Just got back from seeing it. Very very powerful movie, even though it has some problematic bits. The section on the Saudis being allowed to fly out of the country could have been put a bit more clearly, although it is not as deceptive as Republicans make it out to be.
On the other hand the tracing of the links between President Bush and his family and Osama Bin Ladin and his family are very clear, and are not something people are as aware of as they should be. Also shocking are statements made by some in the administration early in 2001 to the effect that Saddam Hussein was being effectively contained.
I don't understand how anybody could see this movie and come away with the belief that Michael Moore doesn't love his country. The only people who believe that are the liars and sophists who want to convince us all that the only way to love America is to be conservative and those blamed fools who believe them.
The most gut-wrenching parts of the movie center around Flint Michigan resident Lila Lipscomb, and her son, who was killed in Iraq. It's hard not to watch those scenes and not be affected. Her visit to the white house grounds, where she is accused of staging her visit, and urged to "Blame al-Qaeda" for her son's death are terribly emotional.
But it doesn't answer the question of whether the war should have been entered into at all. If you believe that the war was beneficial and had good reasoning behind it, well, as painful as it is to say this, Ms. Lila Lipscomb's story becomes irrelevant. Good people have died in every war since this country was founded; people who didn't deserve to die, and many of those deaths have been needless. Civilians have been terrorized and killed in many if not most wars. It's part of war, and if you accept war as part of the foreign policy, you have to also accept the cost of war.
On the other hand, if you believe, as I have come to believe, that this was the wrong war at the wrong time, waged for false and deceptive reasons, than that cost seems unbearable. To paraphrase the current Democratic Presidential Candidate, how can we ask Lila Lipscomb to give her son for a mistake? How?
Where are the weapons of mass destruction?
Why didn't we invade Afghanistan with a sufficient force to catch Osama Bin Ladin?
Why did we let Afghanistan become a crap hole after we invaded it?
Why do we buy the idea that just having "relations" with al-Qaeda is good enough? The United States had "relations" with Osama bin Ladin, are we committed to invading ourself?
Why doesn't President Bush look at Saudi Arabia, the country where 15 of the Hijackers came from, as well as Osama bin Ladin and his family?
I don't have the answers to these questions and dozens of others. I suspect I never will.
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