“I’ll see you when I see you, mate.”
“Not if I see you first.”
We watched the movie Gallipoli this afternoon. One of the stars was a very young Mel Gibson. I’m wondering how much of the story was true. It’s a war movie, but not a John Wayne version–more like a “how stupid and wasteful war can be” movie. The soldiers in the movie didn’t have a clue why they were fighting. And the ending was horrible–very sad and unsatisfying, but then again probably true to the way war sometimes feels and true to the reality of a senseless battle. Watching the movie made made me want to hang out with some Australians who call each other “mate.”
Surely most of the soldiers in Iraq know why they’re there. I pray that those who fight and those who die have a sense that they are there for a reason: to protect those of us back here in the States and to bring the possibility of freedom to the people of Iraq. It’s a blessing, in the middle of a confusing and horrible war, to at least have an ideal to give the fighting some meaning. I think that’s why people like Michael Moore and others who tell lies and distort facts in order to take that meaning away make me angry. If they were showing the courage to fight and even to die for what they believed in, I could respect them even if I disagreed with them. However, did Moore or any of his sycophants try to stop Saddam’s atrocities? Did he make a film about Saddam’s prisons and then try to show it in Iraq? Would he be interested in trying to make a film on the terrible things being done by Great Leader Kim Jong-Il to his own people? Or is he willing to go into China and investigate the charges of forced abortions? Is he even willing to go to Saudi Arabia and try to persuade the Saudi government to show his most recent film? No, he won’t because the muttawa would arrest and deport him so fast his head would spin–if they didn’t do something worse. He stays in the U.S. and Western Europe where we tolerate such propaganda as he makes in the interest of free speech. He’s free to say whatever he llikes here in the West, but I’m also free to say he’s wrong to try to take away our reason for fighting this war with false allegations and innuendo.