The Second Tour of Three Kings

essay by Stephen Himes

graphic by Derek Evernden

As of March 20, we are. The United States' second foray into Iraq is underway, ostensibly to stabilize a war-torn Middle East and to liberate the Iraqi people. Diplomacy has run its course; nations that had been united behind American forces in both Kuwait and Afghanistan are now deeply estranged. For fear of fracturing the first President Bush's unprecedented coalition and "destabilizing" the region, the Gulf War stopped short of changing the Iraqi regime. The first President Bush, as he admits in the March 31 Newsweek, "miscalculated" the resilience of Saddam Hussein; he and "every single Arab leader, every leader in the Gulf felt he'd be gone." A goal of this new war is to correct this miscalculation.

The prospect of changing regimes necessarily raises the question of what they would be changed to, and whether true reform is possible under current occupation strategies. This is where art is useful in providing a local human perspective, especially when American leaders display such a perfunctory understanding of a complex situation. Think back to the line that opens David O. Russell's 1999 Gulf War adventure Three Kings, the best opening line of any war movie: "Are we shooting people or what?" It captures the confusion and naïveté of its protagonists as they embroil themselves in the complex issues surrounding the Iraqis.

Three Kings features George Clooney as Major Archie Gates, a cynical Special Forces commander; Ice Cube as Staff Sergeant Chief Elgin, a fire-baptized baggage handler "on six-week paid leave from Detroit;" Mark Wahlberg as Sergeant First Class Troy Barlow, a party guy-turned-family man called up from the reserves; and Spike Jonze as Barlow's weaker satellite, Private First Class Conrad Vig, a redneck "with no high school" who takes a keen interest in shooting "sand niggers" and "dune coons." The first three are the "Three Kings" who use a treasure map stashed in a captured Iraqi's rectum to track down some stolen "Kuwaiti bullion" for their personal retirement accounts, inadvertently leading them to the heart of the post-ceasefire conflict between Saddam's Republican Guard and Iraqi dissidents. Three Kings is, in essence, an essay on the failures of the Gulf War, foreshadowing how the Bush administration has grossly miscalculated with its current occupation plan. Three Kings views US military intervention through Iraqi eyes, highlighting the deep sense of betrayal felt by anti-Saddam dissident groups and the Iraqi resentment of perceived American interests, and offering an idea of how to reconcile these differences.

In short, world events have ordained Three Kings as the most important American movie of the past decade.

The movie opens with Sergeant Barlow deciding what to do about an Iraqi soldier in the distance. The rest of the troops, however, are battling their own boredom — one has sand in his eye, one is trying to figure out how to use his gun. Barlow shoots the Iraqi in the neck. The men rush to investigate, prompting Conrad to comment "Bad ass!" though Barlow himself is unsure of what he's done. He puts this doubt aside long enough to be the life of the tent party celebrating the ceasefire that evening. The boys, after spending months in the desert, wrap flags on their heads, tip back some tequila and sing along to Lee Greenwood. While the movies have shown us an undisciplined military in the past, rarely has being in the army been portrayed as an intercontinental frat party — which is not to say that the Gulf War was a party by any means, but the point is that, as Seymour Hersch wrote in the May 22, 2000 The New Yorker, "In some cases, the end of the war led to an erosion of discipline."

Three Kings' plot is set in motion by this sort of erosion of discipline: the discovery of the treasure map found while the boys are shaking down surrendered Iraqis. After some negotiations, Gates, Barlow, Chief and Conrad set out across a desert minefield in search of Saddam's hidden bunkers. Gates drives while the rest shoot footballs off the back of the jeep. After Conrad attaches an explosive to one, however, Gates stops the jeep. "You want to see some action?" he asks. Gates responds by showing the boys several scorched bodies, which surprise and horrify them — having, like many of the Gulf War soldiers, never seen the actual combat for which they had trained, they were spared the danger of combat but also disappointed by not having the chance to fight.

Thankfully, during the Gulf War most Iraqis willingly surrendered at the first sight of American tanks, many hoping that the fall of Saddam was near. But the chaos and subsequent abandonment that went largely unreported at the time has, according to the leaders of Iraqi dissident groups, only deepened mistrust.

Part Two: "I'm Confused With All This Pro-Saudi, Anti-Iraqi Stuff"