American Sniper movie: George W Bush, war lovers get last laugh

By Will Stabley | January 30, 2015

The mere existence of American Sniper is a tribute to the fact that freedom of speech and expression are alive and well in this nation. But the popularity of the movie suggests that fourteen years after the fact, America still doesn’t have a clue about the failure of those wars, the damage they did to our military and our security, or the corruption of the President who started them. Or more accurately, they simply don’t want to acknowledge the travesty.

The real life American Sniper Chris Kyle was by his own account a deeply disturbed individual who, if he likely wasn’t a bloodthirsty racist killer before the war began, had certainly been turned into one by the stress of combat. That is not in any way a criticism of the man, his bravery, or his sacrifice. Rather, it shows just how truly horrifying war is in real life, and the kind of homicidal monsters our troops often have to become in order to win it for us.

The film depicts Chris Kyle as having severe conscience issues when it came to whom he killed, always hoping he was killing the right person, fearful he’d have to take out the wrong person. In real life, according to his autobiography and various interviews, Kyle labeled all Muslims as “savages” and opined that he’d like to have killed anyone he saw carrying a Quran if he’d been allowed to. In other words, American Sniper the movie is a work of fiction aimed at convincing audiences that the nature of war is something other than what it is.

The movie also suggests that the burden of conscience is the only scar left on our combat veterans. It leaves out the part where Chris Kyle came home from the war, began making up fake stories about killing people in two different states, attempted to physically assault a governor, and dissolved into a menace to society. If the film were truthful, it would have depicted Kyle as the tragic story of someone who was driven to full blown mental illness by the war and who never received the mental health treatment he deserved upon returning.

But for Americans to acknowledge the truth about the mental illness of many or most war veterans, they would also have to acknowledge that those veterans aren’t getting the care the deserve – and that would cost money. It’s not a coincidence that conservative Americans are cheering on American Sniper as if it were the most patriotic film ever made. They tend to be the ones who talk nonstop about how much they love the military, yet support a republican party which has refused to properly fund the VA and has sabotaged President Obama’s every attempt to improve conditions for veterans.

After all, treating the mental illness of our veterans would require spending money to help others – something which conservatives consistently and steadfastly refuse to do. Just as they want to cut social programs for the working poor, and make up dishonest excuses about how it’s not needed anyway, conservatives spend as much time trying to take funding away from veterans as they do cheering on every war that comes along.

And of course whenever liberals attempt to point out the facts about the real American Sniper or just how mentally disturbed Chris Kyle was, conservatives accuse them of attacking the military and being unpatriotic. Then again, that’s the crutch of conservatism: so long as you keep talking about how much you care about the troops, you can always claim the moral high ground even as you slash veteran funding and veto veteran jobs bills.

And that leads back to the most inexcusable falsehood that American Sniper is built around: that Iraq was responsible for 9/11. It’s the lie that George W Bush sold the American people on and used as an excuse to start an unforgivable failure of an Iraq invasion. It’s the lie that got him reelected to a second term. And it’s the lie that conservative Americans still don’t want to admit was a lie, because acknowledging Bush’s corruption would mean acknowledging that every convenient lie he ever told them was false as well.

So instead, fourteen years later, Americans are flocking to the box office to see a horrifying piece of fictional propaganda which tries to turn a real life tragedy into a piece of uplifting republican party war worship. The scary part isn’t that conservative Americans are still seeking out the kind of lies American Sniper offers so they can continue to pretend that they had it right all along and justify turning their backs on veterans. That’s expected. The scary part is that moderate mainstream Americans are going to see this movie in droves and writing it off as a harmless action movie without having any idea that it’s being used to manipulate their worldview.