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 A number of worthy movies made about Iraq and Afghanistan have failed at the box office. "Stop-Loss" may be the breakthrough. It's full of attractive young actors of both genders, it's produced by MTV films and its main characters are from a Texas town and it includes a lot of stirring "action". Getting a boost with a front page review from the New York Times won't hurt either. The films centers on Sgt. Brandon King. He's been stop-lossed, ordered back into a war theater even though his enlistment contract is up. Right in the trailer he says he's not going back. Then he finds that's not so easy. Most of the reviews say the movie is simply about the injustice of the "stop-loss" policy. It's much more than that. The movie is totally anti-Iraq war, not on the level of overt politics, but in what it shows and what it leave out. None of the soldiers ever talk about the reasons for the war, their sole motivation is to protect their friends in their unit. None of them ever has a good word for any Iraqis. They're all "hajis". The Iraqis we're liberating don't exist. Sgt. King explains to his family that you never have any idea who you're fighting. The usual scenes of GI's patting kids on the head and giving them candy are nowhere to be found. There's some scenes in a veterans hospital with terribly wounded veterans. Not the stuff to win new recruits. And any movie where a lead character shouts, "F… the President" is taking things to a whole new level. Ritter RegretsRitter was worring about VX, a terrifying substance, that was dramatized in the movie "The Rock". In '98 fragments were found of ballistic missile which seemed to have traces of VX. A lab in Aberdeen, MD issued a report that said it was sure that the rocket warheads indeed had weaponized VX. The Iraqis denied it claiming that they had experimented with VX, had never been able to make it stable and had abandoned work on it. Ritter and chemical weapons experts thought they had a smoking gun and were angry when their boss Richard Butler, sat on the report. Ritter decided to leak the information on VX and made contact with right-wingers to get it out. That's when the dinner with Chalabi. He makes some interesting observations about Chalabi, but what's more interesting is what he says about VX. "As for the Aberdeen VX lab report, the Iraqi government in the end had been telling the truth. It had not succeeded in stabilizing VX nerve agent, and it had never filled any weapons with the agent. Far from representing "incontrovertible evidence" of Iraqi duplicity, the Aberdeen lab results were flawed." Ritter says "I was wrong to have pushed so hard to have the lab results made public." It's good to have this laid to rest. At the time the VX controversy was an important element in the general hysteria about Saddam. Ritter says it helped get the "Iraq Liberation Act" passed, a horrible boondoggle to give millions to Chalabi and other Iraqi knaves and fools.
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