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The biggest major motion picture released this weekend in America (to relatively weak attendance)   was the reunion of Bourne Identity filmmaker Paul Greengrass and actor Matt Damon for Green Zone , a fictional take on the beginning of the U.S led military invasion of Iraq almost exactly seven years ago (the anniversary takes place at the end of this week).

As Tom Carson in GQ wrote in his review of the film, the screenplay is packed with nearly every Iraq war "peccadillo" that occurred in the first few years there, with the possible exception of any Blackwater type unit creating havoc.  Although it's said to be partially based on Washington Post reporter's Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, there are only a couple of scenes that seem to come directly from the environment depicted in that 2007 book.

There is one significant twist in the story that deviates from it's ripped from the headlines approach, and that's on the supposed raison d'etre for the war, the search for weapons of mass destruction.

As well know, all of the major intelligence agencies and other notable so called experts, as former weapons inspector David Kay said in 2004 to the Armed Services Committee, "were almost all wrong," in believing that there was WMD in Iraq.

But in Green Zone, Greengrass and screenwriter Brian Helgeland flip the scenario.  In the film, a character whose code name is "Magellan" is supposedly the secret source who knows where the WMD's are, and is considered a vetted source (in real life the character was called "curveball").

In Green Zone, "Magellan" has told high ranking Pentagon officials that in fact there aren't any chemical or biological weapons to be found in Iraq, but that information is never filtered down to the president or the troops.  And that's where we get a duped reporter (a la Judith Miller from the New York Times) who buys into the Pentagon's intel from Magellan, reporting on these great sources, though she later admits she never met "Magellan".  The character played by Amy Ryan, is in the film a Wall Street Journal reporter.  

That's a somewhat slick move by the producers in their attempt to keep it real fictional.  In fact, Wall Street Journal film reviewer Joe Morgenstern didn't like the fact that the Journal, who, unlike the Times, did not lose their credibility for their war coverage, gets the insult from the Green Zone.  On Friday, Morgenstern wrote:

Still, doesn't that ring a distant bell, a female reporter for a U.S. newspaper who dutifully promulgated the Bush administration's line on WMD's? Yes, but the paper wasn't The Wall Street Journal, it was the New York Times. On this subject, like so many others, "Green Zone" weakens its claim to authenticity with fictional fudgings. And the weakening works both ways. In a movie being marketed as an action adventure and nothing more, a penchant for speechifying—"Do you have any idea what we've done here?" Miller asks. "What happens the next time we want people to trust us?"—pollutes the wellspring of the genre, which is action unencumbered by real-world meaning.

Though parts of the film are outstanding, it's a bit of a letdown considering the roll that Greengrass has been on for awhile in Hollywood.  And yes, coming off the fact that another Iraq war drama, The Hurt Locker, just took home Oscars last weekend, the new film does pale in scale in comparison.  However, with time comes perspective.  This film doubtfully could have been made a few years ago.  Now, it's common, second hand news.  Iraq did have an election last week and we still have over 110,000 troops in theatre there, but for most Americans The Hurt Locker or Green Zone are our only touchstones to the continuing war.

Meanwhile, "Private Rove", as Karl Rove says former Secretary of State Colin Powell called him, was on NBC's Meet the Press with guest anchor Tom Brokaw on Sunday, and the legendary newsman tried his best to call Rove out for his sunny re-writing of history in his new memoir, Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight.

Check out this blow-by-blow between Brokaw and the man they used to call "Bush's Brain" on Sunday on Iraqi war revenue helping to pay for the war:

MR. BROKAW:  Now, Mr. Rove, there was also sharp criticism, and justified from a lot of quarters, of the management of the war once you did go to war. The insurgency was more swiftly activated on the part of those Islamics who wanted to fight back.  We were not greeted as liberators beyond the first couple of days.  We didn't have enough troops to provide internal security. The cost of the war skyrocketed almost from the beginning.  There was not a sharing of the oil revenues that a lot of people had promised, including the, the vice president.

MR. ROVE:  I--let me correct you.  There--you put down a lot of things here. I'll be happy to deal with them serially or together whichever you like.  But, for example, on that one, the administration emphatically said that this was not about oil.  And we thought right from the beginning...

MR. BROKAW:  No, no, no, not about oil, but it was about...

MR. ROVE:  Let me finish.

MR. BROKAW:  ...how it would--we would share oil revenue, and it would help offset the cost of the war.

MR. ROVE:  No.  No, no.  Tom, with all due respect, that was not the policy of our government that we were going to go into Iraq and take their resource in order to, to, to pay for the costs of the war.

MR. BROKAW:  But it would be part of the consequence of getting the country stabilized.

MR. ROVE:  No.  Well, part of the consequence would be that, that Saddam Hussein, who used the oil market to manipulate prices and deny supplies to the West, would no longer be in a position to do that.  But the suggestion that somehow or another the administration had as its policy, "We're going to go into Iraq and take their resource and pay for the war" is not reality.

MR. BROKAW:  I, I didn't say that.  What I said was that there would be an oil-sharing and the revenue from that would help offset the cost of the war. And I didn't say it was a principal factor, but it was part of the larger scheme.

MR. ROVE:  No.  With all due respect, we're simply going to disagree on this. There--if you wanted to...

MR. BROKAW:  Well, let's talk about the insurgency.

MR. ROVE:  Right.

MR. BROKAW:  I was in Iraq right before the war began.  Everybody who briefed me said, you know, "We've been talking to the Iraqi generals, they're going to put their weapons in a circle, we're going to be able to move in here," and then the first thing that happens there are white pickup trucks racing across Iraq fighting back.  That was completely unanticipated, we had utter chaos in Baghdad and most of the major cities.

MR. ROVE:  Well, you generally do have utter chaos when you have a major conflict like this.  But it--look, I think it is reasonable to, to say that, that, that the planning could have been better.  But on the other hand, very rarely do plans survive the first contact with the enemy.  And the big problem in this one was that the enemy in, in al-Qaeda decided in the--and with the onset of democracy, they said, "Democracy will strangle us," Zarkawi said to his leaders.  And they began in 2006, two and a half years after the war, to try and inspire sectarian violence, and that's when violence really began to, to, to grow.  And it's a reminder that the enemy gets a vote in this and we have to be nimble, as we were with the surge which countered that.

MR. BROKAW:  Part of the reason that they were able to respond and that they were nimble is that we allowed the dissolution of a Baathist army, and it was not worked out very strategically at all, and we left the entire western part of the country open because we couldn't get the 4th ID to come in from Turkey.

MR. ROVE:  Well--and look, again, a--we had a plan to get the 4th ID into, into Iraq.

MR. BROKAW:  But it didn't work, and we went to war anyway.

MR. ROVE:  Well, I, I--that's my point is is that, that a, a battle plan rarely survives intact its first contact with reality.  And the fact of the matter is you have to plan for the best and sometimes you don't get your plans, a la Turkey denying at the last minute the entry of the 4th ID into western Iraq.

But the liberal blog Think Progress calls out Rove, saying he's completely wrong.

In fact, days after the U.S. invasion, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told a congressional panel that Iraqi oil revenues would help pay for reconstructing the country, i.e. a cost of the war. “The oil revenue of that country could bring between 50 and 100 billion dollars over the course of the next two or three years. We’re dealing with a country that could really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon,” he said.

One month before the war, then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said Iraq “is a rather wealthy country. … And so there are a variety of means that Iraq has to be able to shoulder much of the burden for their own reconstruction.”

Since the start of the Iraq war, the U.S. has spent tens of billions of dollars in reconstruction costs.

And of course, that continues to date.