A deeper reading of Farenheit 9/11

Like Oliver Stone’s film J.F.K, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 is rapidly becoming the canon for explaning recent U.S. domestic and foreign policy and it’s outcomes. Stephen Rosenthal and Junaid Ahmad’s review of the film investigates deeper, showing Moore to be selective in his damnation, accurately criticising Republican policy while being silent on the equally immoral activities of the other corporatist war-mongering party, the Democrats during the Roosevelt, Carter and Clinton administrations.

Like Oliver Stone’s film J.F.K, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 is rapidly becoming the canon for explaning recent U.S. domestic and foreign policy and it’s outcomes. Stephen Rosenthal and Junaid Ahmad’s review of the film investigates deeper, showing Moore to be selective in his damnation, accurately criticising Republican policy while being silent on the equally immoral activities of the other corporatist war-mongering party, the Democrats during the Roosevelt, Carter and Clinton administrations.

Juan Cole also has some interesting dissections of Fahrenheit 9/11.

At least one of his points about the conflicting postures of the Bush administration towards Afghanistan is fairly easily addressed by the revelations (see “Forbidden Truth”) of the amount of negotiations between the administration and the Taliban foreign minister. The commercial pressure to get the pipeline built was driving a hands off policy concerning the Taliban, but after 9/11, clearly the President’s hand was forced (per Richard Clarkes revelations) to actually attack al-Qaeda and that then sent them searching out the Northern Alliance to support (the U.S. had paid only lip service to them previously, see the film “Masood L’Afghan”).