Two characters, Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear), member of Pentagon Special Intelligence, and Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson), member of the CIA, present audiences with two examples of officials involved. Poundstone represents officials who knowingly lied and told others what they wanted to hear so that the war would have justification. Brown represents officials who had a grasp on the regional politics of Iraq, knew that organizations like the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) had the potential to turn Iraq into a quagmire, wanted to take decisive action to hold the country of Iraq together.
In the end, it's the press--the public relations aspect or the propaganda, that is just as frustrating if not as frustrating as the role Poundstone plays in the war. Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan), a journalist for the Wall Street Journal, is a reporter who wrote the news story citing a source with the pseudonym "Magellan" who provided information on the location of WMD in Iraq. Dayne wrote stories in the run-up to the war that led many people to accept the idea that Iraq had WMD.
Dayne is comparable to Judith Miller, the New York Times journalist who cited "American officials" and "American intelligence experts" as sources for her news story on Iraq's pursuit of nuclear weapons in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, a news story that turned out to be, at best, unreliable and, at worst, totally manufactured. "Magellan," Dayne's source, is evocative of "Curveball", an Iraqi citizen that was supposedly an engineer who provided intelligence on biological and chemical weapons in Iraq, which created elements of the pretense for invading Iraq.
Like Judith Miller, Lawrie Dayne would like most to believe that journalists are only to tell people what government officials think and not question the intelligence reports she is given. She would tell soldiers like Chief Miller that journalists are not to independently assess the information, question sources, and analyze information before reporting. (In fact, there is a key scene where Chief Miller takes great issue with the fact that Dayne reported what spotty intelligence as truth without fact checking it.)
It is surprising how Miller ends up utilizing the press as a means for getting out what really happened. Despite the fact that Miller is fully aware of Dayne's failure, he still believes the press can come through and fulfill its role as the Fourth Estate and report on the truth even if the truth counters the reality that those in power have engineered and wish to continue to maintain as truth.
Any film that puts images and ideas related to the war in Iraq (in fact all wars in the Middle East) in front of the general public and pushes them to reflect on the war in addition to being entertained is to be celebrated. After all, the news media don't exactly saturate Americans with images of war in Iraq and they most definitely do not provide narratives that are critical of the missions in Iraq. (Plus, how many Americans still believer there were WMD in Iraq?)
This is not a story of resistance. This is no story of Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia or former Marine Brian Casler or any other Iraq war resister whose story can be found in Dahr Jamail's book The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. This film takes on the overwhelming conventional wisdom that what leaders provide as reason for war prior to the beginning of war is often truth.
As "glorifying, propagandistic Newsweek cover stor[ies]" and "faux regret" is abandoned, as the dead innocent people and the destruction in Iraq made to seem entirely irrelevant, and as the real purpose of the war becomes mired in dogma that suggests the death and destruction will some day be worth it to Iraqis because they are being given the gift of freedom and democracy, a film like the Green Zone challenges that narrative asking critical questions.
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