I was watching the old pre-9/11 Three Kings the other night — and was struck that there was a time when Hollywood, like the earlier books of many authors who later critiqued the Iraq War, was apparently furious at the United States for not removing Saddam (cf. the chants “Free Iraq!”). The theme of the movie — when George Clooney was not dodging a bankrupt media or Saddam’s poison gas mortars — was that we had left brave Shiites hanging to be butchered by Saddam’s henchmen, and apparently were unwilling to do the right thing and remove a murderous dictator and try to help the people of Iraq. The only common denominator between not doing enough in Three Kings and doing too much in Redacted, Syriana, Rendition, etc. …seems to have been that whatever the U.S. did was always wrong — whether too little or too much.