Ross Douthat (January 26, 2008) - Rambo and Iraq (Movies)

Let the bodies hit the floor, indeed.

I'm still hopeful that Stop Loss will wash out the taste of the awful triumvurate of Lions for Lambs, Rendition, and Redacted. Well, Redacted was vaguely okay, if a box office flop.

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot | January 26, 2008 4:16 PM

The I-word is never spoken in Rambo, yet in its coded way, the film makes a case for why we are in Iraq and should stay there until the job is done, whenever that may be.

Right, and it's based on the action movie template that everyone we kill is a bad guy. How, exactly, such a theory of an enemy monolith applies reasonably to Iraq's civil war is not to be asked.

Does this sorta-kinda endorsement of MSZ's sorta-kinda endorsement of Rambo IV constitute a statement on Iraq?

Posted by DivGuy | January 26, 2008 4:22 PM

Also, as politics, there's nothing interesting about the stance of Rambo IV as outlined by MSZ. The US, embodied by Sylvester Stallone, has to kill large quantities of other people to make the world better.

MSZ dresses it up in some fancy Kaplan-y rhetoric about "warrior culture" but it's not complicated. The US has the moral authority to kill lots of people for good.

This is a profoundly undifferentiated political statement, and the application to Iraq - where the US isn't fighting Saddam Hussein, but attempting to manage a counterinsurgency and a civil war - suggests that we're supposed to apply it indiscriminately.

Rambo IV makes the case for neocon fantasies of righteous slaughter. That doesn't make the notion of righteous slaughter any more reality-based, and it certainly doesn't mean that a counterinsurgency in Iraq should be fought by occupying US troops. The counterinsurgency doctrines of St. Petraeus, of course, are based precisely in the rejection of the righteous slaughter model of warfare.

The application of Rambo IV to Iraq is utterly incoherent. Again, since I have no idea whether Ross Douthat endorses the view that MSZ sorta-kinda endorses, I'm not exactly sure how to argue any of this. but this post seems to be a sorta-kinda suggestion that Rambo IV expresses a valuable voice in the national debate about Iraq, and I think that's badly, dangerously wrong.

Posted by DivGuy | January 26, 2008 4:39 PM

One of the interesting things about Rambo IV is that it shows the bad-guy's army is largely made up of kidnapped kids. Rambo kills them anyway.

I'm not sure there is a positive message in that movie about intervention.

Rambo from the beginning is pretty cynical, and never really lets up. The only reason he decides to get involved is he likes (in a non-romantic way) one of the people that is taken prisoner. He really doesn't give a damn about the politics or the factions, or even the other missionaries. He cares about his boat, and the girl.

Indeed, Rambo himself makes pretty clear that he kills because that is what he is good at, not because he is doing something right. How this is a positive argument for Iraq totally escapes me.

I did enjoy it, though.

Posted by matthewcc | January 26, 2008 4:42 PM

"Like its three predecessors, Rambo strikes a nerve, and it's not a nerve that America's left-leaning critical establishment wants struck."

Ah, yes. We-would've-won-too-if-we-hadn't-been-stabbed-in-the-back-by-those-goddamn-dirty-hippies.

I never heard the word "dolchstoss" until college, but I believe I can say I was familiar from the concept from the first time I ever heard any of my Vietnam vet teachers, scoutmasters, etc. tell me about that war.

It seems they're already practicing this theme for when we finally do get out of Iraq, too. Lovely.

Posted by gustav | January 26, 2008 5:05 PM

In today's Time, it should be noted, Stallone says he dislikes Bush and voted non-Republican for the first time in 2004. He doesn't explicitly criticize the war in Iraq, but the article implies that he opposes it (or at least the way it was managed).

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1706759,00.html

Posted by James Kabala | January 26, 2008 5:32 PM

Stallone's for McCain, as we learnt this week.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYfFZsFP2dc

Posted by Ben | January 26, 2008 5:58 PM

Hi, Ross and everybody--

Thanks for the link. I've never come into a comments thread here to further argue my case, but I'd like to try it here, just to offer a few points that I hope are worth pondering.

1. Just because a lot of action movies are about a good guy killing bad guys because they're bad guys doesn't mean that "Rambo," a film that very much fits that definition, is devoid of political content. And the fact that Iraq is never mentioned doesn't mean the film isn't about Iraq -- specifically why we allegedly went in there and why we have to stay until we win, whatever that means, and whenever that happens.

2. The fact that Stallone says he didn't vote for Bush in 2004 and thinks the war has been poorly managed doesn't negate the idea that "Rambo IV" is a stay-the-course polemic that just happens to be set somewhere other than Iraq. "Rambo IV" is basically a feature-length comic book-Socratic dialogue about the necessity of coming off the sidelines and applying lethal force because (1) to decline to do so in the face of epic barbarism would be morally wrong, and (2) because it's the only way to really stop the sort of thuggery depicted in this movie -- thuggery that has many, many echoes of the Bush administration's multifaceted argument for why we're in Iraq.

Added to which, if Stallone does, in fact, think Iraq is simply a bad idea, as opposed to a noble cause badly managed, I doubt he'd endorse the Republican candidate who has made the phrase "We are winning in Iraq" a centerpiece of his campaign, to the consternation of many fellow Republicans. In Stallone's movie, the phrase "We made a commitment" is repeated twice. It sounds innocuous out of context, but within the confines of the movie, its message is as unmistakable as Rambo asking Col. Trautman in the second film, "Do we get to win this time?"

The film insists that religious, humanitarian and diplomatic forms of intervention are useless -- that if you want to change the world, you'd best pick up a gun. That's aimed at a wide swath of naysayers, from Republicans who've soured on Iraq because they think it was incompetently planned and executed to Democrats who would like to see democracy flower in totalitarian regions but abhor the idea of implanting it via military intervention. This is Stallone's movie, so of course pretty much every naysayer comes around to his way of thinking. By the end of the film, the most stridently Christian pacifist character realizes the error of his ways and bashes a snaggletoothed goon's brains in with a rock.

3. There's absolutely no evidence in the film to suggest that Rambo is sexually attracted to Sarah, the female missionary. Other characters may think that or imply that, but the film makes it clear that they are wrong. This movie, like all the Rambo films, is devoid of romantic or sexual feeling. (Only the second film dared hint at such feelings -- and the object of Rambo's affection got shot by a sniper mere seconds after they completed their first kiss.) In "Rambo IV," Sarah is an abstract symbol of goodness, a Victorian angel of purity, blonde, kindhearted and dressed entirely in white; Rambo respects her for her moral certitude and the eloquence with which she expresses it. Their relationship is that of a fairy princess and a dragon that helps her liberate a kingdom enslaved by dark forces. When Rambo saves her from being raped by an evil brown man, he's not saving his girlfriend, but an emblem of all that's good (if naive) in humankind. He might as well be saving the Statue of Liberty from terrorist attack.

4. My article does not endorse Stallone's apparent reading of the Iraq war and why we should stay in it. I hoped that the article's many sarcastic asides about Stallone, the character and the series -- including a parenthetical reference to our possibly having lost Vietnam because the sun was in our eyes and a link to a Wikipedia entry including the tidbit that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was as real as the threat of WMD's in Iraq -- would make that clear. But if it didn't come across, then my apologies; I should have been more emphatic.

The case I'm making might sound like a stretch, but I'm arguing from evidence, and the evidence is not only there in the movie, in the form of dialogue, imagery and situations, Stallone boldfaces his points to make sure they sink in. And the worldview I say the movie advances dovetails with the world view of the other three Rambo films. The series' rhetorical-political through-line is as perfect as the film's release is fortuitously timed. I would not be surprised if Stallone's latest became a surprise hit, and he he had a late-career zeitgeist moment, similar to what John Wayne managed with the critically maligned but financially successful "The Green Berets" in 1968.

Thanks for reading. Over and out.

Yours,
Matt

Posted by Matt Zoller Seitz | January 26, 2008 8:12 PM

matthew cc: Sorry, I didn't see your parenthetical "In a non-romantic sort of way" the first time I read through this thread.

The point I was making about Sarah stands, though. The film makes it very clear that Rambo doesn't just like her as a person, he respects what she represents. She awakens his idealism.

Posted by Matt Zoller Seitz | January 26, 2008 8:26 PM

Americans from the time they arrived in this country have been unafraid to fight wars to protect their vital against serious enemies. That includes quite justifiable wars against the Indians, the British in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, both World Wars, North Koreans, the North Vietnamese, and the Baathists and insurgents in Iraq.

Anyone who accepts the piety that the Vietnam War was unjust should read Mark Moyar's recent book Moyar is a young Harvard College summa with a PhD in history from Cambridge.

While we've, also, from the beginning had distinct pacifist and isolationist tendencies, in the end the fighters win the day. Semper Fi!

Posted by Peter Leavitt | January 26, 2008 8:49 PM

I meant to note that the title of Moyar's book is Triumph Forsaken.

Posted by Peter Leavitt | January 26, 2008 8:52 PM

Anyone who accepts the piety that the Vietnam War was unjust should read Mark Moyar's recent book Moyar is a young Harvard College summa with a PhD in history from Cambridge.

The justice of Vietnam is something that I doubt I could change your mind about. But you seem to be ignoring the practical facet as well: America was incapable of victory in Vietnam. I am consistently disturbed by the fact that so many Americans are so deeply blinded to the possibility of American military failure. America can, has, and will again lose wars. That fact has to be accounted for in any vision of foreign policy.

Posted by Freddie | January 26, 2008 9:47 PM

MZS -

Thanks for your comments. This is my issue:

"Rambo IV" is basically a feature-length comic book-Socratic dialogue about the necessity of coming off the sidelines and applying lethal force because (1) to decline to do so in the face of epic barbarism would be morally wrong, and (2) because it's the only way to really stop the sort of thuggery depicted in this movie -- thuggery that has many, many echoes of the Bush administration's multifaceted argument for why we're in Iraq.

But the issue in Iraq is not that one shouldn't apply lethal force on principle, it's that applying lethal force won't do anything, and hasn't done anything, to produce stability in the face of an insurgency and a civil war.

This is what I mean about the ludicrously broad application of a general idea. That sometimes guns are necessary in foreign affairs in no way functions as a good, or even coherent, argument that the US should station 100,000 troops in Iraq to manage a counterinsurgency and a civil war.

This is the old TNR two-step, arguing for the incredibly general claim that military interventions have been useful in certain situations, and then pretending that this constitutes a sound argument for continuing an occupation of five years that has failed to produce any of the political progress which it was theoretically intended to create.

You seem, in your review, moved by the general principle. What I'm saying is that the general principle doesn't apply to Iraq, and applying it only shows how poor a political message Rambo IV is sending.

It's only by detaching his message entirely from reality that Stallone is able to get it across. The moment we actually start talking about the actual situation in Iraq, it becomes clear that Rambo IV has nothing useful to say.

Posted by DivGuy | January 26, 2008 10:28 PM

That includes quite justifiable wars against the Indians,

Last time I checked every square inch of the US stood on land stolen from Indians with the exception of Hawaii which was stolen from it's native population.

Posted by Don Quijote | January 26, 2008 11:35 PM

Peter Leavitt writes: "Americans from the time they arrived in this country have been unafraid to fight wars to protect their vital against serious enemies. That includes quite justifiable wars against the Indians, the British in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, both World Wars, North Koreans, the North Vietnamese, and the Baathists and insurgents in Iraq."

Yes, because the North Vietnamese and the Iraqis were going to attack the US. And those filthy Injuns didn't luv Jeezus, so they had to go!

It's quite possible Peter Leavitt is the dumbest man alive. Protect your vital! Peter Leavitt says yes!

This is what Peter Leavitt is - he's a creature who could happily shoot a 6 year old child in the back - or who would congratulate someone else who did. Peter Leavitt thinks the My Lai massacre was justifiable homicide, and that Rusty Calley is a hero.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | January 27, 2008 12:14 AM

DivGuy: "It's only by detaching his message entirely from reality that Stallone is able to get it across. The moment we actually start talking about the actual situation in Iraq, it becomes clear that Rambo IV has nothing useful to say."

Yeah, that's pretty much the gist of it. But the fact that he has nothing useful to say regarding Iraq, or Vietnam, or World War II, or American, beyond the standard jingoist imagery hasn't stopped him from saying it, and it hasn't stopped his message from resonating with a hell of a lot of people, including at least one and perhaps more presidents.

John Wayne wasn't a combat vet, either, and could be similarly simplistic in the films over which he had creative control. ("The Alamo," for instance.) But the worldview put across in his various star vehicles shaped American men's self-images (and the image of American men in the eyes of other countries, and perhaps America's image, period) for generations. Still does, I bet.

Posted by Matt Zoller Seitz | January 27, 2008 12:27 AM

Also: Yeah, I guess I am moved by the general principle of taking violent action to stop injustice. There are situations where I think it is necessary, not just individually but collectively -- and imperfectly executed and too-long-delayed as it was, I think there's a broad consensus that World War II was one such instance. (I try to get at this in the piece as well -- the desire to make all American wars into some version of The Good War, and the national rancor that ensues when it becomes increasingly clear that the current war and World War II are not alike or even similar.)

But coming, as I do, from a family with a lot of vets, I have no romantic ideals about war. In fact, I think that the decision to make war of any kind is a national admission of failure -- failure to anticipate and neutralize, by nonviolent means, the situation that is now presented as irresolvable except through war; failure to tend to economic or social problems at home (war as national distraction); and so forth.

For whatever that's worth--

Posted by Matt Zoller Seitz | January 27, 2008 12:37 AM

But the fact that he has nothing useful to say regarding Iraq, or Vietnam, or World War II, or American, beyond the standard jingoist imagery hasn't stopped him from saying it, and it hasn't stopped his message from resonating with a hell of a lot of people, including at least one and perhaps more presidents.

Yeah, that's fair. And that Stallone is saying this, in this particular time, is interesting and worth elucidating, I agree.

Posted by DivGuy | January 27, 2008 8:05 AM

Is this going to be the last Rambo? I know Stallone made the last Rocky film partly because he felt Rocky V had been such a dud ending to the series.

Posted by Freddy Freeboats | January 27, 2008 3:39 PM

But coming, as I do, from a family with a lot of vets, I have no romantic ideals about war. In fact, I think that the decision to make war of any kind is a national admission of failure -- failure to anticipate and neutralize, by nonviolent means, the situation that is now presented as irresolvable except through war; failure to tend to economic or social problems at home (war as national distraction); and so forth.

This is a common liberal view of war. What I would like to know is, where does it come from? The notion that it is always possible, at least in theory, to "anticipate and neutralize, by nonviolent means, the situation" seems to me to be absurd on its face. (Of course there are some situations where this is possible, but the issue is whether it's reasonable to believe that all are.) It's a simple observational fact that some human beings are prone to violence, and that they will use force to get what they want. The notion that people like Hitler, Stalin, Saddam, or an MS-13 gangbanger can be stopped in any manner other than by using force is a willful denial of reality.

Furthermore, this denial of reality only ends up making the carnage worse in the long run. The classic example is of course Chamberlain's response to Hitler - he assumed that a nonviolent means could be found that would "stop" Hitler. But of course stopping him at that point using force would have been far easier and less costly in human lives than it turned out to be.

Likewise, it's myopic to assume that Saddam would not have turned into an even larger threat if we had forgone the invasion in 2003. (Even the containment that we had prior to then, which many now insist could have continued indefinitely, was based largely on the threat and deployment of lethal force.) The issue of WMD stockpiles speaks to the imminence of the threat, but it isn't relevant to the question of whether Saddam ultimately needed to be removed by force. Nobody denies that he had WMD programs, and no serious person thinks that he would not have ramped them up the second the sanctions regime was lifted. So the case against invasion requires assuming either that the "containment" regime could have been maintained indefinitely or that the world would have been better off with Saddam free to develop whatever WMD programs his heart desired.

Posted by Mike S. | January 27, 2008 8:15 PM

Leavitt,

War against _the Indians_? That was a blatant campaign of genocide and land thievery, including that disgusting tactic of sending smallpox infected blankets. It was _their_ land, not yours, and you know it. You should be ashamed of yourself.

War against the Vietnamese? I suppose that they were wrong for wanting their country to be free of the American puppet regime in Saigon and their decadent coterie of usurious landlords, prostitutes, and traitors. And I suppose that in order to keep Vietnam in capitalist hands, it was legitimate for us to bomb the hell out of their country. You should be ashamed of yourself a second time.

Saddam, unlike the North Vietnamese, was actually a bastard of a leader, but the regime that he led
was better to Christians and other non-Muslim Iraqis than anything they have seen in the five years since. You've hit the trifecta.

Posted by Hector | January 27, 2008 10:08 PM

Nobody denies that he had WMD programs

Uh, what? Even Bush gave up that claim for the infinitely sillier "WMD program-related activities". There were no WMDs; there were no WMD programs. And contrary to current conservative thought, assuredly claiming that you know what Saddam 'would have' done, after being completely wrong about what Saddam did do, doesn't make you "serious". It makes you an idiot.

Posted by Bo | January 27, 2008 11:26 PM

Did anyone see 60 minutes tonight? They interviewed the fbi agent who interviewed saddam after his capture. Saddam claimed he had no wmds, that what wasn't destroyed by Clinton's strikes in 98, he dismantled himself. Apparently he feared Iran much more than the US, and wanted them to believe he had wmds. He didn't think the US would actually invade, and that a 98 style strike would be survivable.

Posted by mad6798j | January 28, 2008 12:29 AM

Is the "I-word" a nation or a practice -- Imperialism? Because we know how well that one has worked out in American history (Cuba, the Philippines, Vietnam...etc.)

Posted by Kit Stolz | January 28, 2008 12:04 PM

Hurray! Stallone's for it, so Iraq must have been the right thing to do!

Posted by nitpicker | January 28, 2008 12:43 PM

Jesse Walker has an interesting (and very different from Seitz's) take on the Rambo series:

http://www.reason.com/news/show/124630.html

Posted by James Kabala | January 28, 2008 3:52 PM

Hector, thanks for the accolade on hitting the Trifecta. You, of course, being a Harvard man are aware that any of these wars are perfectly debatable, however imperfect your Adam's House experience. Or have you irretrievably fallen into the leftist abyss.

I should suggest as a start that you read Moyar's book on Vietnam, Triumph Forsaken.

Posted by Peter Leavitt | January 28, 2008 4:35 PM

What a surprise...Rambo happens to be, again, a right wing pro imperialist movie...Who will have suspected it!?

Posted by Sergio Méndez | January 29, 2008 5:03 AM

Rambo and Iraq

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