Specifically, we have an all-volunteer military. We do not have a draft, and the Pentagon's "stop-loss" policy is not a "backdoor draft," in contrast the major premise of the movie.
I raised these points my initial review, "Stop-Loss": The Thinking Man's Antiwar Movie?" For example:
...there's some power in this movie, which is worth seeing and evaluating. In addition to the gritty realism of the battles scenes, the movie's well-acted, particulary as seen in Phillippe's Staff Sgt. King. In Phillippe's hands, King comes off as a vigorous all-America fighter, in Iraq and on the streets back home, where his realizes his personal beliefs have been betrayed.I disagree with those beliefs, which is that the Pentagon's stop-loss policy is tantamount to a "backdoor draft," and that's the major problem with this movie (and where I can understand LGF's dismissal of the film).Plus, the film's gripping opening scene of battle provides a realistic portrait of the constraints on American fighters, who chase insurgents in urban environs peopled by civilians - old men, women, and children - who are then used murderously as human shields by the Iraqi terrorist fighters. No wonder many Americans have trouble adapting upon return home. Even the hardest warrior wants to battle legitimate enemy combatants, not civilians pawns who're sacrificed by Iraqi militias to keep the insurgency alive.
We have an all-volunteer service, so when young Americans sign up to fight they go on the basis of choice and volition. Contractually, soldiers can be recalled to battle, and to be shocked, as Phillippe's King is when told he's returning to Iraq, is disingenuous, if not outright storytelling fraud.
Sure, families have been hit hard by the separations, the battle injuries, and the war dead. But the the consequences of joining the service are known in advance. Soldiers are not victims, no matter how hard the anitwar left tries to make us believe.
One of concern I had is with new Army recruitees' knowledge of the stop-loss policy. A major flaw in the movie's in how Ryan Phillippe's Staff Sgt. Brandon King makes it seem as if he didn't know he could be sent back to Iraq. Frankly, this premise is totally untenable. It's an attempt by the director to make the soldiers look like victims, when they are not.
But check out Urban Grounds' clarification of this question:
My little brother and I enlisted in the US Army together in August of 1990. The recruiter who signed us up went over our contract with us very thoroughly."Stop-Loss" is liberal and antiwar, but it's not useless in its message, as I've indicated.
As the United States had just declared war on Iraq, he also explained the portion of our enlistment contract that detailed the Army’s Stop-Loss policy.
While I knew plenty of Soldiers who didn’t like the policy, I didn’t know any who didn’t know about it and that it was a part of their enlistment contract.
Which is why I think that the new movie Stop Loss is just another piece of Liberal anti-war, anti-military rhetoric.
We will not doubt be seeing more impartial movies of Iraq. The war still rages, of course, so there's no opportunity for historical distance. But when conserservative critics, like that at Libertas, fail to analyze the totality of the film, nuances are lost in the outrage of opposition:
What is possibly left to say about a poorly produced, poorly acted, poorly directed, and very poorly written anti-war film that defames our troops…?Read the whole review, much of which is agreeable. It does bear some consideration, of course, to think about the sacrifice of our soldiers, and to reiterate the military service is on a volunteer basis, and we might have less angst over the war if more people actually supported to decision for young Americans to join up and fight in the first place.
See Reihan Salam's essay, "Why Stop-Loss Matters," for more reflections along these lines.
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