My thoughts are simply that we're churning out too much political trash media at the moment. I don't think we're going to see anything that seriously addresses this conflict for at least another ten or twenty years. Right now the media is very slanted, the left wing has power, and of course we're looking at a lot of productions based around that point of view being right. Interestingly, we have seen little, if anything, doing the same thing from the other side. In fact there has been great effort taken to prevent anything of a similar nature that might demonize Middle Easterners or make the conflict look like the right thing to do.
Arguably I feel when you look at things and take the left wing, and far right wing viewpoints you wind up with the truth being somewhere right in the middle.
That said, I don't think America is really arrogant. I think we're simply the world's dominant superpower, at a time when information spreads nearly instantly. To put things into perspective, a couple hundred years ago the Brits would have been sitting right where we are now. Everything that happened that mattered would indeed wind up revolving around them. The British Empire collapsed due to them pushing too far, too fast, and getting involved in too many fronts simultaneously. Just imagine how some of the things they were involved in would have been covered by today's liberal media. China, India, Africa, other European empires, The Brits had their fingers into all of them and what affected them was felt throughout the globe. Simply by pulling back when it couldn't maintain itself Britan caused a lot of things to happen. We simply maintain a similar position at the moment, albeit we are looking at a situation where we increasingly have rivals in the form of the Chinese and Russians.
Of course when it comes to things like this, the line between arrogance, and merely being realistic can be a fine one. Every nation dreams of being powerful, and relevent, and dealing with the dominant superpower one way or another can be sobering, as well as leading to resentment.
In the final equasion I think America's problem is in many cases that we aren't forceful and arrogant enough. We simply care too much about what other people might think (and fear being thought arrogant) that we don't act as strongly as we should when it's nessicary.
Such are my thoughts.
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Also one minor point I will make (since I don't want to turn this into a major political rant) is that all of the liberal fantasies about "revealing the fact that the WMD stockpiles were a lie" miss the point that the US had no real intelligence assets at the time (we were idiots, and you can thank Clinton for it). We had no idea who attacked us at first. We didn't HAVE any deep and shadowdy CIA types pulling the strings. This is why there was so much discussion about rebuilding our intelligence assets and the like, and discussions about the possibility of a US "Intelligence Czar". People always seemed to assume that we had some movie-like super secret agency defending us, but the reality was that we didn't. We were almost totally dependant on foreign intelligence after 9/11 and were racing to rebuild our assets after they were gutted to save money. If we had the various shadowy "Cancer Man" types theorized in these movies 9/11 never would have happened in all likelyhood, with their presumed resources to make "The War On Terror" happen they would have had far more efficient methods of acheiving similar goals just by their existance. This is a "reality check" it would be nice if Hollywood got when it tries to make movies about this period. When we went looking for WMD at the time we had our advisors (like Britan) telling us that it was very bloody likely they were there, and that is a big part of WHY Britan and other close allies backed us, even against the UN.
It's also noteworthy that it was said (or so I remember) that the American People would probably never be aware of the full scope and/or results of this conflict. Oddly despite this, people seemed to get the impression that if we found WMD in The Middle East, the global press would be invited to a giant Jamboree to check them out first hand. Bush or someone would parade them around as a sort of "I was right" sign because of the politics.
The truth is we have no idea if they were found or not, just that our goverment currently says we didn't, which is what they would have said otherwise. Consider that great effort is made to hide stuff like that and ensure that nobody knows where WMD is at any given time. This is what things like "MX" type programs (placing ICBMS on trains that are always moving and not even the President knows where they are for sure) are all about. Heck, nobody confirms or denies what they actually have at any given moment. There was like 0% chance that for political justification someone was going to let the world know "hey you guys, we've got megatons of Iraqi nuclear weapons sitting right here, come see!". Rather if they were found they would have been quietly disappeared and never revealed. Not to mention what other deals might be involved since someone had to make/sell these things which was an issue to begin with... and well... as soon as they show them off to the world press, that means that someone was going to be in the hot seat. Let's say it was a nation like France (which was illrgally trading through oil for food), or China, or any one of a number of other nations... simply by outing that your looking at an international charlie foxtrot that has to be dealt with.
This got longer than I intended. The point being that the entire WMD angle pursued in books and movies is absolutly absurd, as are conspiricy theories involving intelligence assets that at the time were cut to the bone. Clinton was a big believer that we didn't NEED agents and spies and such because we had Satellites. People pointed out at the time that he was stupid because if you didn't have a man on the ground, you didn't have anything, but he didn't go for that. The bottom line is if we had Mr. "Secret Spy Lord Guy" with all this info and resources we wouldn't have had politicians publically going "OMG! who attacked us" and "OMG! we need to rebuild the CIA into a real force!"
