Clint can’t reinvent history

Clint Eastwood is “growing” as a movie director. And we know what that means – he is going to the politically correct left. And that has led him to some strange conclusions, which are worth addressing.

The one-time archetypal tough guy – his “Dirty Harry” cop character took wrathful justice into his own hands decades before Jack “24” Bauer – has been sliding over to liberalism for the past 15 years. And, of course, equally predictably, he has been showered with Academy Awards ever since.

His “growth” was notable in 1992, when “Unforgiven,” his nihilistic deconstruction of the western, won a bunch of Oscars, including best picture and best director. In 2003, his “Mystic River” gave audiences a curiously sympathetic portrait of a child-murderer, gaining Oscars for liberal lions Sean Penn and Tim Robbins. And, in 2004, Eastwood’s tribute to euthanasia, “Million Dollar Baby,” swept the top awards offered by the Motion Picture Academy.

So it’s not surprising that Eastwood now has his own revisionist take on a famous World War II battle in “Letters From Iwo Jima,” told from the Japanese point of view. Last year, he released an English-language movie about Iwo Jima, “Flags of Our Fathers,” but it’s the Japanese-language “Letters” that has grabbed Hollywood’s attention. “Letters” has been nominated for four Academy Awards, including best picture, best director and best screenplay. By contrast, “Flags” has been shunted aside, nominated for only two minor awards, sound editing and sound mixing.

For his part, Eastwood has been eager to document the “evolution” of his thinking. As he told Agence-France Presse earlier this month, “I grew up in the war pictures in the 1940s where everything was propagandized. In all the movies, we were the good guys and everybody else were bad guys.” So Eastwood is now determined to counteract such “propaganda” by creating propaganda of a different kind.

Reporting on the rapturous reception given to “Letters” at the Berlin Film Festival, the Financial Times was clear-eyed enough to call the film “gaga with political correctness,” depicting the Japanese as “lovable, misunderstood victims of history.” But, in addition to improving the image of imperial Japan, Eastwood had another mission for “Letters.” As he told the same French press agency, “Every war has a certain parallel in the futility of it, and that’s one of the reasons for telling these stories – they are not pro-war stories.” That last point is worth pausing over, because it’s popular in some circles to emphasize the “futility” of war. Yet, in fact, wars frequently resolve vital issues – that is, international ambition, aggression and conquest. Japan, for example, began dreaming of dominating Asia in the late 19th century. First, it took over Taiwan and Korea; then it defeated Russia. Starting in 1931, it attempted to conquer China. And in 1941, of course, came Pearl Harbor. Had America not defeated Japan, all of Asia and the Pacific might still be bowing down to the Rising Sun.

But today, many Americans thinking about Afghanistan and Iraq are prone to see war as futile. But the better conclusion is this: Wars fought incompetently are futile. As the Washington Post reported last week, after nearly four years of fighting in Iraq, fewer than half of the U.S. Humvees have the latest “up armoring.” Indeed, for a war not to be futile, it must be fought competently – which, in this case, means being backed up by top-to-bottom economic and industrial mobilization. That’s how wars are won.

In the meantime, we might pause to reflect on the 62nd anniversary this past Friday of the iconic flag-raising at Mount Suribachi. Nearly 7,000 U.S. Marines died on Iwo Jima during that month of fighting, and they gave us, through their sacrifice, an object lesson in accomplishing a mission. No amount of retroactive Hollywood political correctness can ever detract from what was done there. By Americans – also known, in that battle, as the good guys.