This review originally appeared as a guest post on 10 Years Ago: Films in Retrospective, a film site in which editor Marcus Gorman and various contributors revisit a movie on the week of its tenth anniversary. This retro review will be a bit more free-form, recappy, and profanity-laden than usual.

“So, you add these together. So this is the number of combat troops
available for an invasion, according to these figures.

―12! Thousand?

“No, 12. 12 troops.”

―”Oh, come on, you’re shitting me?”

“I am shitting you. Twelve thousand troops. But that’s not enough…
that’s the amount that are going to die. And at the end of a war
you need some soldiers left, really, or else it looks like you’ve lost.”

Is war unforeseeable? If you spend 20 hours listening to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast series, which referred to the tangle of overlapping alliances that led to World War I as a “Blueprint for Armageddon“, it’s easy to say no. If we’re talking about the 2003 US invasion of Iraq – which, despite the unnamed Middle Eastern country featured in this film, we are – then the answer is certainly yes. That war was the definition of a non sequitur, presented as a response to the September 11th attacks, perpetrated by Osama bin Laden and members of al-Qaeda, which was based at the time in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but had previously conducted attacks in the Middle East, Africa, and East Asia, based on a pretext of undeclared weapons of mass destruction. The answer to this question is, I suppose, whichever is more popular or linguistically sound at the time – but war can certainly seem inevitable when the march towards it features every estate, from the government to the political parties to the media, cheerleading it onward.

In Armando Iannucci’s In the Loop, a razor-sharp, documentary-style lampoon of the lead-up to the War in Iraq, General George Miller (James Gandolfini) grouses privately to US Assistant SecState Karen Clark (Mimi Kennedy), with whom he shares the vibe of a friend, confidant, and ex-lover, that “The case against war is far stronger than the case for war, and the case for war is caveated all to hell.” He reads this from a paper called PWP-PIP (Post-War Planning: Parameters, Implications, and Possibilities), written by Clark’s analyst Liza Weld (Anna Chlumsky), which makes the career-slaughtering mistake of providing too many pesky facts and caveats, and failing to provide an appropriately rosy view of the war to come. The war is being pushed in the US State Department by the psychopathic war hawk Linton Barwick (David Rasche), who might as well be wearing a John Bolton mask. Did you notice I haven’t mentioned a single British person yet? For a film whose principal cast is British, the Brits seem curiously like they’re climbing the mountain of conflict passively, even if they swear profusely (and hilariously) at each other and treat their actions as high-stakes rather than secondary. The highest-ranking cabinet official in the film is Simon Foster (Tom Hollander), the UK’s Secretary of State for International Development, who spars constantly with PM’s Director of Communications, and biggest dick in the room, Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi). Malcolm is ready to walk the political line of Downing Street – whatever it happens to be at this particular moment – and then jam it up the shitter with a lubricated horse cock. And if you’ve got a problem with that, I’d suggest you not make waves, because this film’s profanity is some of the most hilarious and creative I’ve ever seen, and taking a specific position on any of this is antithetical to political survival in this world. And thus, the most difficult thread to follow in this film is not how and why the war will happen, as that’s clearly within the purview of each country’s chief executive, but rather what all of the individuals whom we watch make it happen actually [fucking] want.

I could make a trite little joke here about how this film represents Aaron Sorkin on crack, but I actually did watch that movie last week, and it was a good deal cheerier about the state of politics, presenting a president interested in climate change and gun violence who might actually be able to do something about either one if he just makes the right inspiring, romantic speech. Was this the difference between the 90s and the 2000s? Did George W. Bush, in his rush to judgment (or the mere appearance of one), accidentally teach us how to be cynical as a country again? Or was that Bin Laden, whose life’s work knocked down a few buildings, a few thousand American lives, and whatever mental conviction assured us in both life and popular culture that only the bad guys engage in torture? And that the screaming lies of someone desperate to save face and avoid pain are not to be treated as reliable facts?

I love this movie. But that love began in 2009 from a place of profound, personal regret for my then-old support for the Iraq War, from an earlier time when I was working on a poli-sci degree and dabbling in conservative and eventually libertarian politics. God I was an idiot. I cheerled a backward notion of patriotism that had everything to do with waving flags and nothing to do with helping the actual people who actually live in our country, while clutching my abject, white, middle-class certainty that people left to their own devices would do just fine even if 90% of the nation’s wealth was concentrated in the hands of like 30 families. This is an easy thing to do when you’re young and healthy and have few responsibilities, but I can only imagine how I’ll feel in another decade. My love for this film culminated in me cracking the DVD as I pulled it out to watch for the nth time this week (see above), and like Joseph Heller‘s Catch-22, I get something a little different from this brilliant piece of satire every time I consume it. The most consistent message that I read from this film is that no one is really steering the ship. It lumbers around, occasionally knocked in one direction or the other by the rich and powerful, and the people on the upper deck all play their various individual games of Jenga, each convinced that someone else is secretly in charge. And that’s how sixteen words ended up in the 2003 State of the Union, claiming that Saddam Hussein had violated UN sanctions by trying to procure yellow cake uranium from Niger in the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Falsely, as if it matters. There were fake documents, fake conclusions, and the eventual punitive outing of an American spy, and a war that killed thousands of US soldiers and a half-million Iraqis.

Just as the war in this film will take place in an unnamed Middle Eastern country, the real-life document forgery is paralleled by Malcolm Tucker’s third-act vandalism of Liza Weld’s PWP-PIP paper, and it stood out to me how many times the document is A) photocopied and passed around to various government stakeholders (Zach Woods, playing a delightfully awkward douchebag wonk, possibly for the first time, says at one point that he’s made “another ten copies”), and B) referred to explicitly in this manner: Liza Weld’s PWP-PIP paper. As several of these people are stomping around and conspiring to leak the paper to the press to publicly undermine the case for the war, it occurs to me that they all have the information they need right in their hands, if they would just…read it. And what’s more, when the paper inevitably gets leaked, Malcolm knows just who to blame, but the information is everywhere. And while it’s easy to see Liza ending up as the fall guy, explaining the contents of a paper she only half-wrote to a Senate subcommittee before doing a bid in a minimum-security federal penitentiary, every single one of these people has an opportunity to stop the war in its tracks, and each of them decides individually that it’s best to not make waves and just kinda go with the flow.

This week, as I watched a few minutes of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller being asked by Democrats to read snippets of a damning-but-not-indicting 448-page report aloud, and by Republicans to explain why he didn’t spend taxpayer money to investigate whatever conspiratorial fevered dream they’re on about this week (being “a little meat puppet”, as General Miller would put it), it’s easy to see why political satire in the age of Trump has become so difficult. Iannucci even had to end his HBO series Veep, which starred many alumni of this film. There’s just nothing serious left to lampoon. No stands taken, no principles defended, and no ideology to speak of (apart from tax cuts for rich people). And without any subtlety needed or exaggeration required, it’s hard to resist the temptation to just lie down and accept whatever comes. This is the point of authoritarianism, I suppose. The George W. Bush administration forged documents and fabricated a pretext for war because it felt it needed to. And it worked! They even got bipartisan support for deposing the Iraqi government in response to a terrorist attack that it had nothing to do with. But it’s hard to imagine any of that being necessary today. If the current administration wants to go to war in the Middle East, they won’t bother forging documents in front of the UN, or offering a pretext to rip up a painstakingly negotiated nuclear deal. They’ll just do it, like they do everything else. And let’s be honest, the drone strikes continued unabated during the 8 years of the Obama Administration – I just had marginally more passive confidence that they were being done in service of some kind of strategy and without abject contempt for the lives of non-combatants. Perhaps I’ll feel the same way about that passivity in a decade as I feel about cheerleading the Iraq War now. Or perhaps we’ll have moved on to some other national embarrassment by then.

There’s a rather telling exchange halfway through the film when Simon, who is also a Member of Parliament, glumly returns to his hometown to meet with his constituents. At the front of the line is Paul Michaelson, played as a gruff everyman by Steve Coogan of all people.

Paul: “I’ll keep it brief, I know you’re a busy man. There’s a fellow there who wants to stop people talking in foreign languages in shops.”

Simon: “Yeah. Well, this sometimes can be a magnet for people who are slightly mentally dispossessed.”

“This”, in this instance, refers to representative democracy – and Paul, who is present to make an entirely reasonable complaint about a government-owned concrete wall crumbling and falling into his mother’s back garden, rightly detects a note of condescension in Simon’s response. And before Simon can do anything about the wall, he fobs Paul off to an aide to take a call from Karen Clark and return to the highly important work of floating lazily toward a war he has no interest in, not realizing that his failure to address the wall issue will ultimately be his downfall. In the end, it is used by Malcolm, initially as a media smokescreen, and then as an excuse to fire Simon from his cabinet position. To this day, I’m still not sure how cynically to read this ending. Malcolm obviously doesn’t care in the least about a constituency sidewall, but he pretends to, as politicians often do, because feigned concern for the issues of common people can be an effective political weapon. And Simon is neglecting the people he was elected to represent, and in a world of responsive government, that should be enough to get him removed and replaced. In the real world, it generally isn’t, but the movie seems to be taking the line that every once in a while, government is accidentally responsive and competent – right for the wrong reason? Paul Michaelson probably sees the story of this film very differently than we do, and fancies himself a successful crusader for the rights of the downtrodden. Perhaps he’ll even be inspired to run for Parliament himself, even if he’d probably find that process a bit convoluted.

The Iraq War started 13 years ago (and hasn’t really ended), and I’ve gone through a ballet of feelings on the subject over the years. It may be difficult to believe reading this review, but I actually remain optimistic about the future of (small-d) democratic politics, whether American or British. Not even our most pacifist political candidates (looking at you, Rep. Gabbard) are willing to be precisely pinned down on what constitutes an appropriate use of military force, but it’s still difficult for me to imagine another full-scale, American-led invasion occurring on a fraudulent pretext. Post-9/11 was a unique historical moment (can you even imagine a US president having a 90% approval rating today?), and made us uniquely vulnerable to being fooled – but then, so was 2016, which brought us Trump and Brexit respectively. History, as they say, doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. And I suspect that even as the details change, watching a confabulated procedural on how the latest political grift was assembled by a swarm of bureaucrats who barely understood what they were doing at the time will never cease to be a source of entertainment for me. But it’s also fair to say that the cat is out of the bag, if nothing else, because the grifters can’t help but tweet about their grifts in real-time now. And now we know too much. We know other countries have cheaper and better healthcare. We know that climate change is real. We know real wages haven’t risen for most people in 40 years. We may be in the midst of interesting times right now, but I’m able to laugh at films like In the Loop because they’re firmly punching up at deserving targets, under the assumption that its audience knows that things don’t have to be this way. And eventually, I do believe our politics will follow suit, once all of the rapacious, reactionary relics currently in charge of our political system have the natural [fucking] courtesy to drop dead so the world can move on.

FilmWonk rating: 9 out of 10