The Brooklyn Rail

In 1989, Republican lobbyist Jerry Haleva arrived for work at the California legislature and was greeted by several copies of a newspaper clipping that appeared to display his visage. In the image, a swarthy, mustachioed man waves to a military parade. Underneath the clipping, Jerry’s friend—the legislature’s Chief Sergeant-at-Arms—had scribbled “Now we know what Haleva does on his weekends.” It didn’t take long for Jerry to learn that his dopplegänger was Iraqi head of state Saddam Hussein, whose image was in transition from regional ally to global menace. As a lobbyist, Haleva had worked on a bill to prevent the name, image, and visage of celebrities from going into the public domain once they died. The bill had its skeptics, among them Ron Smith, an agent for lookalike talent who Haleva established a connection with. With the still very much alive Saddam Hussein’s recognition growing, Jerry gave Ron a call to inquire about cashing in on his resemblance.

Six months after war’s end, Haleva had made it to the big screen with a bit part in Hot Shots! (1991), a spoof of the extremely popular Top Gun (1986), which concludes with an air raid on an Iraqi nuclear plant. Haleva had a brief scene portraying Hussein relaxing poolside with a drink only to be interrupted by a bomb. The scene featured prominently in the trailer and was effective enough to secure Haleva an even bigger role in the sequel. A parody of the Rambo franchise, Hot Shots! Part Deux (1993) starred Charlie Sheen, who apparently resented Haleva for all the extra scenes he was getting from on-set rewrites, as the filmmakers made use of Haleva’s pronounced lisp. In the movie, a Special Forces unit comically fails to rescue American prisoners of war from post-Desert Storm Iraq and get themselves captured. In reality, the twenty-two American POWs who were imprisoned during the Gulf War got released from the “Baghdad Biltmore” before Iraq had even surrendered. But in the Airplane!/Naked Gun extended spoof universe, the war had never really ended.

In the years before 9/11, the Gulf War occupied a peculiar place in American culture and consciousness. Along with the post-Vietnam “operations” in Grenada and Panama, Desert Storm offered scant material for cinema of the time, save for the title character of 1996’s slasher Uncle Sam who implausibly fights in all three, then comes back from the dead to murder his ungrateful countrymen and women. A far cry from stories of Gettysburg, D-Day or even Khe Sanh and Fallujah, few Americans knew the names of battles our troops fought in the Gulf. That type of detachment would lead Hollywood to muse about how easy it would be to trick Americans into believing that an entirely fictional war was raging with the biting satire Wag the Dog (1997). The sentiment was echoed by the critic Jean Baudrillard in his 1995 essay “The Gulf War did not take place.” In it, the theorist lamented that we “cannot even say that the Americans defeated Saddam: he defaulted on them, he de-escalated and they were not able to escalate sufficiently to destroy him.”

What exactly happened over those forty-three days in the Gulf, where Americans lost a mere 298 troops despite the tens of thousands of US casualties that were predicted, was difficult to decipher. Between Hot Shots! movies, we got our first proper dramatization of the conflict with The Heroes of Desert Storm. The made-for-TV movie debuted on ABC in October 1991 with an introduction from President George H.W. Bush that feels reminiscent of how Michael Eisner would open each installment of ABC’s The Wonderful World of Disney. The Heroes of Desert Storm interspersed real news footage with the presumably true stories of ten Gulf War veterans portrayed by actors like Daniel Baldwin and Angela Bassett. The movie, which repeats the debunked claim that Iraqi soldiers removed babies from incubators, is characteristic of highly manicured media coverage from the time, which came at the insistence of Pentagon officials still wary of how gruesome news coverage had undermined public support for the war in Vietnam. They resolved to not make the same mistake in the nineties.

Memory plays a striking role in two eerily similar bookends of the Gulf War film genre. In 1996’s Courage Under Fire, Denzel Washington portrays an Army colonel haunted by guilt over a friendly fire incident in the dark of a nighttime tank battle. After the war, Washington’s character is tasked with investigating the worthiness of a fallen female helicopter pilot for the Medal of Honor. The posthumous candidate is played by Meg Ryan in a series of diverging Rashomon-style flashbacks. Eight years later, in one of the last Gulf War films, Washington portrays yet another sullen veteran of the conflict, transfixed by memories of a nighttime tank battle in The Manchurian Candidate (2004). Jonathan Demme’s remake of the 1962 classic inverts the original premise. Liev Schreiber plays a war hero and Vice-Presidential candidate who has been brainwashed during Desert Storm not by communists, but the large and powerful “Manchurian Global” corporation. It’s left on his former comrade-in-arms, Denzel Washington’s character, to piece together what really happened in Kuwait and who its misremembering really serves.

In this writer’s subjective opinion, there is no better distillation of that mixture of the triumph, guilt, and confusion Americans chewed on in the decade following the Gulf War than 1999’s Three Kings. Though the product of David O. Russell, a notoriously abusive director who cribbed the idea from another writer he froze out of working on the new script, Three Kings nevertheless creates a perfectly blended universe of ahead-of-its-time comedy, thrilling action, and heartstring-tugging drama. The film starts in Kuwait as the Gulf War ends, a moment of tedium later captured expertly by Jarhead (2005). Three Kings follows a band of opportunistic US troops who, working off a map found in an enemy prisoner’s rectum, track down a cache of stolen Kuwaiti gold in a bunker just across Iraq’s border. The politics in Three Kings are arguably muddled, though not necessarily to its detriment. On the one hand, Mark Wahlberg’s character is captured and tortured by an Iraqi soldier who confronts him over the death of his son by American bombs (the scene is accompanied by a chilling silent shot of a ceiling falling on a crib). On the other hand, the protagonists become morally compelled to put their heist aside and assist the anti-Hussein resistance in a stab at how George H.W. Bush neglected to back up his call for an Iraqi revolution. This antipathy toward American empire, for both its piratic nature and failure to finish the job in the Gulf, is the kind of contradiction possible only in the inter-war period.

By the twenty-first century, Saddam Hussein had reached a special level of infamy. He was an object of often two-dimensional ridicule in cartoons like Animaniacs (1993–1998) and South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999) where he unites with his gay lover Satan to attempt world domination. Jerry Haleva donned his beret and mustache in Nintendo commercials, the 1998 mob movie spoof Mafia!, and, likely his most memorable appearance, The Big Lebowski (1998). Set during the Gulf War, the Coen brothers comedy features a dream sequence in which Haleva’s Hussein hands a pair of gold bowling shoes to the film’s titular character. But in popular consciousness, Saddam was more than a silly meme. A man George H. W. Bush once called “worse than Hitler,” rumors circulated throughout the nineties that Hussein was out for blood—developing nukes, trying to assassinate George H.W. Bush—to avenge his 1991 humiliation. Ridiculous in retrospect, the 1993 British novel Honour Among Thieves portrays an attempt by Saddam to steal the US Constitution and burn it on the Fourth of July. The most sinister portrayal of Hussein would cap off the period in 2002 with Jerry Haleva’s final, and only serious, performance on film.

Released in late 2002, in the months between the Iraq War’s authorization and execution, Live From Baghdad is based on the true story of a CNN news crew assigned to Iraq’s capital shortly before the Gulf War began. Made by HBO, the movie stars Michael Keaton and Helena Bonham Carter, who sports nearly as many bracelets as the film has Arab stereotypes. The movie revolves around Keaton’s character securing an interview with the one and only Saddam Hussein. Bernard Shaw, played by NPR producer turned actor Robert Wisdom, is flown in to sit down with the dictator. Enter Haleva’s Hussein, whose face is obscured as he makes his way to the interview chair. We see only a menacing gaze from his brow as Keaton puts on the lav mic and passive-aggressively compliments his tie. After a successful interview, the CNN team goes on to become the only cable news crew in Baghdad during the American bombing campaign. With little mention of the thousands dying around them, Live From Baghdad’s protagonists earn plaudits from media colleagues and politicians alike for their breathless coverage of the air assault; even Saddam himself tunes into the latest from CNN. The movie ends as Keaton’s character walks out onto some morning rubble to exchange a parting word with his Iraqi government liaison. A caption informs us that “Saddam Hussein remains President of Iraq.” As of Live From Baghdad’s premiere, this would be true for another three months and thirteen days.

By April 2003, Jerry Haleva was done with the act. Mere weeks earlier, Haleva had admittedly still “milked” the resemblance, making appearances with Capitol Steps, a musical satire group. At a California industrial gala during the Iraq invasion’s early days, the parody singers launched into their Beach Boys number “Bomb Bomb Iraq.” The audience’s response was apropos. It was then that the horrified Haleva realized the bit had gone on too long. As both Iraqis and now Americans perished in the Battle of Baghdad, Haleva, wearing a red, white and blue suit, told the Chicago Tribune “what I do has always been in good fun, but some things are no longer funny.” After twelve years of caricature, sanctions and hypothetical war scenarios, the final conflict with Saddam had arrived. The Persian Gulf was no longer a sandy dreamlike abstraction. The sense, throughout the 1990s, that the future of global conflict would be “surgical,” “postmodern,” or “boring” had been blasted open by a new millennium battle between good and evil, and America’s old placeholder enemy, Saddam Hussein, was being shoehorned into it. The era of fake war had come and gone. Real war, at long last, had finally returned.