Eugene Coyle wrote:
Bush got the Vietnam analogy wrong. It was the USA going into Vietnam that led to the consequences, not the USA withdrawal. Directly the same with Iraq.I read Graham Greene's "The Quiet American" in 1957 I think. The USA was already operating covertly in Vietnam then, as Greene described, and by then, or certainly by early 1958 had military personnel openly in that country.
The Quiet American posted to www.marxmail.org on August 11, 2003 I am sure that most people are familiar with the controversy surrounding "The Quiet American", a 2001 Phillip Noyce film based on the 1955 Graham Greene novel. Originally intended for release in November 2001, Miramax executives delayed the film for months because they worried over audience reaction to its "anti-American message" post-9/11. Noyce would seem to be the ideal director for such a film in light of his pro-Aborigine "Rabbit-Proof Fence" and other left-oriented films. Unfortunately, the film is disappointing on a number of levels. This is partly the failure of Noyce and his screenwriters to bring out the strengths of Greene's novel; it is also a function of some rather unfortunate aspects of the great writer's work itself. "The Quiet American" is focused on three characters: Thomas Fowler (Michael Caine), a cynical, stubbornly apolitical, aging British journalist assigned to cover the Indochina war; his young mistress Phuong (Do Thi Hai); and young OSS agent Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser) in Vietnam to rescue the natives from communism and French colonialism. While there, he falls in love with Phuong and battles to win her away from Fowler. As a trophy for vying Anglo-Saxon men, she is a symbol for her own troubled nation. Pyle believes in a "third way" that can redeem the country. For astute members of the movie audience, the parallels with the Iraqi "nation-building" enterprise of today would appear obvious. Indeed, Noyce ends his film on an open anti-imperialist note that can scarcely be discerned in Greene's novel. The final frames depict growing US military involvement through newspaper graphics from the 1950s and 1960s. As we shall see, Greene--much like Fowler--was not that committed to the anti-colonial cause. It should surprise nobody that "The Quiet American" is a film more about desire than it is about politics. The triangle between the three lead characters is put into the foreground, while the frequent ideological clashes between Fowler and Pyle are kept in the background. These clashes, which are framed as long passages of dialog in Greene's novel, are both modulated and abbreviated in the film. Rather than emphasize the spoken word, the film spends an inordinate amount of time in languorous visual depiction of Saigon and the Vietnamese countryside. In contrast, Greene is much more economical in providing visual cues. When they do occur, it is through the jaded eye of narrator Thomas Fowler who, for example, describes the battle-torn town of Phat Diem this way: "Rubble and broken glass and the small of burnt paint and plaster, the long street empty as far as the sight could reach, it reminded me of a London thoroughfare in the early morning after an all-clear: one expected to see a placard, 'Unexploded Bomb'." full: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/culture/Quiet_American.htm
