Get A Clooney
Actor and foreign policy expert George Clooney says American “can’t beat anyone” in a war. This from a guy whose relevant foreign policy and military experience is pretty much limited to playing a soldier in two movies. Did he learn anything from those movies? Apparently not.

In 1999's Three Kings, Clooney played U.S. Army Maj. Archie Gates. In the fictional story, Gates is one of four U.S. soldiers who plan to steal a secret stash of Kuwaiti gold (looted from Kuwait by Iraqis and then hidden). Instead, the GIs find themselves getting involved with civilians being executed by Saddam Hussein and left defenseless by the U.S. military. They make the moral choice, of course, and help the civilians to safety. And the movie makes an excellent point about how the U.S. was wrong to fail to support Iraqis who rise up to overthrow Saddam at the end of the Gulf War.

In 1997's The Peacemaker, Clooney played U.S. Army Col. Thomas Devoe, a “Special Forces Intelligence Officer” assigned to help track down a stolen Russian nuke before a Serbian terrorist detonates it at the United Nations in New York. It has one of the best car chases you’ll ever see in a movie, and the ending, where Clooney and Nicole Kidman's character are racing to stop the terrorist as he wanders through the crowded streets of New York with a nuke in his backpack, is unsettling to say the least. Being a Hollywood movie, the nuclear blast is averted at the last second and millions of New Yorkers are spared. Intentionally or not, the movie makes the point that terrorist regimes must not be allowed to come into possession of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction – and that we can’t risk waiting until they have WMDs and are working to smuggle them onto our shores.

You’d think Clooney might have learned a thing or two while making those two movies. You’d think he’d understand the very real risks the United States faces, and understand that it is our failure to liberate the people of Iraq 12 years ago that left intact a breeding ground for state-sponsored terror. You'd think that he'd believe the U.S. must take this chance to rectify its mistake of 12 years ago. But he doesn't. In the movies, Clooney's character decided to save the Iraqi civilians. In the movies, Clooney's character raced to save American civilians from a terrorist nuke. But in real life, Clooney would prefer to leave the people of Iraq to suffer and die, and leave Americans vulnerable to a terrorist strike of unimaginable horror.

Three Kings and The Peacemaker were just movies. But if we again fail to liberate the people of Iraq – the plight of the Iraqis in Three Kings writ large as awful reality – then the people of Iraq may well come to loathe us as much as they loathe Saddam. And events much like the plot of the The Peacemaker may yet come to pass.

Only without the happy Hollywood ending.