What the F is Going On!?! Part Eight: Modern Wareware

Donald Trump campaigned on being the Peace President, claiming to end wars in Ukraine and Gaza quickly after entering office. While Ukraine’s peace talks have been turbulent, Gaza has a cease fire agreement with mixed results  Trump has claimed to have ended somewhere between seven and nine wars around the globe, although his interaction and the efficacy of the “ending" of these wars have been questionable. We do know that the US became involved in Israeli bombing of Iran, bombing nuclear sites, swapping tit for tat missile launches before agreeing to a cease-fire. This was the gameplan in a dangerous exchange of missiles in the first Trump administration that was promised to be a one-time deal, turned into a major missile attack in this administration and now Israel is asking for support on another strike soon.

I had started writing this post over a month ago, I planned it far before that and watched the films illustrating modern warfare over a period of time that it almost seemed like it was no longer going to be timely or relevant. I had no faith in the militaristic impulses of Donald Trump and the Wormtonguery of Steven Miller. Not only have there been renewed threats of invasion in Greenland in the last couple of weeks, but threats toward Iran, again, over crackdowns of protesters, but the sinking of boats off the coast of Venezuela escalated very quickly to the arrest of President Maduro and the Vice President fleeing to Russia. 

Overall, the “Peace President” has ordered bombings in Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Yemen, Somalia and has deployed troops to multiple US Cities in less than a year. It’s that kind of hard work that earned him the first ever FIFA Peace Prize of Football. In his acceptance speech he floated the idea of renaming American Football so that no one would get confused, but that’s neither here nor there nor any fucking where. 

Around twenty years ago I remember reading a stat that 80% of casualties in modern warfare are civilians, a number that very quickly had me turn on my head the concept of a justifiable war for an aggressor. This has been very much apparent going back to one of the biggest international affairs scandals of the Clinton administration where a hospital was bombed in the Balkans, and we have seen history repeat itself over and over again with hospitals being bombed in several different conflicts. The civilian casualties in Afghanistan were brutal during our multidecade war, right up to the pull out, but injuries and deaths still remain from their war with the USSR well before that because of land mines.

In this century, modern warfare has evolved quite a bit, now there are more techniques of building to building urban warfare, as depicted in the 2025 movie Warfare, where special forces move from home to home, floor to floor, having to make consistent decisions on enemy combatants and civilians. Warfare was a very tense drama told like “a game of inches,” where every building, every door is another danger. It is almost as small of a story as there can be. 

Lone Survivor (2013) is nearly an opposite setting for modern warfare, in a forest on the outskirts of a small village where special forces is stuck with an impossible decision when a boy encounters the team as they are preparing for a strike, they have to decide whether to detain or kill the boy to keep their cover, but the mission’s integrity is in the balance. Ultimately, they are discovered, they get pinned down in a landscape where the faceless Afghanis have all of the knowledge of the terrain, and a series of disasters lead to tragedy. 

While Eye in the Sky (2015) is the only fictional movie of this trio, it is the most representative of the US military reliance on local assets, incredible technology and drone warfare. This is another situation of an impossible decision, here, after the target is identified on camera, the strike is delayed as the local asset has to do the most harrowing spywork of film history where he simply has to get a child to stop selling buckets on the corner. At one point he buys out the buckets to make the child leave, only for them to return with the corner with more buckets because of a sudden surge of demand in the market. The clever uses of technology including a camera drone disguised as a flying bug is reminiscent of the movie Act of Valor, which was amazing for its cast entirely made up of US Special Forces showing off what their technology and tactics could do as well as a really impressive scene of the most realistic interrogation ever filmed. Unfortunately the story of that movie is painfully thin and the cast can’t hide their amateur status.

The two movies that feel like they capture the propaganda of the Maduro kidnapping are Zero Dark Thirty and Operation Finale. The differences are that neither of those films depict the capture of a head of state of a sovereign nation. Zero Dark Thirty might show the tactics that special forces could use to infiltrate a compound and surprise a target, and although US troops were not welcome for an operation like that in Pakistan, Bin Laden’s killing didn’t topple their government. Operation Finale tells the true story of Israelis finding the Nazi Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, capturing him, drugging him and smuggling him out of the country to be tried and executed in Israel. The drugging of Eichmann was debated for its morality. While there are similarities that Bin Laden, Eichmann and Maduro all being pretty terrible people, the situation of Maduro’s capture is the only one that can very likely be the opening event in a war under false pretenses, something we had already lived through in Iraq and Vietnam. Those previous wars at least went through the effort to try to bring a case to the American people for war and included Congress in the decision-making.

Top Guns

Even as we are looking like we are ramping up for a war in South America with the intent of installing American Oil companies to liberate stolen oil under the ground of Venezuela, there is the very real possibility that we will be reliving the attack on Iran from last summer at the behest of Israel. Trump touted that he was able to end the war between Israel and Iran after a ceasefire was attained when both sides ran out of missiles and needed to manufacture more rockets and explosives. Now Israel feels rested up and has been putting out feelers to get the US to support more missile attacks. 

I have this under the Top Gun movies, not because Iran is ever named in either movie, the fact is that no adversarial country is ever named in either movie. The first movie is clearly intended as the Soviet Union, but they are never named. Frankly, that first movie is intended to look like it is entirely war games, practicing for war during the Cold War and if any planes were shot down it would be a pretty big and bad international incident. It’s all a very well made commercial for the military and it worked like a charm, enlistments in the US military had a healthy bump after the movie came out and we weren’t at war with anyone and we hadn’t been attacked by anyone. 

Top Gun: Maverick pulls the same trick of never naming an adversary, but internet sleuths figured out that the only country the US is at odds with that has terrain, anti-aircraft technology and underground nuclear facilities narrowed things down not just to Iran, but even more specifically to the nuclear facility that was bombed a couple of years after the strikes of last summer. This movie was much more of a cinematic darling than a call to join the military, perhaps because it was a little too real in a world where our wars haven’t been entirely “Cold”

Nuclear Threats

As I have been writing this things have rapidly been changing in Iran, and Trump’s message to the world has been to use the old Bush Era co-oped proverb “every crisis is an opportunity” for exploitation. There have been widespread protests in Iran in the last week or so and the government has killed hundreds of protesters. Trump has sent the message that if the Iranian government is violent toward protesters it will provoke more bombings from the US. He was seen with a “Make Iran Great Again” hat, posing with Lindsey Graham who has been fantasizing of such regime change and likely disastrous nation building in the aftermath. Graham’s friendship with John McCain was most visible through their shared desire to attack Iran, capped off by an awkward Beach Boys parody of “bomb, bomb Iran.”

The initial attack last year brought a long dormant fear of nuclear programs and in recent years we have had a couple of notable films about the US and Nazi nuclear developments during World War II. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer made nuclear armament a cultural event, to be enjoyed with Barbie as a blockbuster, winning Oscars and becoming a fan favorite. Creating the first nuclear bombs, the only two ever used in warfare, is a dramatic event, not just the scientific and personal side in New Mexico, as it is beautifully shot by Nolan, but also the covert monitoring of Germany’s attempts in The Catcher Was a Spy. There is a scene where Niels Bohr informs Oppenheimer and his team that the Nazis are using the wrong methods to try to create an atomic bomb of their own. That information was gathered through an incredible story of its own from history told in The Catcher Was A Spy where Paul Rudd plays former MLB catcher Moe Berg, a genius who knew several languages, understood the science necessary to build a bomb, was charming enough to insert himself into gatherings where he could meet Heisenberg, all as an American Jew in Nazi Germany and a possibly closeted gay man. He was tasked with getting information to learn whether the Nazis were on track to build their own bomb, if they were not he would leave it alone, if they were, he would kill the Nobel Prize winning physicist Werner Heisenberg on the spot. There weren’t any bunker busting bombs necessary and confirmation of the neutralization of the Nazi nuclear program was timely. Nothing was escalated and the Nazis didn’t know any different. There were stories that during the Obama administration the US was able to infiltrate the computer systems of maybe Iran and North Korea’s nuclear program with viruses that would slow down their systems, stall the program or give false information. Sometimes spy work can be more damaging than bombing a nuclear facility and not having any eyes on the ground to know if it was knocked out or just delayed two, three or six months.

The Middle East

It seemed as though there hadn’t been much of a change in the Middle East since I started research for this last summer/fall, but even as I write events have made drastic changes. Movies love to give a backdrop of uprisings, there may not have been any as pertinent as the only look at the street view of Jafar Panahi’s This is Not a Film that shoes as he is navigating his house arrest there is a violent uprising on the street of Tehran directly outside his apartment. One of the biggest recent movies that attempted to tackle instability in the Middle East happened to be Wonderwoman 1984. It is an incredibly weird choice for a superhero movie, especially one where the lead actress is Israeli. The idea of the movie is that people are given a bit of a monkey paw chance to make a wish, sometimes without realizing it, and the villain trades a wish to an Arabic warlord who gets the result he seems to want, to rule over “his land” which results in chaos in the Middle East. It’s a view of arabs in the middle east with short sighted goals, and selfish/violent intentions.

Munich is the Spielberg movie about the Israeli hitmen tasked to hunt down and kill the perpetrators of the Munich Olympics terrorist attack. Israel’s intelligence forces are shown to be very brave and capable of carrying out assassinations despite having to build the team and skills necessary from scratch. Ultimately, they are tricked into assassinating people outside of the scope of revenge for Munich and it takes a moral cost on the team.

Spy Game is one of my favorite spy movies and it spans US conflicts through the last couple of decades of the twentieth century, from Vietnam, the Cold War in Eastern Europe, Beirut, and China. The Beirut installment is interesting for being a conflict that is so incredibly destructive on the city and people that we see, it was considered an important conflict to send US agents into, but it was very distant to the American people. It is the section that is seen as the most tragic, everything goes wrong, too many people die, good people are double crossed. 

There are these ideas we get of the Middle East, what we believe is important to the people there, how the people there are made to be perceived, Wonder Woman 1984 only shows us greedy repressive oil wealth and animalistic violence. There is a media perspective that Israel is a surrounded state capably holding off aggressors and a political view that Israel is equated with Judaism and one political view. Prime Ministers like Benjamin Netanyahu and Itsak Rabin were ideologically opposite, but still they were both Israelis and both Jewish. 

Foreign Influence

There is this hubris from the Trump Administration that we can just hand out American flags and other countries will decide they will “welcome us like liberators.” Every involvement in Spy Game was a real life conflict the US was involved in and every one of them lingered for decades. We either evacuated and completely pulled out, or if we did end up in good standing, we had to pull back from influence. It’s not just that other countries found the US to be a big bad guy meddling in their affairs, it’s that people love their countries and want the chance to govern themselves. Jafar Panahi has been imprisoned by the Government of Iran, banned from making movies, denied the ability to leave the country, but his film Offside shows a feeling by repressed women that he shares, that as bad as their Government is, they still have pride in their country, still root for their soccer team, still fly their flag even if they aren’t allowed to attend the game. I think of the two part movie by Steven Soderberg, Che, about Che Guevara's involvement as a revolutionary. He ended his life attempting to lead a revolution in Bolivia, but he was seen as an outsider, it wasn’t his fight even if the other fighters believed in a lot of the same political tendencies. He wasn’t accepted, he didn’t gain a following to create a viable revolution, and he wasn’t knowledgeable enough about the landscape to fight or the population to gain a hold. He was killed by the CIA, who also failed to gain a hold on the region, stuck in decades of secret warfare that didn’t gain any trust in the population. 

Conclusions

We may have the best special forces, the most advanced Airforce and Navy in the world with great capabilities to either arrest a head of state in Venezuela or bomb a nuclear facility hidden in a bunker in Iran, but these things sure have a tendency to only escalate after the initial attacks, and there is a terrible track record of “winning over the hearts and minds,” of far away countries. We built the atomic bomb, we kept the technology away from the Nazis, but we spent a half a century in the Cold War, resulting in more countries gaining the technology and the threat of other wars.