CONTENTS

Introduction
I. The Election and Bush in Office Before September 11
II. September 11th and the Saudis
III. Afghanistan and the Pipeline
IV. Terrorism and the Patriot Act
V. The War in Iraq
VI. The Military
VII. Conclusion
Appendix 1. Corrections and Updates to This Document
Appendix 2. Other Resources

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VII. Conclusion

To bolster his claim that the administration cannot be trusted, Moore shows a few clips. We see President Bush saying “he has used weapons”—referring presumably to Saddam Hussein, who of course has used weapons of mass destruction against his own people and his neighbors. We then see Donald Rumsfeld saying, “We know where they are, they’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and, and, east, west, south, and north.” This is presumably aimed to make Rumsfeld look silly, since the U.S. has not actually found stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That clip is from an interview Rumsfeld did with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week on March 30, 2003. Here is the exchange:

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally, weapons of mass destruction. Key goal of the military campaign is finding those weapons of mass destruction. None have been found yet. There was a raid on the Ansar Al-Islam Camp up in the north last night. A lot of people expected to find ricin there. None was found. How big of a problem is that? And is it curious to you that given how much control U.S. and coalition forces now have in the country, they haven’t found any weapons of mass destruction?

SEC. RUMSFELD: Not at all. If you think—let me take that, both pieces—the area in the south and the west and the north that coalition forces control is substantial. It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat. (http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/t03302003_t0330sdabcsteph.html)

Three and a half months later, on July 13, 2003, on the same TV show, Secretary Rumsfeld was asked to clarify his March 30 comment about knowing where the WMDs were:

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: On the broader subject of weapons of mass destruction, the last time you appeared on the show I think was March 30th. We you talked about why no weapons had been found yet, it was about three weeks into the war. And here’s what you said. I want you to take a look at it…. [plays Rumsfeld clip from March 30] … You said “we know where they are.” Have those sites where you thought the weapons of mass destruction were, have those been inspected now?

DONALD RUMSFELD: I probably should have said we know where they were instead of we know where they are. At that moment the intelligence community said these are X number of suspect sites, meaning we have reason to believe that they might be in these various locations, numbers of hundreds.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: But at that time on March 30th, you believed the weapons were there?

DONALD RUMSFELD: Exactly. We did believe that. And, and they may have been there. We have been out looking at those sites and some of those sites and have gone through some fraction of them. It takes a long time. It is an enormously big country and, and, as, as you’ll recall, the one individual came in and took the investigators into his backyard near a rose bush, dug down and found things that had been buried there for years with respect to the Iraqi nuclear program. And, and you can imagine how would anyone have known that except for the person who buried them coming in and saying, here they are. So what the Iraqi survey group is now doing is they are instead of running around to all of these suspect sites that, that we had where we believed they were, they are instead going through the interrogation process with these people and trying to find people who can tell us where they are. (http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030713-secdef0384.html)

Put simply, Rumsfeld was relaying the sincere view of the intelligence community about the location of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Moore offers no reason to believe the administration was lying about these matters, or could no longer be trusted. The aim, of course, is to make these officials look duplicitous by taking short clips out of context.

In serving that aim, Moore now thoroughly outdoes himself. We see a clip of Condoleezza Rice saying, “There is a tie between Iraq and what happened on 9/11.” The idea here is of course to get us to think that Rice is arguing that Saddam Hussein and his regime were somehow directly involved in 9/11, and so not telling the truth. But the clip is from CBS’s Early Show on November 28, 2003, and here is what Rice said:

Oh, indeed there is a tie between Iraq and what happened on 9/11. It’s not that Saddam Hussein was somehow himself and his regime involved in 9/11, but, if you think about what caused 9/11, it is the rise of ideologies of hatred that lead people to drive airplanes into buildings in New York. This is a great terrorist—international terrorist network that is determined to defeat freedom. It has perverted Islam to—from a peaceful religion into one in which they—they call on it for violence. And they’re all linked. And Iraq is a central front because, if and when, and we will, we change the nature of Iraq to a place that is peaceful and democratic and prosperous in the heart of the Middle East, you will begin to change the Middle East. And the Middle East is, after all, a place that is increasingly without hope and without prosperity, where these ideologies of hatred are being born. So there’s a very, very close connection. Saddam Hussein, of course, had been a supporter of all kinds of terrorist organizations, but it’s really the broader point that, as the president said in his speech at Whitehall in London, we have got to take this on, the war on terrorism, as an opportunity to change the very nature of the Middle East, and partnership with those in the Middle East who want a different Middle East. And then you’re going to see that the terrorists will have been very much wounded because their myth that Islam and the rest of the world cannot live together in harmony, and democracy will have been exploded.

This is, in fact, a succinct and serious argument about the place of the Iraq war in the larger war on terrorism, and the reason why opening up a democratic alternative to fundamentalism is crucial in a region where one way or another an alternative to the status quo will be wanted. It is the case for the Bush foreign policy, the case Moore has thoroughly ignored throughout the film, and now hides from his viewers, by showing only a snippet which purports to show Rice saying something which she immediately thereafter explains she is not saying. This moment is really the epitome of Moore’s technique throughout the film: he uses real information to create an impression that is the opposite of reality.

Moore continues, now showing a clip of Dick Cheney saying, “The struggle can only end with their complete and permanent destruction.” Here again, it is worth looking to the source, because just as with Rice’s statement above, Moore—in the process of masking the truth—has also pointed us toward it, if we will only peek behind the shallow veneer he has painted. He wants to make the statement seem bellicose and crazy. But if he cut this clip himself, then he must have heard Cheney’s full statement, must have been exposed to what is really there, and chosen to run from it, and to keep it from us. Cheney’s remark was made at a charity dinner just a month after September 11th. He said:

We cannot deal with terror. It will not end in a treaty. There will be no peaceful coexistence, no negotiations, no summit, no joint communiqué with the terrorists. The struggle can only end with their complete and permanent destruction—(applause)—and in victory for the United States and the cause of freedom. (Applause.) America has always stood for human freedom. Never has this cause had more friends in every culture and on every continent. Our enemies direct their rage at us not because of what we do but because of who we are. Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, we know who we are. We are freedom’s home and defender. We are a faithful friend to allies and a strong, permanent presence in the affairs of the world. We love our country only more when she is threatened. We did not ask for this trial, but it has come, and we will see it through to victory. (http://www.whitehouse.gov/vicepresident/news-speeches/speeches/vp20011018.html)

These are the words of a man with a heavy burden on his shoulders. But Moore can only treat it lightly, and so he must pick one snippet and make us think the rest simply is not there. To make the truth seem like a lie, he paints a canvas full of contradictions, and then throws the truth in too, so that it might be mistaken for what surrounds it.

This is the only way to understand why Moore now lets us hear President Bush say, “We wage a war to save civilization itself. We did not seek it. But we will fight it. And we will prevail.” And he is right. The clip is from a speech Bush made to a national television audience about homeland security, just two months after September 11th (which again makes clear that Moore’s target here is not the war in Iraq so much as the larger struggle with radical Islam). Bush said that night:

This new enemy seeks to destroy our freedom and impose its views. We value life; the terrorists ruthlessly destroy it. We value education; the terrorists do not believe women should be educated or should have health care or should leave their homes. We value the right to speak our minds; for the terrorists, free expression can be grounds for execution. We respect people of all faiths and welcome the free practice of religion. Our enemy wants to dictate how to think and how to worship, even to their fellow Muslims. This enemy tries to hide behind a peaceful faith. But those who celebrate the murder of innocent men, women and children, have no religion, have no conscience, and have no mercy. We wage a war to save civilization itself. We did not seek it, but we will fight it, and we will prevail. This is a different war from any other nation has ever faced—a war on many fronts, against terrorists who operate in more than 60 different countries. And this is a war that must be fought not only overseas, but also here at home. (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/11/text/20011108-13.html)

Moore has so thoroughly built up his lie that he feels comfortable now exposing us to the truth, certain that we will not recognize it, and hopeful that we will only laugh at it, as he does.

And then he quotes the one man who would have best seen through what he has sought to do. Moore says, “George Orwell once wrote, that it’s not a matter of ‘if the war is not real, or if it is. Victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won, but it is meant to be continuous. A hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance, this new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia but to keep the very structure of society intact.’” It is a perfect ending, because in fact Orwell did not write this text. Moore wants us to think these lines come from Orwell’s book 1984 (http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/1984/), and indeed bits and pieces of this statement, in a different order, do appear that book. But the quotation Moore reads actually comes from a movie version of 1984, and was not written by Orwell.

But perhaps it is not a matter of whether the quote is not real, or if it is. Honesty is impossible. The film Fahrenheit 9/11 is not meant to be real, but it is meant to be an overwhelming illusion, in the wake of which nothing is real. The anger it seeks to manufacture is only possible on the basis of deception and ignorance. The film produces a new version of the past and hopes that by insisting it is the truth it might become the truth so thoroughly that no other version can ever have existed.

Moore’s project aims to make the whole world look ridiculous, but especially to make responsibility look ridiculous: to make the complexity of governing and making choices seem a wicked combination of arrogance and greed, to make those who are charged with seriously exercising power look at once both stupid and cunning, both too dumb to be trusted and too clever to be trusted.

The film moves by a peculiar mix of elitism and populism, and of burning the flag while wrapping itself in it. It seeks to hide from certain truths: that living in the world is hard, that power can and at times must be righteously exercised, that sometimes we really must confront threats that cannot be appeased by paperwork. The fear that this may be so, and the narrowing array of alternative explanations, drives Moore deeper into paranoia and further into the thickets of ever more complicated and decreasingly plausible conspiracy theories. By piling them on one after another in quick succession, with snippets and clips all patched together and no real concern about contradictions and gaps, Moore has made a world for himself where he almost feels comfortable—where all politics is oppression; where all war is absurd; where America is ignorant and obnoxious and guilty. Most fundamentally, it is a place where the exercise of power is tainted and impure, and where the many are the victims of the few and need to be fought for by those who have found out the truth. It is a sad delusion, and this film shows the true enormity and depravity of the vision. In the end, what it lacks is a sense of responsibility, of what it really means to be answerable, to be charged with the nation’s affairs, and to make decisions with limited information when all your decisions matter terribly. The movie is an expression of a deep desire for a world where no responsibility is necessary and no hard choices exist. It is a very old fantasy, and this most recent version of it wants us to believe that such a world is well within our grasp, if only we could get Bush out of the way. The movie tries hard to so arrange our understanding that we might be fooled into agreeing.

But by giving us glimpses of the truth, particularly toward the end, it undoes itself without knowing it. And the movie finally ends with Bush saying, in his ineloquent but crystal clear way, that we will not be fooled. Neither should viewers of Fahrenheit 9/11.

  Continue to Appendix 1. Corrections and Updates to This Document 

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