YouTube "War"

Ana Marie Cox (ex-Wonkette) posted an interesting article on time.com about the home movies/documentaries that US soldier's in Iraq have begun making and compiled for a documentary called "The War Tapes." Some of these videos are apparently on YouTube if you can find them. She describes how the videos provide an "untarnished" view of the war and the attitudes of the soldiers over there.

The article is interesting but sadly Ana felt compelled to add her uninformed two cents by saying "raised on Nintendo and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, the troops fighting this war want to experience the kind of battle promised to them by Splinter Cell and Total Recall. The videos they make are an attempt to salvage a war whose coherence crumbled soon after Saddam's statue fell. However, while they offer the credibility of an unvarnished image, they lack any meaningful context of what came before and after the clip, or what's happening outside the frame."

The result of this is she undermined the whole point of the article. In all the gibberish, she is dismissing the soldiers viewpoint because the videos have an amateur vibe (no shit Sherlock) and inserts the idea that the soldiers thought war was all fun and games (I call bullshit on that one). I doubt any soldier thinks that, more likely they are just disenfranchised with why they are there and the direction. This occurs in any circumstance, war or just paper pushing, when there is no end in sight, the shit keeps piling up, and the powers that be clearly don't have a clue what they are doing. I guess then the point of the article is if the soldier is not a professional film maker with a "thank god I am here rather then with my wife and kids" viewpoint, then really, no one should hear from them all.

Click here to see what she is referring to.