But it is not merely McCain’s views on Iraq policy that mark him as an überhawk. He has also advocated hardline policies toward Iran, Syria, and North Korea, and has even staked out confrontational positions toward such major powers as China and Russia. The evidence suggests that a McCain administration would be even more reckless and aggressive than the current one.

McCain did not enter Congress as a militant hawk. During the 1980’s and early 90’s, his reputation as a Republican foreign-policy maverick was well deserved. He was one of the few Republicans to criticize Ronald Reagan’s decision to send U.S. troops to Lebanon in 1982. To McCain, such a murky and dangerous mission that lacked any connection to important U.S. security interests was all too reminiscent of the Vietnam debacle. To advocates of a more selective and cautious strategy, McCain’s skepticism about the Lebanon mission was understandable, given his horrific experience as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam for five years. His opposition to the Lebanon venture was vindicated in October 1983 when 241 Marines perished in a truck-bombing of their barracks in Beirut.

In the initial post-Cold War period, McCain continued to advocate a policy that appealed to cautious realists. True, he supported the Gulf War, but only after an initial period of agonizing reluctance, and his response to the U.S. intervention in Somalia the next year was unrelentingly hostile, particularly when that mission expanded from the original goal of providing humanitarian relief to starving Somalis into an amorphous nation-building enterprise led by the United Nations. Once again, his skepticism appeared vindicated when 18 Army Rangers died in a firefight against the forces of one of the numerous feuding factions in Mogadishu.

Still, there were troubling signs that he might not be the cautious realist that his positions on the Lebanon and Somalia missions suggested. For example, as evidence mounted in 1993 and 1994 that North Korea was pursuing a nuclear-weapons program, McCain embraced an extremely hawkish position. He suggested that the United States consider air strikes against the Yongbyon reactor complex and other North Korean military targets if Pyongyang did not immediately abandon its nuclear activities. When the Clinton administration negotiated the 1994 Agreed Framework under which North Korea pledged to freeze its program in exchange for aid from the United States and its East Asian allies, McCain grumbled that the arrangement was “all carrots and no sticks.”

The following year, he endorsed U.S. air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs, albeit after another period of hesitation. The civil war convulsing Bosnia should have been precisely the kind of conflict that a cautious realist would have wanted us to avoid. America had no significant economic or strategic interests at stake in that internecine struggle, yet McCain advocated U.S. involvement, apparently for no better reasons than bloodshed was occurring and NATO’s credibility appeared to be at stake.

Senator McCain’s hawkish posture involving Balkan issues deepened when the Clinton administration pushed for U.S.-led military action to compel Serbia to relinquish control over Kosovo. Unlike many of his Republican colleagues in Congress who argued that America had no interests that justified intervention on behalf of the rebel Muslim “Kosovars,” McCain endorsed military action—even more vigorously than the Clinton administration did. During the 1999 war, NATO forces relied entirely on high-altitude bombing of Serbian targets, but Senator McCain wanted to send in ground forces. His criticism that Clinton’s policy was insufficiently bold foreshadowed his critique of the Bush administration’s strategy in Iraq.

Since the dawn of the 21st century, Senator McCain has been among the most hawkish Republican political figures. That became evident in 2002 when McCain proposed that the United States openly threaten to use military force unless Pyongyang capitulates on the nuclear issue. “After first responding appropriately to North Korean violations of the [1994] agreement and refusing even to discuss with North Korea its extortion demands,” wrote McCain in the January 20, 2003, issue of the Weekly Standard, “the administration now appears to have embraced, and in some respects exceeded, the style and substance of the Clinton administration’s diplomacy.” He was especially perturbed that President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell “publicly ruled out the use of force, although force could eventually prove to be the only means to prevent North Korea from acquiring a nuclear arsenal.”

It was also clear that he did not care much about the views of other countries in East Asia, sneering that they should “spare us the usual lectures about American unilateralism.” Noting that we would “prefer the company of North Korea’s neighbors” in a military campaign, he emphasized that “we will make do without it if we must.” The “neighbors” to which the senator referred include Japan and South Korea—Washington’s most prominent allies in East Asia for more than half a century.

Given the possibility of a McCain administration confronting the still-unresolved North Korean nuclear issue, these allies have ample reason to be apprehensive, for McCain’s views regarding North Korea have not become noticeably less belligerent since early 2003. He has remained a staunch critic of the six-party talks—the diplomatic process involving North Korea, the United States, Japan, China, Russia, and South Korea that is attempting to resolve the nuclear problem through negotiations. Policy toward North Korea is one area in which a McCain administration would almost certainly be more confrontational than what we have witnessed during the Bush years.

The same is true regarding Iran’s nuclear program. McCain has received widespread criticism for a “joke” at an April 2007 campaign stop in which he sang “bomb bomb bomb, bomb-bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann.” But his nonjoking comments are only marginally less troubling. He has stated repeatedly that an Iran with nuclear weapons poses an “unacceptable risk” to regional and global stability. “There is only one thing worse than military action, and that is a nuclear armed Iran.”

Perhaps most ominously, McCain has long been an advocate of preemptive war against “rogue regimes.” A story in USA Today (March 26) featured the following comment: “Standing by while an odious regime with a history of support to terrorism develops weapons whose use by terrorists could literally kill millions of Americans is not a choice. It is an abdication.”

McCain was strongly supportive of the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein. When it became evident that U.S. expectations of a rapid success in creating a stable, democratic Iraq were unrealistic, though, he did not join a majority of Americans in turning against the war. Already in November 2003, he was calling for the deployment of at least another division, “giving us the necessary manpower to conduct a focused counterinsurgency campaign across the Sunni triangle.”

As U.S. military fortunes in Iraq deteriorated, he became more strident in his advocacy of escalation. And he never shrank from the probable costs in treasure and blood. In a speech to the American Enterprise Institute in November 2005, he stated:

Securing ever-increasing parts of Iraq and preventing the emergence of new terrorist safe havens will require more troops and money. It will take time, probably years, and mean more American casualties. Those are terrible prices to pay. But with the stakes so high, I believe we must choose the strategy with the best chance of success.

McCain regarded President Bush’s decision a little more than a year later to implement the “Surge” as a vindication of his own strategy. He then went to extraordinary lengths to portray the Surge as a success. On a visit to Iraq in mid-2007, for example, he announced that the security environment was vastly improved, citing his ability to stroll down several streets near a Baghdad market in safety. What McCain failed to mention was that he was accompanied by more than 100 heavily armed U.S. troops while several missile-laden helicopters hovered overhead.

Iraq’s ongoing instability raises concerns about McCain’s proposal for a long-term U.S. troop presence. He gave his political opponents ammunition earlier this year when he encountered a question at a political rally about the possibility that U.S. troops might have to stay in Iraq for 50 years. McCain’s flippant response was “make it a century.”

Republicans vehemently argue that critics have taken his comment out of context. The senator made it clear in subsequent remarks that he was not proposing turning the Iraq conflict into the 21st century’s version of the Hundred Years War. Rather, he was suggesting a reduced, long-term U.S. military presence once Iraq became stable and peaceful. His model for that strategy is the U.S. troop presence in South Korea, which is now in its 55th year following the armistice that ended the Korean War.

But that is not exactly reassuring. Iraq is nothing like South Korea—a cohesive society that welcomed U.S. military protection from communist North Korea, which had already created a bloodbath on the Korean peninsula in a failed attempt to compel reunification.

American forces in South Korea have never had to confront an armed insurgency or the ever-present prospect of civil war between ethno-religious factions. The situation in Iraq is obviously not comparable. When one thinks of a long-term occupation of Iraq (even with reduced forces), a closer analogy is the dangerous and frustrating British mission in Northern Ireland from the late 1960’s through the 90’s.

Although McCain insists that Iraq is the “central front” in the War on Terror, he seems somewhat hazy about the specifics of the threat of radical Islam. As a member of a senatorial delegation visiting Iraq earlier this year, he erroneously accused Iran of aiding Al Qaeda and suffered the embarrassment of an on-camera correction by his friend and fellow überhawk, Sen. Joe Lieberman, that Tehran was aiding “Shiite extremists,” not the Sunni zealots of Al Qaeda. Yet, during a Senate hearing a few weeks later, he committed a similar gaffe, describing Al Qaeda as a Shiite group, and then adding “Sunni, Shiite, whatever.”

Mistakes about such basic facts are both surprising and troubling coming from someone who repeatedly touts his foreign-policy experience and credentials. Unfortunately, those verbal blunders may reflect more than rhetorical sloppiness. They are indicative of McCain’s tendency to conflate disparate movements, regimes, and problems. Troublesome regimes such as those in Iran, Syria, and North Korea pose challenges for U.S. foreign policy, but lumping them together as rogue states obscures more than it illuminates.

John McCain harbors a barely disguised hostility toward China, arguing that her growing economy and military modernization pose a great threat to the United States. On several occasions, he has cited China’s rise as a justification for even greater U.S. military spending. Most independent experts estimate Beijing’s military budget to be between $50 and $75 billion, and the Pentagon contends it is between $84 and $125 billion. At any rate, McCain considers the amount excessive for China’s legitimate defense needs. Yet he does not view the U.S. military budget (including supplementals for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) of nearly $800 billion to be excessive.

He also advocates provocative symbolic snubs of the Chinese government. For example, he criticized President Bush’s decision to attend the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, because of human-rights abuses.

Cato Institute foreign-policy analyst Malou Innocent concedes that Beijing’s authoritarianism is troubling, but she notes that “Senator McCain appears to preclude the possibility of building a constructive relationship with China unless it becomes fully democratic.” That attitude puts at risk America’s extensive economic relationship with China as well as ignores the numerous issues on which we need China’s help—most notably in trying to defuse the North Korean and Iranian crises. This is yet another area in which a McCain presidency would likely be more confrontational and destabilizing than the Bush presidency.

McCain seems friendly to China, though, compared to his attitude toward Russia. He advocates NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia, over Moscow’s strident objections. “Western nations should make clear that the solidarity of NATO, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, is indivisible and that the organization’s doors remain open to all democracies committed to the defense of freedom.” McCain strongly supports the Georgian government’s feud with Russia over the status of two secessionist regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, even though there are no discernible American interests at stake in that dispute.

Combined with McCain’s penchant for needlessly provocative policies toward both small adversarial states and major powers is his unwillingness to reconsider long-standing U.S. security commitments around the world. He has enthusiastically promoted the continuation of NATO, even though the original mission of that alliance disappeared with the demise of the Soviet empire. Indeed, McCain has been a vocal proponent of NATO’s eastward expansion, a process that entails increasingly murky and dangerous U.S. security commitments to small client states that add little or nothing to America’s own military capabilities.

McCain seems to harbor a preference for initiating or maintaining U.S. obligations to parasitic security clients. A prime example is his willingness to continue the American alliance with and troop presence in South Korea—the model for his long-term designs on Iraq. His invocation of South Korea highlights the fallacy of his overall approach to security strategy. Washington has provided a lucrative defense subsidy to South Korean taxpayers for more than half a century. Today, South Korea has twice the population and an economy 40 times larger than North Korea, its only plausible enemy. Yet South Korea remains heavily dependent on the United States for her security. That is a wonderful deal for South Korean taxpayers, but not so much for their American counterparts. For a self-proclaimed conservative to embrace such a needless, expensive burden is both surprising and maddening.

[amazonify]1933995165[/amazonify]The foreign policy that John McCain now advocates is reckless and promiscuously interventionist. If he were a university student majoring in international relations or security studies, he would deserve a resounding F for his analysis of the crucial issues that the United States has confronted over the past 14 or 15 years. After a promising start, his performance has steadily deteriorated. The last thing that America needs is an even more aggressive and incompetent steward of foreign policy than George W. Bush has been.

Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign-policy studies at the Cato Institute, is the author of eight books on international affairs, including Smart Power: Toward a Prudent Foreign Policy for America.

This article first appeared in the July 2008 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

While Rockford voters lean Democratic, they might still be swayed in a presidential election by a Republican who took seriously the causes of the current recession: a costly and unnecessary war; the falling dollar; rising gas prices; overextended credit, both personal and mortgage; and the outsourcing of U.S. jobs.

John McCain is not that candidate. He has hitched his wagon to the Iraq war and expressed his desire to “bomb bomb bomb, bomb-bomb Iran”; he does not dare say much about the subprime mortgage debacle, lest his eventual Democratic opponent use the opportunity to bring up the Keating Five; he has told manufacturing workers across the country that their jobs are going overseas and are never coming back; and, like every other national politician of both parties, he knows that the falling dollar is about the only thing propping up what remains of the U.S. economy, so any remedy to fix the decline might well be worse than the disease. If that means even higher gas prices going into November, McCain will just have to take his chances.

The factory worker who has seen his job shipped overseas might (all other things being equal) turn to a Democratic candidate who, at least compared with McCain, talks tough on trade and outsourcing. (Of course, the fact that the Democratic nominee will be Barack Obama means that all other things are not equal.) But what about the factory owners—not the stockholders of multinational corporations but the businessmen at the helm of the small to medium-sized factories that are the backbone of U.S. manufacturing?

Like Dean Olson, most factory owners here tend to favor Republican candidates. With the economy headed south and a Republican in the White House, that support might well erode, but in Rockford, all of the signs are pointing the other way. Is the prospect of Democratic control of the economy so terrifying that it makes four more years of war, high fuel prices, and recession look like the lesser of two evils?

Those concerns are not irrelevant, but the larger part of the electoral calculus may be that, for many small manufacturers, the softness of the economy will not be an issue this fall. The dollar has fallen so far that, even with the concomitant rise in fuel costs, American manufactured goods look cheap to customers in Europe. We are nowhere close to wiping out the recent trade deficit in manufactured goods, and manufacturers should be cautious about expecting the (relatively) good times to last, but if anyone can continue the Bush economic legacy, it is John McCain.

As Mr. Olson points out, “I’d rather be running a small business right now than Ford Motor Company, wondering how to compensate for the loss of truck sales because of gas prices.”

The upshot is that, as in 2004, social issues might well play a larger role. The California Supreme Court’s May ruling on homosexual “marriage”; the move toward “therapeutic cloning,” including the creation of human-animal hybrids to grow organ tissue; and, of course, the decades-long battle over abortion—all are issues that John McCain, a political chameleon, might try to make his own. And socially conservative small businessmen, doing well enough at the moment, will feel more comfortable casting their vote for a cynical politician than for an ideologue who comes down on the wrong side of all of those issues.

Yet McCain is not likely to try to stop the spread of homosexual “marriage” or “therapeutic cloning” once elected; moreover, he supports embryonic stem-cell research and may even undo what little good Bush did.

The fact that manufacturing can recover while the economy is sliding into recession gives the lie to the idea that the American economy is a monolith. Multinational corporations have understood this for some time, and used it to their advantage—to the detriment of the American working class and small manufacturers. When the hard times hit, small manufacturers never get the consideration that the multinationals do. “When Rockford Acromatics starts to falter, I guarantee you there will be no federal bailout,” Dean Olson wryly notes.

It is time to turn the tables—to leverage the weak dollar to bring in business from overseas that can finance new equipment and processes that can put American manufacturers not on par with other countries technologically, but significantly ahead.

Let McCain extol the virtues of outsourcing and retraining for the “information economy” and the “healthcare industry.” The small manufacturers who once made America the economic envy of the world know that a country that does not make things has no real say in its economic future. By concentrating less on the American economy and focusing instead on planning for the future of their own businesses, they could do more to revive the economic fortunes of the United States than John McCain could ever dream of doing.

Scott P. Richert is Chronicles' executive editor.

This article first appeared in the July 2008 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Modern American conservatism has been marked by a fascination with ideology. Despite arguments that conservatism is not an ideology or is opposed to all ideology, American conservatives have regularly attempted to systematize their own beliefs. Moreover, they have often attempted to define themselves by reference to ideologies they oppose. Opposition to Soviet communism played a major role in uniting conservatives of many different varieties throughout the Cold War. More recently, neoconservative apparatchiks such as Norman Podhoretz, Victor Davis Hanson, and Christopher Hitchens have sought to portray President George W. Bush’s “War on Terror” as part of a protracted global struggle against “Islamofascism,” and Jonah Goldberg has made a bid to become the conservative movement’s Mikhail Suslov by spending four years writing a book arguing that “fascism” is the intellectual taproot of American liberalism.

Somewhat overlooked in all of this has been the ideology that has enjoyed the most political success in the modern era: socialism, the object of this enjoyable study by Thomas Fleming.

The reader of a book as brief as this will hardly learn all there is to know about socialism, but he will encounter a thoughtful overview of this important subject, from such forerunners as Plato, Christian millenarians, and Enlightenment philosophes down to the present day. What is more, he will encounter an original thinker and witty writer. Any book that contains such lines as “Rousseau had a very high regard for freedom, especially his own” and “The Fabians may have believed in economic and social equality, but they refused to abandon their belief in the superiority of intellectuals” is well worth the read.

[amazonify]0761426329[/amazonify]Fleming describes Sir William Harcourt’s observation that “We are all socialists now” as “an accurate, if somewhat extreme, description of all the major parties of Europe and the Americas.” Despite the dismal failure of avowedly socialist parties in America, Fleming notes that American socialist Norman Thomas “lived long enough to see most of his socialist policies enacted by Democrats and Republicans.” Citing such facts as the inflation-adjusted 500-percent increase in government spending on education over the last four decades, and the federal government’s ownership of 28 percent of all land in America, Fleming argues that “the United States has developed its own tradition of democratic socialism, but rarely under that name.” Indeed, as Fleming notes, in the United States “socialist parties have always been misleadingly described as ‘liberal.’” The ideology undergirding American liberalism is in fact socialism, not “fascism,” a defunct left-right hybrid that combined “a belief in the nation and its traditions” with domestic policies that were “primarily socialist.” A “belief in the nation and its traditions” is markedly absent from the rhetoric of many American liberals, which is the major reason the Democratic Party has been at a disadvantage in so many recent electoral contests. Indeed, the leading contender (as of this writing) for the Democratic nomination, Barack Obama, has a wife who did not feel pride in America until her husband began winning primaries and a minister who prefers “God damn America” to “God bless America.”

Fleming sees the essence of socialism as egalitarianism—an emphasis on “the duty of society to ensure social and economic fairness and equality.” This is both socialism’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness. It is socialism’s greatest strength because the enduring inequality that is part of the human condition means that “the socialist revolution will never run out of enemies.” The persistence of inequality explains the “protean” nature of socialism and why “there are an almost infinite variety of socialist experiments.” Conversely, human nature means that socialism’s vision will never succeed: “Ever since Plato’s time, socialist theorists have had to wrestle with the fact that human nature may not be up to the demands put on it in an ideal society.” The desire to create the perfect society by eliminating the imperfect led to the greatest blot on the Marxist record, the unequaled mass murder that accompanied communism. But the reality of human nature means that even peaceful socialist experiments will inevitably end in disappointment and failure.

The initial focus of socialism was on economics, and socialism has certainly had a profound impact on economic life around the world. Every major industrialized nation has some form of governmental safety net, and Fleming observes that “some aspects of socialism . . . are probably inevitable in the vast countries and complex economies created by liberals and nationalists over the centuries.” But too much taxation and regulation kills economic initiative, and these days not many socialists are calling for nationalized industry and central planning. As an example of the dead end to which socialist economics leads, Fleming cites Sweden, where in the mid-70’s Ing­mar Bergman was being taxed at a rate of 139 percent. By the 1980’s, inflation in Sweden was twice the European average, growth and productivity were stagnant, and taxes represented 55.3 percent—and government debt, 75 percent—of GNP. Even the enthusiastically socialist Swedes felt the need to cut back on spending and taxes, and by 2005 government debt had dropped to 52 percent of the GNP. Of course, far more dramatic departures from socialism occurred elsewhere, and the “1980s witnessed a virtual free market revolution” with the ascendancy of Reagan, Thatcher, Chirac, and Kohl. The end result has been something of a stalemate, with none of these figures enjoying “major success in slowing, much less reversing, the moral and social revolution that had taken place,” but with their socialist opponents emerging from the 1980’s having accepted the “proposition that the market should be allowed to operate within more or less strict limits.”

If the socialist revolution has arrived at something of an impasse in the economic arena, it has been making great advances on other fronts—in the culture, in the family, and in its war against the nation-state. Fleming rightly sees Antonio Gram­sci, who died in one of Mussolini’s prisons, as “one of the most influential socialist thinkers of the twentieth century,” and the “long march through the institutions” to which he gave birth has been spectacularly successful in turning the culture-forming institutions of the West toward the left. In America, the Gramscian revolution was carried out under the auspices of members of the Frankfurt School such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, who fled Hitler to ensconce themselves at the New York School for Social Research. The Frankfurt School was the intellectual wellspring of the New Left of the 1960’s, which has gradually succeeded in undermining traditional morality and habits of thought in the United States.

Cultural leftism hardly began in the 60’s, though. The Marxist left has, from its inception, been hostile to both the family and the nation-state. Engels “saw the traditional family as oppressive,” and “there has been a strong tendency in socialist thinkers . . . to deny legitimacy to the institutions of marriage and family and celebrate sexual freedom.” Gunnar and Alva Myrdal campaigned in the 1930’s for “aggressive sex education for all children” and “legal contraception and abortion to liberate women from childbearing.” The Myrdals’ vision now holds sway throughout the Western world. Marx called “for the end of the nation-state” with the “ultimate goal, already anticipated by the Communist Manifesto, of world government.” Although we are not there yet, NAFTA and GATT have served to undermine American sovereignty, and many of the same forces that helped push us into those supranational compacts are now pushing for a North American Union modeled after the European Union. Interestingly, many of the strongest proponents of NAFTA and GATT were not socialists at all, but classical liberals.

One of the great strengths of Fleming’s book is that it demonstrates that, in spite of the important contributions by such seminal figures as Friedrich Hayek to the critique of socialism, classical liberalism remains an uneven opponent of socialism—and is sometimes even a kindred spirit. Fleming cites German socialist Eduard Bernstein, who

understood that socialism, rather than being in conflict with basic liberal principles, could be seen as an extension of them. Liberals had worked to end restrictions imposed by religion and aristocracy. What remained was to end the oppression based on wealth, and this could only be done by gradual and democratic means.

Those who follow John Stuart Mill’s dictum that “the despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement” are, at best, unreliable defenders of such prime targets of cultural Marxism as the family, tradition, and religion. Indeed, hostility to tradition was the animating spirit behind the destructive work of Gramscian Marxists in both America and Europe. And many of those who claim to draw on the classical-liberal tradition, such as the editors of Reason, are unremittingly hostile to traditional morality. Fleming’s critique of classical liberalism extends even to the cornerstone of Austrian economics, the subjective theory of value, which Fleming sees as mistaken because “most individual preferences are determined not by individuals but by families, friends, communities, social fashions, and local and national traditions.”

If classical liberals are unreliable opponents of cultural Marxism, they are full-fledged allies in the Marxist war against the nation-state. Marx and Engels saw free trade as the first step toward the elimination of the nation-state, an insight shared by liberal thinker Frédéric Bastiat, who wrote that free trade would lead to the “peaceful, ecumenical, and indissoluble union of the peoples of the world.” Fleming offers this revealing quote from Hayek to illustrate the classical liberal aversion to national borders:

It is neither necessary nor desirable that national boundaries should mark sharp differences in standards of living, that membership of a national group should entitle [it] to a share of the cake altogether different from that in which members of other groups share.

In practical terms, America is being subjected to free trade and mass immigration, despite the skepticism of the general populace, because the heirs of both Marx and Hayek are in agreement that national borders are artificial and undesirable.

Fleming foresees socialism continuing to expand in new directions. He notes that socialist parties

embraced feminism, sexual freedom, anti-colonialism, and minority rights, and by the end of the last century a typical socialist agenda might include protection of endangered species, same-sex marriage, Third World development, and global government.

Indeed, environmentalism, with its almost unlimited scope for new governmental regulation and control, is likely to be particularly enticing:

Green parties are generally made up of socialists and leftists who added environmentalism to their agenda without giving up their commitment to Marxism. . . . It is very possible that the next generation of socialists will be far more green than red.

Unsurprisingly, Fleming’s overall assessment of socialism is negative. Even the socialists who have avoided mass violence have produced societies “run by meddlesome do-gooders whose interventions in the free market and in private life have produced dullness, sterility, and dependency.” However, he concedes its achievements, including “often soften[ing] the hard lot of those who have failed to succeed in competitive societies.” He credits Marx with seeing “what classical liberals refused to see, that industrial capitalism had undermined all the security enjoyed by poor people in traditional societies.” He also notes that, “If liberal opponents of socialism usually win the arguments about efficiency, they are defeated rather easily on arguments about justice and morality.” Fleming argues that seeking to reduce society to Ludwig von Mises’ dictum “the means by which each individual member seeks to attain its own ends” will have little appeal outside the libertarian echo chamber.

Fleming also suggests that the “dullness, sterility, and dependency” wrought by socialism will be found in any mass society organized along bureaucratic lines, including our own. Fleming’s own sympathies lie with those resisting such a mass society, and he deals with the often overlooked thinkers who sought a Third Way between socialism and unfettered capitalism, who desired

a society made up of small farmers and shopkeepers, where local and regional cultural traditions were preserved and culture was more than a product sent out to radio stations and movie theaters.

Many will contend that any effort to recreate such a society is quixotic, but since the men who secured our independence from Great Britain and wrote our Constitution lived in such a society, it at least seems worth a try.

[Socialism • by Thomas Fleming • Tarrytown, NY: Marshall Cavendish Benchmark; 144 pp., $39.93]

Tom Piatak writes from Cleveland, Ohio.

This article first appeared in the July 2008 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

[amazonify]B00005JPS8[/amazonify]It is always reassuring when a big-budget superhero film fulfills its responsibility to edify the young. Iron Man, the latest Marvel comic book to come to life on the big screen, does just that. This movie teaches youngsters that it’s righteously cool to kill Middle Easterners by the caravanload.

Iron Man is, in short, a mechanized wog obliterator, if I may borrow Mrs. Clinton’s mot juste as to what she would like to do to Iran if things got out of order. And we wonder why Middle Easterners hate us. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning.

Iron Man is really Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), an arms manufacturer who never saw a war he didn’t like. We first meet him as he skims the Afghan desert in the backseat of a Humvee while sipping a Scotch and joking merrily with the soldiers accompanying him. He is on a mission to assess how well his weapons are slaughtering the local wogs. But the joke’s on him. His Humvee is blasted by one of his own weapons stolen by a troop of cave-dwelling Afghan . . . insurgents? Terrorists? It is hard to say. In a futile attempt to avoid offending overseas markets, the film never utters the words Muslim, Islam, or Al Qaeda. Lots of luck.

Stark wakes in a makeshift clinic where Yinsen (Shaun Toub), an Afghan doctor and one of the few good wogs, has installed an electromagnet in the center of his chest. Stark’s body has been perforated by shrapnel from one of his own missiles. The metal fragments are intelligent. If they don’t kill the victim upon penetration, they gravitate to his heart to do the job later. The gizmo Yinsen has installed deflects their deadly mission. It also works as a handy symbol. Yinsen has given Stark the heart he never had. Before becoming Iron Man, he becomes Tin Man, searching for an Ozian rainbow.

And so the cynical arms manufacturer begins to rethink his callous ways. He learns that the doctor is as much a prisoner as himself and, worse, that the bad Afghans are threatening to kill his family if he doesn’t keep Stark alive. They want the “most famous mass murderer in America,” as they respectfully address him, to build them one of his ominously named Jericho missiles. It seems they have some more walls to set a-tumble. Under the pretense of following their wishes, the ingenious Stark builds a weaponized metal suit instead to make his escape. Although he fully intends to bring Yinsen with him, the doctor, true to his good wog status, happily plays Gunga Din and sacrifices himself so Stark can blast his way to safety.

Once back in America, a chastened Stark holds a press conference announcing that his company will no longer make weapons but turn to peaceful pursuits. Understandably, his board of directors and second-in-command are thrown into a tizzy and take the company away from him. For reasons not entirely clear to me, Stark repairs to his home lab and, with the help of a robot more solicitous than Luke Skywalker’s R2D2, improves upon his original metal suit, transforming it into a gleaming red and gold mannequin reminiscent of Hollywood’s Oscar award. This comes in handy when he learns from CNN that the bad wogs have invaded Yinsen’s village and are forcing the men to join their campaign. The bald, beardless, and blatantly un-Islamic leader, Raza (Faran Tahir), has monomaniacal ambitions to be the next Genghis Khan, ruling an empire that will extend from Arabia to the Pacific. Stark suits up metallically, blasts off, and swoops down on these nasties, killing them right and left. But, of course, he does so with a precision that guarantees the safety of the innocent. At one point the bad wogs take hold of a group of women and children, using them as shields against the titanium warrior. No problem. Stark simply programs the mini-multi-missile launcher built into his arm and targets them so exactingly that the shells only explode the villains, leaving the innocents they are clutching wholly unscathed. It is a variation on the smart bombs we used to hear about, the ones that only killed the bad wogs and left the good eternally grateful for our intervention. Well, what are comic books for if not dreaming?

I suppose I wouldn’t mind all this if it were happening in some comic book never-never land. But this action takes place in present-day Afghanistan where, in pursuit of a just goal, our actual Armed Forces have inadvertently wrought incalculable havoc on innocent people. This is not fantasy land; it is the sorry site of our failure to capture Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda forces because of our current administration’s infamously wrongheaded decision to wage a larger war in Iraq. To make this the background of a children’s fantasy is flatly obscene. Worse, it could conceivably lead our young to believe in the myth of American omnipotence, setting them up to countenance a future administration’s military folly.

Speaking of obscene, why in a children’s movie do we need to watch the hero casually bed a brazen babe on the make? Although their coupling is shown in shadow, even an eight-year-old would not mistake it for a friendly wrestling match. Or does the fact that the woman is a feisty reporter who learned to scorn America’s Middle Eastern policies at left-wing Brown University justify screwing her?

[amazonify]B0015OKWKI[/amazonify]The Visitor, a film of exquisite charm and poignance directed by Thomas McCarthy, turns the geopolitical tables. Here, the Middle East and Africa invade New York City. This will not surprise anyone who has walked the streets of the city’s five boroughs, of course. Nevertheless McCarthy has rendered this invasion with an astonishing intimacy that forces us to rethink our positions on the fraught issue of immigration.

The film begins with the portrait of a wan WASP not living but rather existing in suburban Connecticut. So wan is Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) that we don’t even see him at first as McCarthy’s camera glides about the empty rooms of his chaste and chilly home. Then the doorbell rings, breaking the genteel hush, and, finally, Walter appears, a bespectacled man in his early 60’s who would seem inoffensively mild were it not for his perpetually guarded expression. In glancing asides, we slowly learn that he is a widower who has not yet come to terms with the loss of his wife, a concert pianist. As if to sustain her presence, he has embarked upon piano lessons for himself, but it’s going dismally. His instructor tries to console him. “Learning an instrument at your age is difficult, especially if you don’t possess a natural gift for it,” she says, in an entirely misconceived attempt at kindness. Walter merely stares at her wordlessly through his black-rimmed glasses. He is trying to reconnect to the lost rhythm of his former life, only to suffer this fatuous consolation.

More than piano lessons, Walter needs to be shaken from his soul-destroying depression. On cue, the shaking begins the next day. Teaching global economics at a Connecticut university, Walter has allowed himself to become that most useless of things, an uninterested and uninteresting professor. He hasn’t prepared a class for years, nor has he written much of anything since publishing the four books that established him earlier in his career. When his chairman asks him to give a talk at a New York University conference on global economics, he reluctantly agrees and takes himself to his Greenwich Village apartment located near the school. Upon entering the apartment, he discovers he has unexpected visitors. He hasn’t been there in some time, and in his absence a young couple have taken up residence. After a few fearful moments on both sides, Walter and his uninvited guests figure out what has happened. The couple were misled to believe they were subletting from a “friend.” Both are illegal aliens who have fled their home countries—Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) from Syria; his girlfriend, Zainab (Danai Gurira), from Senegal. They apologize, and Tarek offers to pay for their tenancy; Walter declines. They quickly pack their few things and leave. When Walter discovers them on the street a little later, desperately phoning their friends to find quarters for the night, he takes pity and invites them back into his apartment, saying they can stay until they find something else that suits them.

While they share the apartment, Walter becomes fascinated by Tarek’s talent on the djembe, a West African drum he plays professionally in various jazz clubs. Tarek offers to teach Walter how to play, and, with some coaxing, the reserved academic agrees. Things go fitfully at first, but this doesn’t deter Tarek. He’s a natural enthusiast and keeps encouraging Walter. “Walter,” he says, “I know you’re a very smart man, but with a drum you have to remember not to think. Thinking just screws it up.” This is Walter’s breakthrough. Soon after, he is joining Tarek, drumming in Central Park with other enthusiasts, often the only white guy in the group and certainly the only 60-year-old wearing a tie and sport jacket under a nylon windbreaker. I am usually not a fan of the don’t-think-just-be philosophy, but seeing the joy that overtakes Walter’s face in these sessions, I found it impossible not to respond to the life-affirming energy invading his long-stifled existence. Tarek’s trespass has colonized him with unexpected joy. Jenkins is marvelous in these scenes. He manages to convey both Walter’s awkwardness as a reserved, isolated intellectual and his growing exuberance as a man rediscovering his life’s rhythm.

This is one aspect of Walter’s return to life. There is another, however, and it has none of drumming’s appeal. When immigration authorities discover Tarek’s illegal status, they clap him in a detention center, a grim cement block of a building. Uncharacteristically, Walter wastes no time. He hires an immigration lawyer in an attempt to extricate Tarek from the Byzantine toils of INS regulations. He also sees to the needs of Tarek’s mother, who flies in from Michigan to help her son. Eventually, he even takes a leave of absence from his university to support Tarek. In short, he wrenches himself out of his guarded insularity, trying to shout down fate itself. It is his belated assertion that he is still alive.

It is tempting to dismiss this film for being foolishly sentimental about illegal immigration. But that’s too easy. McCarthy is not arguing ideology. He is on the side of individual humans. He recognizes that we are all visitors here, calling hopefully to one another across the borders that separate us, banking on what we share despite our differences.

My grandfather has congestive heart failure. I hate to say it, but I probably won’t see him this time next year. “Gramp,” as I’ve called him since I can remember, taught me how to shoot and hunt, taught me how to change the oil, taught me how to drive a truck, taught me how to run a trot line and how to shake a catalpa tree for worms. He helped me buy a hotrod and a Fender strat. His daddy’s gun sits by my bed, and I have paper money from Okinawa that he brought back from the War. For half of my life, we lived in the same house. I named a son (Carl) after him.

I sometimes wish he would have joined me in going over to the Lutheran church, but Gramp is a hardcore Baptist and just never was interested in learning why we do all of that standing up and sitting down, why we say some of the same words every week. (“The Lord be with you. / And with thy spirit.”) On the other hand, had he joined me in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, I wonder what he would have made of LCMS President Gerald B. Kieschnick’s signature slogan: “This is not your grandfather’s church.”

It was on the basis of that breathtaking statement that President Kiesch­nick launched Ablaze!™ in 2004—a “missions movement” designed to “share the Good News of Jesus with 100 million unreached or uncommitted people by . . . 2017.” From the get-go this business of counting “critical events,” as Kieschnick puts it, seemed very un-Lutheran. Tallying up decisions for Christ makes sense after a Billy Graham Crusade, but it does not square with the Augsburg Confession—a document once known in a Church that respected Her grandfathers.

“When one person gives a clear presentation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to another person,” says the Ablaze!™ website, “so that there is an opportunity for that person to respond, this activity ‘counts’ toward the 100 million goal.” But how is one to know whether he has participated in an activity that fits the bill? Here is some helpful guidance:

A congregation puts 1,500 flyers in the local paper. The 1,500 flyers do not count. But, any inquiries that came as a result of the flyers and opened the door for the congregation to share the Good News with an unreached or uncommitted person will count toward the 100 million goal.

Another thing that did not count was a long-running and surprisingly popular radio program called Issues, Etc.—“Talk radio for the thinking Christian.” Every weekday from three to six in the afternoon, and for two hours during a nationally syndicated broadcast on Sunday evenings, the Rev. Todd Wilken talked about current events, politics (Srdja Trifkovic was often interviewed on foreign affairs), popular culture, and—above all else—Lutheran theology. As Lutheran theology has something to do with “the Good News”—Lutheran churches were first called “evangelische”—it should come as no surprise that, quite often during Issues, Etc., the Gospel was “shared.” And while it is really impossible to “count” the work of the Holy Spirit, it is safe to say that the program produced results. An ever-growing audience testified to this. Countless lifelong Lutherans discovered their own Church’s doctrine and learned why we say those same words every week. Unbelievers called in with questions, and many became catechumens in Lutheran congregations. Issues, Etc. live broadcasts from parish halls across the heartland reflected the excitement of the faithful who had a renewed sense of their own identity.

When David Strand, a layman and the chairman of the LCMS Board of Communication Services, fired the Rev. Wilken and his veteran producer, Jeff Schwarz, on March 18 (Holy Tuesday), there was an immediate backlash. Over 7,500 signed a petition, and several districts (dioceses) issued formal complaints. President Clinton . . . er, Kieschnick was quick to declare that the decision “transpired with my awareness but neither by my order nor at my direction.” Soon thereafter, fellow LCMSer Mollie Hemingway wrote critically of the “Holy Tuesday Treachery” in the Wall Street Journal, tying this “critical event” to the theological aberrations of Ablaze!™. (As a regular guest on Issues, Etc., I was always cautioned never to speak ill of Ablaze!™ on the air.) President Kieschnick fired back a letter to the WSJ editor, explaining in carefully selected detail that this decision was all about money and denouncing Hemingway for suggesting that our synod is “deeply divided.” (How ridiculous!)

Speaking of money, even as the plan to ax Issues, Etc. was entering President Kiesch­nick’s “awareness,” one new LCMS congregation was using $25,000 in Ablaze!™ dollars to pay for billboards around suburban St. Louis that read, for example, “JeffersonHills Church sucks.” As KSDK NewsChannel 5 in St. Louis reported, “Beneath those messages is a hyphen, followed by ‘Satan,’ as if it’s a note from the biblical Prince of Darkness."

“I seen that thing and I about fell over,” one passerby told KSDK. “I just thought maybe some atheist group might have put it up, or something,” said another. “We’re getting a lot of responses,” said “Lead Pastor Steve Benke.”

Actually, I think President Kiesch­nick is right. This is not my grandfather’s church.

[Update: Issues, Etc. is back on the air as an independent program, 3-5 P.M. Central, thanks in part to the efforts of the Brothers of John the Steadfast. Check out the program's website, or subscribe via iTunes.]

Aaron D. Wolf is Chronicles' associate editor.

This article first appeared in the July 2008 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Bush's Whips, McCain's Scorpions
by Thomas Fleming

VIEWS

John McCain on Foreign Policy
by Ted Galen Carpenter
Even worse than Bush.

Neo-McCainism
by Leon Hadar
The highest stage of neoconservatism?

The Dream Ticket
by Srdja Trifkovic
The most dangerous man in America,
bankrolled by the most evil man in the world.

A Case of Russophobia
by Wayne Allensworth
Putin, Medvedev, and John McCain.

STORY

The Fortune Teller
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.
An excerpt from Mexico Way.

REVIEWS

The Forgotten Ideology
by Tom Piatak

Thomas Fleming: Socialism

plus

H.A. Scott Trask on Jack Beatty's Age of Betrayal:
The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900

Catharine Savage Brosman on X.J. Kennedy's In a Prominent Bar in
Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1955-2007

Wayne Allensworth on Paul Craig Roberts' and Lawrence M.
Stratton's The Tyranny of Good Intentions

CORRESPONDENCE

Letter From Rumania: What Civilization Remains
by Derek Turner

VITAL SIGNS

The Courts: Supreme Subjectivism and Arbitrary Abortion
by Kenneth Zaretzke

COLUMNS

The Bare Bodkin           
by Joseph Sobran

Under the Black Flag
by Taki Theodoracopulos

Heresies
by Aaron D. Wolf

The Rockford Files
by Scott P. Richert

In the Dark
Iron Man, The Visitor
by George McCartney

DEPARTMENTS

POLEMICS & EXCHANGES
AMERICAN PROSCENIUM
CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS

POETRY

Line to Circle and
On the Anniversary of
a Natural Disaster
by Jennifer Reeser

ON THE COVER

Cover by Sandy Faulkner.
Inside illustrations by Melanie Anderson.

[amazonify]B0013FSL1Q[/amazonify]On March 29, 2008, Suffolk County police officers vigorously fulfilled their sworn duty at the Smith Haven Mall in Lake Grove, New York. Alerted by the mall’s security professionals, they swooped down on a fearsome 80-year-old criminal, one Don Zirkel, former editor of the Tablet, a Catholic weekly published by the Diocese of Brooklyn. They charged Mr. Zirkel with the crime of protesting America’s occupation of Iraq, clapped him in a wheelchair, and whisked him out of the mall. They then took this perp to their precinct and duly booked him—protecting shoppers from the unconscionable distraction he had been causing. Once this criminal had been removed from the mall’s premises, the shoppers were free to return to their primary patriotic duty: consuming goods imported from China.

Zirkel was one of 250 demonstrators marching outside the mall. When he came inside for a cup of coffee, he was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned “4000 Soldiers, 1 Million Iraqis Dead, Enough.” Two security guards swiftly accosted him. They could not allow such a message to offend the mall’s customers, they explained. He would have to remove his T-shirt or turn it inside out. When Zirkel refused to comply, the police were called. It was all very legal, of course. As the manager of the mall explained, he has a duty to maintain “a pleasant shopping environment,” and Zirkel’s T-shirt was decidedly unpleasant. Evidently, the manager saw nothing unpleasant in the astonishing T-shirts hawked in several of the mall’s stores. One urged performing sexual congress as an assault; another suggested doing rather odd things with bodily wastes. These, you see, refrain from anything unpleasant, such as calling a halt to bombing raids.

I am sure the guards and the police were just following orders. Their quick response to Zirkel’s outrage and the public’s indifference to their actions illustrate once again that comfortably undraftable Americans do not want to know about Iraq. The powers that be, of course, are only too happy to defend their right to ignorance.

This incident explains why the recent Iraq-war movies have done so poorly at the box office. Most Americans are invincibly incurious about that distant desert country. And just to protect the remaining few who might harbor a bit of curiosity, our self-appointed media security guards are always at the ready. As I mentioned in a recent column, luminaries such as Bill O’Reilly, John Podhoretz, Michael Medved, and Matt Drudge simply will not tolerate the despoliation of our pleasant media environment. Whenever films such as In The Valley of Elah or Lions for Lambs arrive at theaters, the luminaries begin to flail and shout. Don’t go to this film. It’s unpatriotic, it’s junk, and—my favorite—it’s a bomb, a curious term to apply to a film that seeks to stop the bombing.

Kimberly Peirce’s disturbing new film, Stop-Loss, has met the same treatment at the hands of our ever-vigilant media guards. Although Peirce deliberately excludes pejorative political pronouncements in favor of dramatizing the private experience of a group of inarticulate young Iraq veterans, her film has been excoriated feverishly. Bill O’Reilly calls it—what else?—a “bomb.” Medved screams in his one-minute review, “Avoid it at all costs!” Podhoretz apparently heeded Medved’s advice. His review in the Weekly Standard recounts his nonattendance at the film. He did not go, he sneers, because he knew in advance just what it was about. Like all Hollywood films, it would allege that the only mature soldier is an AWOL soldier. No one should see such unpatriotic nonsense. Curiously, Podhoretz denounces the film for ennobling an AWOL sergeant. Had he not gone unpatriotically AWOL himself by avoiding the grave risk of attending a screening, he would have learned that this is not Peirce’s point at all.

Like the Smith Haven security goons, it seems our media guards are just following orders when they issue their nearly identically worded reviews. Although we can guess well enough who is issuing these orders, it would be sporting of the guards to name their commanders. We should know unequivocally whom to thank for protecting us from the truth.

Stop-Loss, as you may have guessed, is not unpatriotic. It does not portray our troops as crazed killers and depraved rapists. Peirce strives instead to give us the war at eye level as experienced by a group of average young Texans—boys, really, much like her brother who served in Iraq and on whose experiences she drew. Like so many other young American soldiers, Peirce’s protagonists have little understanding of the conflict in which they find themselves or the political machinations driving it. It is clear that none of these recent high-school graduates has ever thought to read a book about the Middle East. It is unlikely they read newspapers beyond the sports pages. Their awareness of international events derives from an occasional glimpse of blowhards such as O’Reilly ranting on FOX News as they flip through the channels in search of ball games and action flicks. In fact, watching FOX media bites served up by retired brass on the Pentagon’s gravy train is probably just where they got the idea that killing Iraqis would be a swell payback for September 11. This is not to say that they are dumb. Nonetheless, by family and class, they are the kind of guys who assume they can trust college-educated officialdom to lead them. It does not occur to them to question authority, at least not automatically.

The film opens in Tikrit with Brandon (Ryan Phillipe) and his squad ambushed in the city’s narrow residential streets. The skirmish that follows is brief, confusing, and utterly convincing. As they are attacked from the rooftops of surrounding apartment buildings, the Americans defend themselves. In the ensuing crossfire, some women and children are shot, but it is impossible to tell whether by Americans or insurgents. Death comes swiftly—a muffled burst of automatic fire, a splotch of red on a wall, a corpse hitting the ground. There is no time for agonizing reactions. The soldiers just keep moving and shooting. During the fight, Brandon loses three men and watches several others suffer severe wounds. Nevertheless, he manages not only to keep his remaining men together but to save one who foolishly gets himself trapped in an apartment building. There is no question that Brandon acquits himself honorably, and we later learn that he is awarded a Purple Heart and Bronze Star. As his C.O. says, he is a natural leader.

In the next scene, Brandon and two of his squad—Steve and Tom, who happen to be his closest friends since childhood—are back home in Brazos, Texas. Their minds, however, are still in Iraq. Steve and Tom drink heavily, get into bar brawls, and fight with the women they are pledged to marry. They are not out of combat mode. In fact, they do not want to leave the Army and may soon sign up for another tour. The more levelheaded Brandon has had enough. He tries to return to normal life, only to discover that he has been stop-lossed—automatically scheduled for redeployment. Usually calm and deliberate, he loses his composure entirely. He protests that this is nothing but a “back-door draft” and even says something unprintable about President Bush. Put under arrest for insubordination, he decks the MPs escorting him to the stockade and bolts. Coming to his senses, he realizes that he is in deep trouble. The only remedy he can think of is to drive to Washington, D.C., to speak to the senator who had presided over his homecoming ceremony. After all, this public servant had told him to contact him if he needed any help. Yes, Brandon is that naive.

So he heads east with Michelle (Ab­bie Cornish), Steve’s fiancée, as his unlikely companion. A woman on the eve of marriage to one man usually does not drive across country with another. These folks, however, are not certified members of the prudent middle class. They are recklessly impulsive descendants of Texas ranch hands and small ranch owners—prime material, in fact, for the Armed Services. Besides, Steve, while drunk, has slapped Michelle around, and he is beginning to suggest that he might continue with the military rather than meet her at the altar. So it is not unreasonable to assume that Michelle might want a period of separation, even if—or perhaps because—it might provoke a little jealousy. In any event, although she and Brandon share motel rooms during their trek, they never so much as flirt with each other. How un-Hollywood is that? From a storytelling point of view, I suspect Peirce wanted Michelle on the road trip to provide a feminine perspective. As Brandon weaves across country, he visits the parents of one of the men who died under his command and stops at a rehabilitation center to see another who has lost an arm, a leg, and his sight. Michelle is there to help him cope with his guilt, giving him a chance to talk about the emotional impact of not having been able to save his friends, something we never see him doing with his male colleagues. In one of the film’s best scenes, Brandon tells her that he enlisted because wanted to avenge the September 11 attacks. Once in Iraq, however, he realized what he was called upon to do “wasn’t about 9/11 at all.” Instead, he continues, “you get a kill-or-be killed mentality.” As he tries to explain himself in halting language, we watch a flashback of the battle scene that had played in the opening minutes of the film. This time, however, we get more information. As Brandon enters the apartment house to save the trapped soldier, we see him confronted by an unspeakable necessity. The event has scarred him, but it is only the proximate source of the bewildering guilt he is suffering. He is quite able to accept the awful things war entails, but he is profoundly troubled by his inchoate doubts about this particular war’s necessity. This doubt feeds a pent and unacknowledged fury that finally erupts when he catches three petite thieves robbing his car in Memphis. He comes within a hair’s breadth of killing the punks. Only Michelle’s feminine influence manages to disarm him both figuratively and literally, bringing him another step closer to the sanity he lost in Tikrit.

[amazonify]B000U6YJMO[/amazonify]Clearly trying to pitch her MTV-produced film to America’s youth, Peirce has assembled a cast of good-looking but believable young actors. Although it is far and away the best of the Iraq films—if we do not count Charles Ferguson’s superb documentary, No End in Sight—Stop-Loss has not been thriving at the box office. I guess the young, like their parents, are not quite ready to pay attention. Of course, if the neocons get their way and Congress revives the military draft to field our coming invasion of Iran, the MTV generation will doubtless be making a run on Stop-Loss in its DVD release. By then, sadly, it will be too late.

George McCartney is Chronicles' film editor.

This article first appeared in the June 2008 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.