Best Documentary Ever?
Over at the Weekly Standard, quondam Reason contributor Michael Fumento reviews a new documentary on Iraq. Nothing new there. But this documentary, The War Tapes, has been praised up and down across the anti-war blogosphere and media. But it's not an anti-war tract—it's gritty and clear-eyed enough to impress a hawk like Fumento.
The War Tapes simply shows the war as it is, for better or worse, primarily through the eyes of three apparently quite average National Guard soldiers… Producer Deborah Scranton gave them, and other soldiers from the New Hampshire National Guard's 172nd Infantry Regiment deploying for a year to Camp Anaconda in the Sunni Triangle, mini-DV camcorders. With these they show the boredom, the horror–and yes, the humor–of men given the nasty job of accompanying primarily food convoys past IEDS, RPGs, machine-gun ambushes, and worst of all, suicide car bombers.