film-within-a-film from Inglorious Basterds:" link

Journalist and author Robert Fisk, who reported on several wars and armed conflicts, tweeted that American Sniper is "rubbish."

Adam K. Raymond wrote about "5 Things American Sniper’s Chris Kyle Allegedly Lied About."

Brock McIntosh, an ex-soldier, commended Chris Kyle for telling his story in his book. McIntosh wrote that “American Sniper” is "rife with lies" and that the movie is "as fictional as Buffy Summers." He also wrote: "... Americans were responsible for thousands of Iraqi deaths and almost none were held accountable." ... "So enough about Chris Kyle. Let’s talk about [Bradley] Cooper and [screenwriter Jason] Hall, and the culture industry that recycles propagandistic fiction under the guise of a “true story.” And let’s focus our anger and our organizing against the authorities and the institutions that craft the lies that the Chris Kyles of the world believe, that have created a trail of blowback leading from dumb war to dumb war ... "

Robert Fantina wrote American Sniper "glorifies the life of a mass murderer. It has long been a fact of U.S. life that murder when committed in uniform is somehow noble, and the perpetrator heroic. And today, it is all the more glorious if the victims happen to wear hijabs and kufeyahs. So violence and terrorism against Muslims, or any Arab for that matter, receives nothing but silence from the United States. A few incidents are instructive ..."

Louis Proyect wrote that “American Sniper” "is a film that turns history on its head" ... "[The documentary film] Same Same but Different ... can be seen now on Vimeo for free. For those who want to get an idea of what a real American hero is about, this 54-minute documentary is the best place to start. It allows Vietnam War veterans to describe their experiences as foreign invaders committed to Cold War verities and then being transformed into opponents of the war. What gives the film added poignancy are the Deep South origins of most of the subjects who unlike the Texas sniper Chris Kyle were able to break with a racist and militarist culture and become true American heroes." ... "Another really good old boy is Suel Jones from East Texas who served with the Marines in the DMZ, an area drenched with Agent Orange and that left American GI’s, their Vietnamese “enemies”, and noncombatants exposed to the dioxin that often destroyed their health and that of the children they brought into the world. Jones went back to Vietnam and worked with the Friendship Village that serves the needs of its victims. Jones is the author of “Meeting the Enemy: A Marine Returns Home”, a memoir that deserves to be read more than ever in a time when Chris Kyle’s “American Sniper” prepares the groundwork for the next generation of young Americans fighting to make the world safe for American corporations and unsafe for those who get in their way."

Peter Van Buren criticized American Sniper in an article titled "War Porn -- Hollywood and War from World War II to American Sniper."

Paul Street criticized American Sniper in an article titled "More Than Entertainment -- Hollywood’s Service to Empire."

(An article from 2004, referenced by Janet Weil above.) Journalist Dahr Jamail in his direct report from Fallujah on American snipers "Slaughtering Civilians in Fallujah:" "... the Americans bombed one of the hospitals, and were currently sniping people as they attempted to enter/exit the main hospital ... " (photo caption: "Iraqi woman wounded in the neck by an American sniper. Doctors predicted the wound would be fatal.") ... " As I was there, an endless stream of women and children who'd been sniped by the Americans were being raced into the dirty clinic, the cars speeding over the curb out front as their wailing family members carried them in. One woman and small child had been shot through the neck – the woman was making breathy gurgling noises as the doctors frantically worked on her amongst her muffled moaning. The small child, his eyes glazed and staring into space, continually vomited as the doctors raced to save his life. After 30 minutes, it appeared as though neither of them would survive. One victim of American aggression after another was brought into the clinic, nearly all of them women and children. This scene continued, off and on, into the night as the sniping continued." ... "One small boy of 11, his face covered by a kefir and toting around a Kalashnikov that was nearly as big as he was, patrolled areas around the clinic, making sure they were secure. He was confident and very eager for battle. I wondered how the U.S. soldiers would feel about fighting an 11 year-old child? For the next day, on the way out of Falluja, I saw several groups of children fighting as mujahedeen." ... "Although the ambulance already had three bullet holes from a U.S. sniper through the front windshield on the driver's side, having westerners on board was the only hope that soldiers would allow them to retrieve more wounded Iraqis. The previous driver was wounded when one of the sniper's shots grazed his head. Bombs were heard sporadically exploding around the city, along with random gunfire. It grew dark, so we ended up spending the night with one of the local men who had filmed the atrocities. He showed us footage of a dead baby who he claimed was torn from his mother's chest by Marines. Other horrendous footage of slain Iraqis was shown to us as well." ... "One of the bodies they brought to the clinic was that of an old man who was shot by a sniper outside of his home, while his wife and children sat wailing inside. The family couldn't reach his body, for fear of being sniped by the Americans themselves. His stiff body was carried into the clinic with flies swarming above it." ... "What I can report from Falluja is that there is no ceasefire, and apparently there never was. Iraqi women and children are being shot by American snipers. Over 600 Iraqis have now been killed by American aggression, and the residents have turned two football fields into graveyards. Ambulances are being shot by the Americans. And now they are preparing to launch a full-scale invasion of the city. All of which is occurring under the guise of catching the people who killed the four Blackwater Security personnel and hung two of their bodies from a bridge." Photo caption: "Young Iraqi boy shot in the neck by a U.S. sniper in Falluja."

Objectifying Iraqis, and presenting children as legitimate targets

Janet Weil, a military family member, wrote "And what about the locals? In his brilliant analysis in Reel Bad Arabs, Professor Jack Shaheen gives a sort of taxonomy of Arab male types in popular films — the evil Arab, the silly/horny Arab, the primitive Arab, and the nervous/arrogant Arab. With the exception of the “primitive” type with camels, these stereotypes are on display in “American Sniper,” plus a couple of others I would name “Pitiful Father” and “Kid as Target.” The presentation of children as potential or actual evildoers, and thus “deserving” victims of Kyle’s kill shots, seems to me a sinister new development in American film." ... "The Iraqis that Kyle kills lie flat, literally and metaphorically, like images in a video game, and we hear no one weep for them (with the exception of “The Sheikh,” whose screaming daughter runs to his corpse). One scene briefly shows dogs eating Iraqi corpses. The American dead, by contrast, are pulled at great risk from the battleground, wept over, accompanied in their flag-covered coffins in flights home, and laid to rest in magnificent ceremonies, remembered. The American dead were persons, and they count. The Iraqi dead were objects in a sniper’s scope, and they are counted. That in a nutshell is the message of “American Sniper.”" ... "And the boy in Fallujah with the RPG in his arms? Kyle kills him, and the woman with him. We as audience are asked to ... empathize, not with the boy in the devastated street, but with a “tormented” man becoming a hardened killer, who calls Iraqis “savages” in several scenes." Weil said the movie portrays snipers as protectors, and invaders as "The Good Guys," and that Iraqi children are portrayed as "legitimate targets" ... She further wrote: "I left the movie theater with ... a heavy heart, and the feeling that this is a very dangerous film."

Lorraine Ali, who has lost family in Baghdad, lamented American Sniper’s’ discounting of Iraqi lives. She wrote: "... But the bigger problem here is that the Iraqis in Eastwood’s production are mere props, grizzled monsters who torture children with drills, swarthy insurgents who proliferate like cockroaches, bumbling, hapless victims who can barely string a sentence together let alone protect themselves. Their foreign “chatter” (harshly spoken Arabic) is alienating, and their values are not like ours. Would you send your child to his death in the name of blowing up convoys or hide a cache of weapons under his bed? The Iraqis here do. Plus, their faith is downright spooky. In “American Sniper” the call to prayer — a sound more commonplace than car alarms in the Muslim world — is foreboding, shorthand for bad things to come. By the time our on-screen hero refers to the Iraqis as “savages,” the film has already made that point about 10 times over. If all of “American Sniper” were this lunkheaded, then the fact that its Arabs can’t even sip tea without looking like Satan’s henchmen could be passed off as an expected part of one more ham-fisted war movie. But given the care the film takes in depicting Kyle’s own struggles with PTSD, his moral conundrums on the battlefield and his complicated life as a husband and father, the dehumanization appears more a plot strategy than an oversight. Just as the evil-versus-good narrative helped sell the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, it’s also helped sell “American Sniper.” The film broke box-office records ... Finally, a success story stemming from the Iraq war."

Alexander Reid Ross wrote that "Movies like American Sniper ... promote the dehumanization of Muslims (especially Arabs), fan the flames of racial and religious hatred, extending beyond hateful epithets to admitted desires to murder Arabs. The killing of three Muslims in Chapel Hill is immediately related to the racial and religious aspects of white culture in the US, and the inability of the left to effectively respond."

Propagating the "trauma hero myth"

Roy Scranton, who served in the US Army in Iraq from 2002-2006, analyzed the film in the Los Angeles Review of Books, and criticized the political, historical, social, ethnic and racial aspects of the film. He said the film stereotyped and objectified Iraqis. He further wrote: ... "The trauma hero myth also serves a scapegoat function, discharging national bloodguilt by substituting the victim of trauma, the soldier, for the victim of violence, the enemy." ... "Never mind the tired Vietnam-era trope of the bomb-wielding child, a fiction that Eastwood grafted onto Kyle’s less sensational autobiographical account of shooting a woman." ... "the film obviates the questions of why any American soldiers were in Iraq, why they stayed there for eight years, why they had to kill thousands upon thousands of Iraqi civilians, and how we are to understand the long and ongoing bloodbath once called the “war on terror.” It does that precisely by turning a killer into a victim, a war hero into a trauma hero." ... "Yet when the trauma hero myth is taken as representing the ultimate truth of more than a decade of global aggression, as with American Sniper, we allow the psychological suffering endured by those we sent to kill for us displace and erase the innocents killed in our name. ... the real victims of American political violence disappear under a load of shit." "... American Sniper may portray a loss of innocence that makes the dirty war in Iraq palatable as an individual tragedy, but [it] only do[es] so by obscuring the connection between American audiences and the millions of Iraqi lives destroyed or shattered since 2003. Focusing on the suffering of ... Kyle allows us to forget the suffering of the very people whose land was occupied in our name. " "But the failure does not belong to the writers. It belongs to all the readers and citizens who expect veterans to play out for them the ritual fort-da of trauma and recovery, and to carry for them the collective guilt of war.   Such an expectation is the privilege of those who can afford to have others do their killing for them. Off-loading the problem of war onto the figure of the traumatized veteran, however, has long-term costs we have yet to reckon. The imperative to see war clearly is persistent, and as urgent today as ever ... Understanding the problem of American political violence demands recognizing soldiers as agents of national power, and understanding what kind of work the trauma hero is doing when he comes bearing witness in his bloody fatigues."

Attending to the insecurities of race, gender, and empire

Political scientist Joseph Lowndes wrote that "American Sniper need not directly claim a link between 9/11 and Iraq, it need not subscribe to Chris Kyle’s claim that Iraqis are “savage” and “evil.” One could easily read both as meant to convey the narrow, provincial perception of the protagonist. It need not even endorse any American presence in the Middle East at all. American Sniper dispenses with conventional politics to portray the raw, emotional core of white vulnerability. James Baldwin once wrote that the monstrous violence visited by white Americans on the world is due to this people having opted for safety over life. American Sniper, attending to the triple insecurities of race, gender, and empire, serves as an exclamation point to that observation."

Overly simplistic portrayal of Iraq

Janet Weil wrote "The violent battle scenes had, for me, a tedious inevitability that kept me from being pulled in emotionally. What hurt me the most ... was my sense of Iraq being used as backdrop. It’s reduced to a hot, dirty place that “smells like dog shit,” as one Marine says in the opening scene. “This place is evil,” Kyle’s psychologically shattered younger brother, a fellow veteran, tells him as he departs the country. One war-blasted city looks much like another, almost as if a painted stage backdrop representing “Urban War Scene” were just hauled from one scene to the next." ... "Iraq is [portrayed as] battleground and backdrop for American deeds and emotions — nothing more."

Misapplication of Christian values

Gary Legum wrote that right-wing Christians who think American Sniper embodies Christian values use patriarchal language to defend Chris Kyle in the “clash of civilizations.” Legum further wrote that "... Chris Kyle ... embodied the fanatical, driven purpose of those 10th-century Christians who invaded the Holy Lands and saw slaughtering Muslims by the thousands as their God-given duty. In his autobiography upon which Clint Eastwood’s hit film is based, the self-professed Christian, who had tattooed the Crusader’s red cross on his arm, referred to the Iraqis he was paid to shoot as “savages” and a “savage, despicable evil” who all “deserved to die.” ... Kyle ... or any other militant Christian, can pick and choose whichever passage from the New Testament justifies his own desire to kill for Jesus. Unfortunately it’s us non-believers who still have to live in the world they make."

The film serving as war propaganda

Janet Weil wrote that ""American Sniper" is well acted, slickly produced, and occasionally gripping. It's also war propaganda." She wrote that "Al-Qaeda in Iraq ... is mentioned frequently throughout the film, without one line of dialogue as to how al-Qaeda had penetrated Iraq following the U.S. invasion." ... "How Chris Kyle and hundreds of thousands of other, mostly young Americans came to invade and occupy, wound and be wounded, kill and be killed in Iraq — for what politics, for whose profits — cannot be touched upon in American Sniper. Because to do so would be to move the narrative away from the isolated, tragic white male — that hoary old trope of Western Civ[ilization] — toward something more politically and historically informed, and much less of a money maker." ... "In war propaganda — a huge genre in which American Sniper stands as a well-acted, high-production example — fictional narratives borrow just enough from true-life stories to reinforce already established memes. Cowboy, family man, Navy SEAL, sniper, trainer, author, veteran, celebrity, murderer, and eventually a murder victim of another tormented combat veteran — Chris Kyle was a mystery. American Sniper portrays the life of a flawed “hero” who is also a blank slate on which other Americans can project rage, hatred, and ignorant misconceptions about Iraqis and other Arabs, as well as their — our — many conflicted feelings about war, “the troops,” and veterans."

Criticism of media coverage of the film

Noam Chomsky criticized American Sniper and the media that glorified it. He drew a parallel between Sniper and the US "global assassination campaign, the drone campaign, which officially is aimed at murdering people who are suspected of maybe someday planning to harm us."

Popular/cultural evaluation

Sheldon Richman commented on the popular/cultural evaluation of Kyle: "Despite what some people think, hero is not a synonym for competent government-hired killer." Richman said if American Sniper launches a frank public conversation about war and heroism, Eastwood will have performed a "badly needed" service. Richman added: "Jeanine Pirro, a Fox News commentator, said, “Chris Kyle was clear as to who the enemy was. They were the ones his government sent him to kill.” Appalling! Kyle was a hero because he eagerly and expertly killed whomever the government told him to kill? Conservatives, supposed advocates of limited government, sure have an odd notion of heroism. Excuse me, but I have trouble seeing an essential difference between what Kyle did in Iraq and what Adam Lanza did at Sandy Hook Elementary School. It certainly was not heroism."

Film historian Max Alvarez, in an article titled From Psychopaths to American Hero? A Short History of Sniper Cinema, expressed the hope that "American Sniper will not set the tone for future Hollywood movies in which “sharpshooters” are portrayed heroically."

Max Blumenthal stated that the film distorts the truth, including that during Chris Kyle’s first tour in Iraq in 2003, there was no al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia; that locally based resistance fighters were portrayed as foreign fighters with international ambitions to kill Americans. He also considered the movie to have turned into a vehicle for ongoing Islamophobia-inspiring culture wars, which taken together inspire hatred and incite violence against Muslims and Arabs, as exemplified by the trend, following the release of the film, of extreme threats through social media.

Paul Edwards wrote that American Sniper displays "baldly ridiculous ideas long universally discredited, and a politics rooted in deep, indomitable ignorance and a form of stupidity that prides itself on denial of irrefutable reality." He also wrote the film displays "the sleazy depravity of a mind that can craft a mawkish, fawning tribute to a diseased serial killer from a biography in which the killer himself spells out in appalling detail his own disgusting sickness.   So much has been written about this paean to a subhuman monster -– much of it on whether or not it is moral and heroic to murder people wholesale for flag and country -– that the only truly important thing about its success has not been articulated. That is the grossly ugly fact that such a huge number of Americans jubilantly support this morally dirty film and its message.   Of course, an audience that embraces films featuring all kinds of vicious, repulsive, sadistic murderers -– cannibals, necrophiles, zombies, vampires -- can be expected to flock to any flick that promises to satisfy its craving, and promotion for American Sniper puts it right in their wheelhouse.   What is profoundly disturbing culturally but should not be surprising is that, unlike goofy trash about chainsaw maniacs, anthropophagous esthetes, and midnight bloodsuckers, American Sniper glorifies a real self-confessed serial murderer, and its supporters don’t care. It makes no distinction, that is, between imbecile fantasy and appalling truth. The fact that the “hero” and much of his story was real only enhances his glamour in their eyes.   What gives the film its fierce attractive power for them is that the relentless propaganda of “the Global War on Terror” has imbued them with the same hateful, furious, kneejerk, Nazi-style “patriotism” that Kyle embodied.   As long as the tag-team of our “news” media and the Hollywood War Porn industry continues, the fan base for U.S. military ubermensch horror films will grow. As Germany learned in the deadly 1930s, there is nothing quite so dangerous to a nation’s liberty as a furious, stupid, violence-addicted, enemy-fixated underclass."

Henry Giroux compared and contrasted the films Citizenfour, Selma and American Sniper. He wrote: "America’s addiction to violence is partly evident in the heroes it chooses to glorify. Within the last month three films appeared that offer role models to young people while legitimating particular notions of civic courage, patriotism, and a broader understanding of injustice. Citizenfour is a deeply moving film about whistleblower Edward Snowden and his admirable willingness to sacrifice his life in order to reveal the dangerous workings of an authoritarian surveillance state. It also points to the role of journalists working in the alternative media who refuse to become embedded within the safe parameters of established powers and the death-dealing war-surveillance machine in legitimates. Snowden comes across as a remarkable young man who shines like a bright meteor racing across the darkness. Truly, the best of what America has to offer given his selflessness, moral integrity, and fierce commitment not only to renounce injustice but to do something about it. Selma offers an acute and much needed exercise in pubic memory offering a piece of history into the civil rights movement that not only reveals the moral and civic courage of Martin Luther King Jr. in his fight against racism but the courage and deep ethical and political americas-ed-deficit-300x449commitments of a range of incredibly brave men and women unwilling to live in a racist society and willing to put their bodies against the death dealing machine of racism in order to bring it to a halt. Selma reveals a racist poison at the heart of American history and offers up not only a much needed form of moral witnessing, but also a politics that serves as a counterpoint to the weak and compromising model of racial politics offered by the Obama administration. The third film to hit American theaters at about the same time as the other two is American Sniper, a war film about a young man who serves as a model for a kind of unthinking patriotism and defense of an indefensible war. Even worse, Chris Kyle himself, the hero of the film, is a Navy Seal who at the end of four tours of duty in Iraq held the “honor” of killing more than 160 people. Out of that experience, he authored an autobiographical book that bears a problematic relationship to the film. For some critics, Kyle is a decent guy caught up in a war he was not prepared for, a war that strained his marriage and later became representative of a narrative only too familiar for many vets who suffered a great deal of anguish and mental stress as a result of their war time experiences. This is a made for CNN narrative that is only partly true. A more realistic narrative and certainly one that has turned the film into a Hollywood blockbuster is that Kyle is portrayed as an unstoppable and unapologetic killing machine, a sniper who was proud of his exploits. Kyle models the American Empire at its worse. This is an empire steeped in extreme violence, willing to trample over any country in the name of the war on terrorism, and leaves in its path massive amounts of misery, suffering, dislocation, and hardship. Of the three films, Citizenfour and Selma invoke the courage of men and women who oppose the violence of the state in the interest of two different forms of lawlessness, one marked by a brutalizing racism and the other marked by a suffocating practice of surveillance. American Sniper is a film that erases history, spectacularizes violence, and reduces war and its aftermath to cheap entertainment, with an under explained referent to the mental problems many vets live with when they return home from the war. In this case the aftermath of war becomes the main narrative, a diversionary tacit and story that erases any attempt to understand the lies, violence, corruption, and misdeeds that caused the war in the first place. Moreover, the film evokes sympathy not for its millions of victims but exclusively for those largely poor youth who have to carry the burden of war for the dishonest politicians who send them often into war zones that should never have existed in the first place. Amy Nelson at Slate gets it right in stating that “American Sniper convinces viewers that Chris Kyle is what heroism looks like: a great guy who shoots a lot of people and doesn’t think twice about it.” Citizenfour and Selma made little money, were largely ignored by the public, and all but disappeared except for some paltry acknowledgements by the film industry. American Sniper is the most successful grossing war film of all time. Selma will be mentioned in the history books but will not get the attention it really deserves for the relevance it should have for a new generation of youth. There will be no mention in the history books regarding the importance of Edward Snowden because his story not only instructs a larger public but indicts the myth of American democracy. Yet, American Sniper resembles a familiar narrative of false heroism and state violence for which thousands of pages will be written as part of history texts that will provide the pedagogical context for imposing on young people a mode of hyper-masculinity built on the false notion that violence is a sacred value and that war is an honorable ideal and the ultimate test of what it means to be a man."   "The stories a society tells about itself are a measure of how it values itself, the ideals of democracy, and its future. The stories that Hollywood tells represent a particularly powerful form of public pedagogy that is integral to how people imagine life, themselves, relations to others, and what it might mean to think otherwise in order to act otherwise. In this case, stories and the communal bonds that support them in their differences become integral to how people value life, social relations, and visions of the future. American Sniper tells a disturbing story codified as a disturbing truth and normalized through an entertainment industry that thrives on the spectacle of violence, one that is deeply indebted to the militarization of everyday life. Courage in the morally paralyzing lexicon of a stupefied appeal to patriotism has become an extension of a gun culture both at home and abroad. This is a culture of hyped-up masculinity and cruelty that is symptomatic of a kind of mad violence and unchecked misery that is both a by-product of and sustains the fog of historical amnesia, militarism, and the death of democracy itself. Maybe the spectacular success of American Sniper over the other two films should not be surprising in a country in which the new normal for giving out honorary degrees and anointing a new generation of heroes goes to billionaires such as Bill Gates, Jamie Dimon, Oprah Winfrey, and other leaders of the corrupt institutions and bankrupt celebrity culture that now are driving the world into political, economic, and moral bankruptcy, made visible in the most profound vocabularies of stupidity and cruelty. War machines and the financial elite now construct the stories that America tells about itself and in this delusional denial of social and moral responsibility monsters are born, paving the way for the new authoritarianism."

Response to criticism

Responding to critics that called the film Pro-War on Terror, Pro-Republican and jingoistic, Eastwood said that it is a "stupid analysis" and that the film has nothing to do with political parties. He stated: "I was a child growing up during World War II. That was supposed to be the one to end all wars. And four years later, I was standing at the draft board being drafted during the Korean conflict, and then after that there was Vietnam, and it goes on and on forever ... I just wonder ... does this ever stop? And no, it doesn’t. So each time we get in these conflicts, it deserves a lot of thought before we go wading in or wading out. Going in or coming out. It needs a better thought process, I think." Eastwood called American Sniper "the biggest anti-war statement any film can make," and said that "the fact of what [war] does to the family and the people who have to go back into civilian life like Chris Kyle did" and “what it (war) does to the people left behind." Eastwood further stated: "One of my favorite war movies that I’ve been involved with is Letters from Iwo Jima and that was about family, about being taken away from life, being sent someplace. In World War II, everybody just sort of went home and got over it. Now there is some effort to help people through it."

Bradley Cooper stated that much of the criticism ignores that the film was about widespread neglect of returning veterans, and that people who take issue with Kyle should redirect their attention to the leaders who put troops there in the first place. He said: “We looked at hopefully igniting attention about the lack of care that goes to vets.” “Discussion that has nothing to do with vets or what we did or did not do, every conversation in those terms is moving farther and farther from what our soldiers go through, and the fact that 22 veterans commit suicide each day.” Mr. Cooper noted that an increasing number of soldiers are returning from conflict psychologically damaged, only to be more or less discarded.

Michelle Obama, the wife of the President of the United States, was quoted on American Sniper: "The number-one movie in America right now is a complex, emotional depiction of a veteran and his family. And while I know there have been critics, I felt that, more often than not, this film touches on many of the emotions and experiences that I've heard firsthand from military families over these past few years. This movie reflects those wrenching stories that I've heard — the complex journeys that our men and women in uniform endure. The complicated moral decisions they are tasked with every day. The stresses of balancing love of family with a love of country. And the challenges of transitioning back home to their next mission in life. And here’s why a movie like this is important: see, the vast majority of Americans will never see these stories. They will never grasp these issues on an emotional level without portrayals like this."

Former GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin addressed "Hollywood leftists" with their "shiny plastic trophies" in responding to criticism about the movie. Palin criticized these "leftists" for "spitting on the graves of freedom fighters" and decried that the opponents of the movie were "not fit to shine Chris Kyle's combat boots." Palin further wrote "May the epic "American Sniper" bring nothing but blessings to Taya and the children of this true American hero."

Additional sources I did not yet have the time to cite

• Civil war at the cineplex: “American Sniper,” “Selma” and the battle over American masculinity. "America may love Clint Eastwood's gun-toting SEAL, but the true movie hero of the day is Martin Luther King, Jr."
• I was an American sniper, and Chris Kyle’s war was not my war. "Don’t make the mistake of thinking the hit movie captures the truth of the Iraq conflict. I should know. I lived it."
• Several other sources that have also been critical of the movie and which I did not yet have the time to cite:
• An article from almost 11 years ago, referenced by Janet Weil below. Journalist Dahr Jamail in his direct report from Fallujah on American snipers "Slaughtering Civilians in Fallujah:" "...the Americans bombed one of the hospitals, and were currently sniping people as they attempted to enter/exit the main hospital ... " photo caption: "Iraqi woman wounded in the neck by an American sniper. Doctors predicted the wound would be fatal." ... " As I was there, an endless stream of women and children who'd been sniped by the Americans were being raced into the dirty clinic, the cars speeding over the curb out front as their wailing family members carried them in. One woman and small child had been shot through the neck – the woman was making breathy gurgling noises as the doctors frantically worked on her amongst her muffled moaning. The small child, his eyes glazed and staring into space, continually vomited as the doctors raced to save his life. After 30 minutes, it appeared as though neither of them would survive. One victim of American aggression after another was brought into the clinic, nearly all of them women and children. This scene continued, off and on, into the night as the sniping continued." ... "One small boy of 11, his face covered by a kefir and toting around a Kalashnikov that was nearly as big as he was, patrolled areas around the clinic, making sure they were secure. He was confident and very eager for battle. I wondered how the U.S. soldiers would feel about fighting an 11 year-old child? For the next day, on the way out of Falluja, I saw several groups of children fighting as mujahedeen." ... "Although the ambulance already had three bullet holes from a U.S. sniper through the front windshield on the driver's side, having westerners on board was the only hope that soldiers would allow them to retrieve more wounded Iraqis. The previous driver was wounded when one of the sniper's shots grazed his head. Bombs were heard sporadically exploding around the city, along with random gunfire. It grew dark, so we ended up spending the night with one of the local men who had filmed the atrocities. He showed us footage of a dead baby who he claimed was torn from his mother's chest by Marines. Other horrendous footage of slain Iraqis was shown to us as well." ... "One of the bodies they brought to the clinic was that of an old man who was shot by a sniper outside of his home, while his wife and children sat wailing inside. The family couldn't reach his body, for fear of being sniped by the Americans themselves. His stiff body was carried into the clinic with flies swarming above it." ... "What I can report from Falluja is that there is no ceasefire, and apparently there never was. Iraqi women and children are being shot by American snipers. Over 600 Iraqis have now been killed by American aggression, and the residents have turned two football fields into graveyards. Ambulances are being shot by the Americans. And now they are preparing to launch a full-scale invasion of the city. All of which is occurring under the guise of catching the people who killed the four Blackwater Security personnel and hung two of their bodies from a bridge." Photo caption: "Young Iraqi boy shot in the neck by a U.S. sniper in Falluja."

• An article from Oct. 2007, "Tomgram: Having a Carnage Party:" The recent murder trial of an American sniper from an elite sniper scout platoon operating in Iskandariya, a Sunni area in the "Triangle of Death" south of Baghdad, has been filled with revelations. Among them, that the Pentagon has a program to put "bait" out like "detonation cords, plastic explosives and ammunition" to draw unwary insurgents into sniper scopes; this, in a land with perhaps 50% unemployment, where anything salvageable will be scavenged by civilians. ("In a country that is awash in armaments and magazines and implements of war, if every time somebody picked up something that was potentially useful as a weapon, you might as well ask every Iraqi to walk around with a target on his back," comments Eugene Fidell of the National Institute of Military Justice.) As it turns out, the snipers seem to have misunderstood the use of these "bait" items -- or to have understood all too well their real use -- and instead placed them on unarmed Iraqis they had already killed in order to create instant "insurgent" bodies appropriate for the body count that wasn't supposed to be.

As Private David C. Petta, told the court, according to the Washington Post, "he believed the classified items were for dropping on people the unit had killed, 'to enforce if we killed somebody that we knew was a bad guy but we didn't have the evidence to show for it.'" (The weaponizing of the dead was, by the way, a commonplace of the Vietnam War as well.) According to court testimony, the specialists from this sniper squad, "described how their teams were pushed beyond limits by battalion commanders eager to raise their kill ratio against a ruthless enemy.... During a separate hearing here in July, Sgt. Anthony G. Murphy said he and other First Battalion snipers felt 'an underlying tone' of disappointment from field commanders seeking higher enemy body counts. 'It just kind of felt like, "What are you guys doing wrong out there?"'")

And little wonder, given what was at stake. This was, of course, standard operating procedure in Vietnam too -- and for the same reasons. Lieutenant General Julian J. Ewell, for instance, had his own codified kill ratios of "allied to enemy dead" for his units in Vietnam. These ranged from 1:50, which qualified as "highly skilled U.S. unit" to 1:10, "historical U.S. average." And woe be to those who were just average. Units will be "pushed beyond limits" any time "victory" or "success" or "progress" becomes nothing but a body-counting game, as is happening again.

Once progress in a frustrating counter-guerrilla war is pegged to those endlessly toted up corpses, the counting process itself naturally becomes a crucial measure of success (in lieu of actual success), unit by unit -- which means it also becomes a key measure of performance, and performance is, of course, the measure of military advancement. So, the pressure to be that "highly skilled unit" translates into pressure for more bodies to report as signs of success. Sooner or later, if you just report actual enemy killed, your stats sheet begins to look lousy -- especially if others are inflating their figures, as they will do. And then the pressure only builds.

Every bit of this should ring a grim bell or two; but, as New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh commented recently in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, from Vietnam to today there's been "no learning curve." "You'd think," he said, "that in this country with so many smart people, that we can't possibly do the same dumb thing again.... [but] everything is tabula rasa."

Counting Squads

Prepare not to be surprised: In Iraq, the military counted bodies from the beginning -- counted, in fact, everything. They just weren't releasing the figures back in the days when the Bush administration was less desperate about Iraq and far more desperate not to appear to be back in the Vietnam era of endless stats and no victory. But the "metrics" (as they are called) were always something of an open secret. In March 2005, for instance, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told an NPR reporter:

"We have a room here [in the Pentagon], the Iraq Room where we track a whole series of metrics. Some of them are inputs and some of them are outputs, results, and obviously the inputs are easier to do and less important, and the outputs are vastly more important and more difficult to do.

"We track, for example, the numbers of attacks by area. We track the types of attacks by area. [W]e track a number of reports of intimidation, attempts at intimidation or assassination of government officials, for example. We track the extent to which people are supplying intelligence to our people so that they can go in and actually track down and capture or kill insurgents. We try to desegregate the people we've captured and look at what they are. Are they foreign fighters, Jihadist types? Are they criminals who were paid money to go do something like that? Are they former regime elements, Ba'athists? And we try to keep track of what those numbers are in terms of detainees and people that are processed in that way.... We probably look at 50, 60, 70 different types of metrics, and come away with them with an impression."

And as it happens, though he didn't mention it that day, the military were also assiduously counting corpses. We know that because last week they released figures to USA Today on how many insurgents U.S. forces have supposedly killed since the invasion of Iraq ended: 18,832 since June 2003; 4,882 "militants" so far in 2007 alone. That represents a leap of 25% in corpse-counting from the previous year. These previously derided body counts, according to American officials quoted in Stars and Stripes, now give the necessary "scale" and "context" to the fight in Iraq.

As the USA Today report points out, last year Centcom Commander John Abizaid had suggested that the forces of the Sunni insurgency numbered in the 10,000-20,000 range. If the released figures are accurate, nearly 25%-50% of that number must have been killed this year. (Who knows how many were wounded.) Add in suspected Sunni insurgents and terrorists incarcerated in American prisons in Iraq only in the "surge" months of 2007 -- another 8,000 or so -- and it suddenly looks as if something close to the full insurgency has essentially been turned into a ghost resistance between January and September of this year.

(Again, Vietnam had its equivalents. After the nationwide Tet Offensive in February 1968, for instance, the U.S. military requested more troops from the Johnson administration. They also claimed that the Vietnamese had lost 45,000 dead. As historian Marilyn Young wrote in her book, The Vietnam Wars, "UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg wanted to know what was enemy troop strength at the start of Tet. The answer: between 160,000 and 175,000. And the ratio of killed to wounded? Estimated at three and a half to one, answered the officer. 'Well, if that's true,' Goldberg calculated quickly, 'then they have no effective forces left in the field.' This certainly made additional American forces seem redundant.")

By now, it seems as if everyone on the American side is suddenly counting in public. In August, the President, for the first time, felt free to become the leader of a "body-count team" and proudly announced, in a televised speech to the American people, just how many insurgents U.S. forces were supposedly killing in each surge month (though the figures don't gibe with the ones released by the military last week): "Our troops have killed or captured an average of more than 1,500 al Qaeda terrorists and other extremists every month since January of this year." General Petraeus, of course, arrived in Washington to deliver his "progress report" to Congress with his own Vietnam-style multicolored charts and graphs to display; and the military, having sworn not to do body counts, is now releasing figures daily -- often large ones -- on kills in Afghanistan and Iraq that regularly make the headlines. And every day, it seems, new Pentagon databases and squads of number-crunchers are revealed. By now, it's a genuine carnage party.

Last week, Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post reported in far greater depth than we've seen before on the metrics squads run out of the Pentagon and the U.S. command in Baghdad. In the process, she found some interesting discrepancies between the findings of the Pentagon's data analysts and those working for Petraeus -- "Civilian casualty numbers in the Pentagon's latest quarterly report on Iraq last week, for example, differ significantly from those presented by the top commander in Iraq" -- and this became the subject of much on-line analysis at sites like ThinkProgress.org and TalkingPointsMemo.com. But perhaps more interesting than these discrepancies was the size of the overall military counting operation.

DeYoung, for instance, interviewed Chief Warrant Officer 3 Dan Macomber, the "senior all-source intelligence analyst" in charge of a six-person team whose only task is "to compile [data] and track trends and analysis for General Petraeus" personally. And that team, in turn, is but a small part of a larger crew "far from the battlefield" that, DeYoung reports, includes "platoons of soldiers in Iraq and at the Pentagon assigned to crunch numbers -- sectarian killings, roadside bombs, Iraqi forces trained, weapons caches discovered and others -- in a constant effort to gauge how the war is going."

Think of that for a moment. "Platoons" of military counters trying to count their way so high on a pile of Iraqi corpses and captured weapons that, someday, "progress" and even perhaps a glimmer of "success" might appear at the end of that dark, dark tunnel. That would be when, assumedly, the "stability" we represent would finally make its appearance. What Iraq would be by then is another matter entirely.

Counting to a Million and Beyond

Why would such "platoons" of counters be needed? One answer might be that the counting runs high indeed. On Monday, there was a revealing inside-the-fold piece in the New York Times on this subject. It was, on the surface, a modest good-news piece from a distinctly bad-news land. While the central government in Baghdad is now almost paralyzed, wrote James Glanz, its corrupt ministries unable to spend even small percentages of the oil moneys allotted to them for various reconstruction activities, local spending in some provinces may be significantly more effective (or, if you read the piece to the end, it may not). Here was the key passage:

"The capital budget for the entire country, including the provinces, was $6 billion in 2006 and $10 billion in 2007. But some national ministries spent as little as 15 percent of their share last year, citing problems such as a shortage of employees trained to write contracts, the flight of scientific and engineering expertise from the country and the danger from militias and the insurgency."

Think about that: "a shortage of employees trained to write contracts"; "the flight of scientific and engineering expertise from the country" There's something worth counting, but you might be doing it for a long, long time. Significant parts of what was once a large Iraqi professional class have, since the occupation, become "bus people." They have fled the country in unknown numbers -- though a recent Oxfam report indicates that, in Baghdad, some hospitals and universities have lost up to 80% of their staffs. These are part of a larger exodus of staggering dimensions. It is now estimated -- nobody knows the real numbers -- that there are at least 2.5 million Iraqis who have fled abroad since the Bush administration's invasion ended. Up to 2.2 million more Iraqis have been dislodged from their homes, largely by sectarian violence, and turned into internal refugees.

And then, of course, there were the Iraqis who couldn't flee -- those corpses everyone is now so hot to count, so eager to measure progress upon. As in June 2006 with the door-to-door study that became the Lancet report, which suggested that 600,000 Iraqis might have died violently since the invasion of 2003, we have another survey of the dead. Again, it offers startling figures; and, once again, those figures, though produced by a reputable British survey outfit, ORB or Opinion Research Business, which has been polling in Iraq since 2005, were largely ignored in the mainstream media. As Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. wrote in a moving essay at his libertarian website, LewRockwell.com:

"How comfy we are all in the United States, as we engage in living-room debates about the US occupation of Iraq, whether 'we' are bringing them freedom and whether their freedom is really worth the sacrifice of so many of our men and women. We talk about whether war aims have really been achieved, how to exit gracefully, or whether we need a hyper-surge to finish this whole business once and for all.... But when 'we' cause the calamity, suddenly there is silence."

A sample of 1,499 Iraqis 18 years old and up were asked: "How many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003 (i.e. as a result of violence rather than a natural death such as old age)? Please note that I mean those who were actually living under your roof." Nearly one of every two Baghdad households claimed to have lost a family member and the firm estimated that, overall, approximately 1.2 million Iraqis may have died violently since the invasion, which, if true, would put even the Rwandan genocide in the shade. Other estimates of Iraqi deaths are lower, but still staggering.

And that's just the dead. Not the wounded. Not the mentally damaged or the shell-shocked or the deranged. Not those thousands in northern Iraq who are now coming down with cholera, thanks to worsening sanitary conditions and the unavailability of potable water. There -- in a country which may have lost 1.2 million people to violence in four-plus years -- is where our leading presidential candidates, many pundits (liberal as well as conservative), and significant numbers of Congressional representatives agree we must remain in some form beyond at least 2013, for reasons of "stability," lest a "genocide" occur.

If the polls are to be believed, here in this country only the American people disagree, and they obviously don't count for much.

So while we hunker into Iraq, the numbers-crunchers will undoubtedly redouble their efforts for the next "progress report," upcoming in March 2008, from General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. They are undoubtedly already preparing their bar charts and multi-colored graphs. Out in the field, the pressure on the troops to provide the stats that will make those graphs reflect "progress," that will allow units to achieve "success" and commanders to advance, will only increase.

The lesson of these last metrics-filled surge months is already clear enough: We count, they don't.