To: MeeknMing
Letting the viewers come that that conclusion on their own instead of beating them over the head with it will be more effective IMHO, although I'm sure that wasn't the intent. Of course the problem with that is it requires that the audience has the brain cells to draw that conclusion.
27 posted on
12/27/2001 10:49:41 AM PST by
Grig
To: Grig
The problem we have here is that we don't actually know the text of the crawl that they're talking about, but reading between the lines of the article, it probably went something like: "In the wake of the Battle of Mogadishu, public outcry led to the withdrawal from Somalia and Bill Clinton's subsequent squeamishness toward other military ventures, including a serious war on terrorism, which in turn opened the US to more attacks culminating in 9/11." And it's a valid point that the American people didn't want their boys in harm's way for no good reason, and that Clinton did little to try to lead America into changing their mind. Except when it was Bosnia, of course. Let's face it, there was no credible political leadership from anywhere that was arguing that we had to go full-bore into Somalia after that. Or that we had to stop the genocide in Rwanda.
I'm not one of those that agrees that the sole blame for 9/11 can be laid at Clinton's doorstep. Every president going back at least to Carter has some responsibility for what happened. How is Clinton's withdrawal from Somalia different than Reagan's withdrawal from Beirut after the Marine barracks bombing? Didn't both of them just encourage Muslim fundamentalist terrorism by handing them a victory? But there's never been a true consensus in America over attacking terrorism head-on until now.
Should the crawl have been removed? Probably. It's a verity of screenwriting that those sorts of crawls are a cheat for something you weren't clever enough to make clear within the film, but which the audience should probably know. And I think most everyone now knows the antecedents to 9/11.
35 posted on
12/27/2001 11:17:23 AM PST by
Heyworth
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