Part Four: "You Do The Thing You're Scared Shitless Of, And You Get the Courage After You Do It, Not Before You Do It"

From here, Three Kings, as Charlie Kaufman might say, adapts to itself by adhering to the conventions of the action genre: Bullets flow more freely, a helicopter is blown up by an explosive attached to a football and the boys decide to do the heroic thing. When I first saw the movie in the theater, I was very disappointed when I left. How could a film that takes so many chances have taken such an easy way out? In the end, Gates, Barlow and Chief decide to help the Iraqis to the Iranian border so they can escape Saddam. The American military catches up to them, threatening to court-martial them for "violating American policy." They are handcuffed, including Barlow, who needs an inflating device to breathe. The Iraqi peasants are desperate to get to the border; they know if they don't get through, they'll be killed by Saddam. The only way for them to get through is to be escorted by Americans, who are under orders not to get involved in the intra-Iraqi conflict.

Russell justifies his happy ending by making the case for a free and independent media covering military conflict. During the Gulf War, the media only had access to the battlefield when escorted by the military, and thus reported mostly official military record. When we first see Gates, he's boning a newsbunny in exchange for a story — a crude but apt description of the relationship between the military and the media during that war.

They are interruptused by a general and Adrianna Cruz (Nora Dunn), a reporter clearly modeled after Christine Amanpour, though bitter after being crowned runner-up at the Emmys. The general rebukes Gates for his actions ("This is a media war, and you better get on board!"), to which Gates responds, "I don't even know what we did here." Pressing the point, the General asks, "Do you want another Vietnam?" The underlying point is that the opposition to Vietnam was in part fed by front-line reporting to mainstream American media, and for Gulf War commanders to present anything less than a unified front would jeopardize the accolades bestowed upon them by the media, thus diminishing the nearly unanimous support for American policy.

In the movie's resolution, however, Cruz, after being led on a wild goose chase by a military underling, catches up to Gates. She reports on the real consequences of American policy, which for the sake of the narrative rescues our heroes. But underneath the Hollywood ending is the idea that the American public needs an unconstrained media if it is ever to have a complete, complex portrait of events half a world away. The major American media outlets accepted the escort-only rule under protest, but seemed all-too-willing to accept an untainted, yellow-ribboned victory. The deep divisions over this conflict necessitate precisely what Three Kings calls for: Media free of unreasonable military intervention, which buried the most unsavory aspects of the last war.

So why else defend a Hollywood ending to a movie that is otherwise M*A*S*H in the sand? Unfashionable though it may sound, Three Kings has something to teach: If Americans are to win the trust and support of the Iraqis, then they have to believe that our intentions are sincere.

There are many stories of individual American troops acting selflessly in both wars, offering starving civilians their own MREs and giving medical care when possible, but what happens when policy is enforced by a American military governor under the orders of the Bush administration? If the people feel exploited, or in the language of the film, feel as if we're stealing the gold, how long can we expect this trust to last?

In the end of the film, the boys sacrifice the gold after sharing it with the poor Iraqis. The idea is that we will have to sacrifice our own interests of wealth to win the people's trust, that we care about them as a people, as a nation — not just as an uprising that needs to be mollified so that the American kings can steal their wealth. Educated and uneducated Iraqis are too smart for that. We know that Saddam withheld profits from the oil-for-food program, but are American oil companies any better if too little of their profits from Iraqi oil are sacrificed to feed the people and rebuild their cities? A movie like Three Kings, functioning as Roger Ebert's "empathy machine," answers by drawing us emotionally into the plight of the Iraqi peasants: For Gates, Chief and Barlow to abandon them is unconscionable.

Likewise, any occupation plan that hampers humanitarian efforts or disregards Iraqi dissidents who have fought Saddam is itself unconscionable.

The characters are developed to make this change of heart believable. Barlow develops a newfound and concrete respect for life; Gates sees his cynicism erode into empathy when faced with the real consequences of the policy he's there to enforce. But the soul of the film is Chief, baptized in a ring of "the Jesus fire," who adopts a Muslim headdress and prays with the Iraqis before the recon mission. After proclaiming that "God put this [treasure map] in our path," Chief finds inner peace in the bustle of conflict because the prophecy is fulfilled: God indeed put the map in their path, for reasons that at first weren't clear, and the Three Kings can sleep well knowing they did the moral thing.

With American marines paying visits to Saddam's personal palaces, it seems that the Battle of Baghdad is already in its endgame, but the harsh reality is that the struggle has only begun. Jonathan Alter quotes a Soviet Army veteran in this week's Newsweek: "We took the presidential palace in Kabul in three hours. We took the city in 24 hours. It was only 10 years later that we left, and there were no smiles on our faces." The Soviets did little to rebuild the nation they helped destroy, resulting in a safe haven for the very terrorists over whom this war is allegedly being fought. Thus, a moral imperative falls to the coalition forces that this must not be the fate of Iraq. President Bush, who has been accused of using the war on terrorism to promote his arch-conservative Christian agenda, who has used the word "crusade" to describe military interventions, must show himself as religiously enlightened as Chief. Donning a Muslim headress may be too much to expect, but in the spirit of Christian charity, a total devotion to humanitarian efforts would show the Arab world that American intentions are indeed to liberate and not to pirate.

During his commentary on the Three Kings DVD, director Russell reports that after the White House screening, President Clinton said that the film "could be extremely useful as far as showing Americans how the war really ended in Iraq, and letting them know what's really entailed in these kinds of interventions, so that in the future if it ever has to happen again, people will realize what is required to finish a huminatarian intervention … without leaving a mess behind." Three Kings should be required viewing for President Bush, to show him exactly how much of a mess has been left behind, to put a human face on abstract policies. President Bush seems intent on limiting the United Nations' role in post-war Iraq, most likely to bolster American influence in the area and to punish the French, Germans and Russians. But considering the scope of the reconstruction and stakes placed on success, petty personal squabbles not only put Iraqi lives at risk, they also put American lives at risk. Will the Iraqi people peacefully submit themselves to what so easily could be perceived as imperial occupation? Perhaps, but the recent history of Afghanistan and evidence from the first weeks of war suggests otherwise — as does Three Kings, a map that leads as near to the Iraqi heart as we can find in American movies.

E-mail Stephen Himes at stephenhimes@hotmail.com.