War Machine (2017)

This is a movie I wanted to talk about for a while now. I have to admit: I wanted to post it in 2017 (the year the movie came out), but not posting at all was no option either. It’s a movie of which you can have multiple political views, so let’s try to give you mine.

War Machine is a comedy/drama movie about the war in Afghanistan, directed by David Michôd. In all honesty, I had no idea who he was until I did research about him for this article. It was then when I found out he had directed the movie The Rover. This movie is a heartbreaking dystopian drama/action movie deserving of an article of its own, but let’s get back on track. War Machine has a large cast, but to me the most notable are Brad Pitt as general Glen McMahon, Ben Kingsly as the Afghan president, Anthony Michael Hall playing McMahon’s right hand man named Greg Pulver, Topher Grace as the civilian media advisor, Lakeith Stanfield as a corporal and Will Poulter as a sergeant. The latter, I am trying to keep an eye on.

The story is told in a narrative way by the Rolling Stones journalist Sean Cullen, played by Scoot McNairy who appears later on in the movie. The movie starts with the introduction of general McMahon and his entourage. The journalist Sean Cullen explains that the war in Afghanistan is an unwinnable war. Instead of ending that war, however, they fired the previous general and hired a new guy. That new guy is General McMahon, who thinks that he can do what his predecessor couldn’t: win the war. The United States is used to fight wars the old fashion way. In the past, nations fought each other with armies in uniform. Back then you knew who the enemy was, but the war in Afghanistan is different. The U.S. Army isn’t fighting regular armies anymore. In this war, the army invaded a country which they shouldn’t have and they ended up fighting the local people who are obviously no soldiers in uniforms. These people are what the U.S. army calls insurgents (or terrorists in Western media). What are insurgents? Sean Cullen summarizes it perfectly: normal people with normal clothing who pick up arms because you just invaded their country. The problem with an insurgency war is that it’s impossible to win. The only strategy is to convince the locals of the country you just invaded that you are there to help.

Yea… well good luck with that. I believe this is called counter-insurgency. You are showing the people that you are the better pick, rather than siding with the insurgents. You do it by installing a puppet government, by building schools, roads, taking care of power supplies and investing in local agriculture and in this case: heroin (I kid you not). The thing with counter-insurgency though, is that it does not work. You can’t help the people and be killing them at the same time.

For general McMahon, however, it hasn’t “worked” because it has not been done by him. He will make it work because his mission is to end the war in Afghanistan. Indeed, he was asked to come to Afghanistan to end it, but for the Obama administration, it meant the decrease of the American presence in Afghanistan, whereas for McMahon it meant winning the war. This, however, comes with a lot of obstacles in form of bureaucrats, cultural incomprehension, corruption and the straight up disinterest of the Afghan president in his own country. The general is tasked to make an assessment of what he needs to end the war, but he is not allowed to ask for more troops. You can imagine the problems he gets in when he goes and makes his assessment and asks for 40.000 more troops. It goes even further out of hand when he accidentally (on purpose) makes that assessment public.

The movie is a comedy at heart. There are so many over the top comical situations while the general and his entourage travel through the world to gain support and get shit done. However, the movie is sad at the same time because it is based on real-life events and actually existing problems. Although the movie focusses on the war in Afghanistan, for me it is much bigger than that. For me, the movie represents the frequent intervention or better said meddling of major powers within third world countries from which they do not understand the culture or the social relations within that country. The United States thought the same with Iraq. They went into that country, toppled the government and thought they could just put a puppet government while they drained Iraq of its resources. They did not understand that it was the dictator Saddam Hussein that kept the country together and I admit: with an iron fist. A few years later and the whole country was full of insurgencies and suicide bombing killing a lot of the local population. A problem that would later create ISIS that also moved to the Syrian Civil war.

I remembered that I was little and still on the elementary school when the United States invaded Iraq. Most of my friends were following the media or just repeating what their parents told them and said things like, ‘they had to invade Iraq because Saddam has connections with Al-Quida’, ‘they invaded Iraq to give the people democracy’ or ‘Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.’ Now many years later and they have not found any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the country has a fake democracy which discriminates their Sunni population resulting in extreme groups like ISIS and they still haven’t found any proof of Sadam having connections with Al-Qaeda. This I knew since I was a child. Sadam was a socialist militarist, the opposite of what a radical Islam group would want. Saddam Hussein belonged more on the list with others like Houari Boumedienne, Muammar al-Gaddafi and Gamal Abdel Nasser. Don’t get me wrong, none of these men are saints (including Saddam or the Taliban) but social change has to come from the people within and not from external invasion, especially when they have alternate motives.

To go back to the movie, you can imagine the problems the general encounters. As you know now, I am against the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq but watching the movie I can’t help to feel sorry for General McMahon. He truly seems like a genuinely nice guy who wants to help. The thing is you can’t help someone who sees you as the enemy. Even more so when he has many reasons to see you as one. I won’t spoil much of the movie but it is a movie I recommend. It did not really score well on IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes, but let that not fool you. It’s a must see and please keep an eye open for Russell Crowe cameo. It’s genius and shows how we as humans just can’t learn from our mistakes and are bound to repeat it.