It has been reviled in the newspapers and magazines that would have reviled it anyway and it has been lauded in the media that was always going to praise it. Presidential candidates have even paused to comment. If nothing else, like George Bush himself, Michael Moore’s film (oh, what was it called again?) is divisive and antagonising. It threatens even to increase the turnout in the polls in November.

But really, Fahrenheit 9/11 changes nothing. Those that opposed the invasion of Iraq will feel further vindicated and are pleased to see it condensed into an easy-to-digest two-hour argument. Those that were ‘for’ the war will be still for the war will not have their opinion altered. An eyebrow may be raised about how quickly Iraq was brought into the equation after 9/11 (like, 1 day) and the Taliban’s visit to Texas to discuss a pipeline deal, but otherwise, Moore is just a liberal propagandist; and they thought that already.

And for those who went along just to laugh at Bush, they get something too. With clever editing and selective use of sources, most people can be made to look pretty foolish - just film them having their make-up applied. Alternatively, you could splice in a photo opportunity at a golf course and throw in some unprompted questions that require a more than one word answer: George Bush does make things easy for you. But perhaps the most alarming moment of the film was the President’s childish smirks and peek-a-boo games played with his eyes, just moments before going on air to tell his nation that they are at war. That said, he is the consummate professional. The moment he was live, his demeanour had changed to the solemn purveyor of grave news.

Despite what Tony Blair maintains - that Bush is charismatic, intense and above all, intelligent - this film amplifies all the doubts you had about this dim-witted ignoramus.

Lampooning aside, Moore’s film is more about the substance of President George Walker Bush’s Administration. He demonstrates financial, business and political ties between the Bush dynasty, the Bin Ladin family, the House of Saud, the Taliban, Hamid Karzai, defence contractors and oil companies. Although this will not come as a complete shock, it will assure you that both President Bushes had their Administrations compromised by serious conflicts of interest, long before entering office.

This could no doubt be said of most American Presidents (probably, most political leaders). But it is the density of the relationships and the quantities of money involved that confirm that American politics is so devoid of any concept of selflessness or passion for reform, that it is to remain ultimately tarnished with money, oil and blood.

This film, unsurprisingly, has been banned in Saudi Arabia. It is highly critical of the relationship between the USA and the House of Saud. This relationship is built on the continuing trust that the US will protect the House of Saud from Shia insurgency and the House of Saud will maintain a steady and cheap supply of oil to the world market to fuel US business.

The House of Saud is the Saudi government. It is crooked, in hoc to the Mullahs, anachronistic, undemocratic (and unlikely to ever be otherwise) and is routinely criticised by NGOs for its human rights abuses. But this does not hinder the US relationship and the opportunity for the already wealthy to make even more money. Bush Senior, for example, is the best of buddies with many Saudi Princes - he sells them guns and military equipment. Oh, and he is the only ex-President to exercise the right to receive CIA intelligence briefings. But hey, that’s just politics.

Deepening the intricate web of oily handshakes, Moore continues. Aware that the House of Saud is not the stable guarantor of cheap oil it once was, American policy makers knew they had to diversify their sources of oil. The fall of the Soviet Empire opened up excellent opportunities in the Caucus region of Central Asia. There was just one problem - it is in the middle of nowhere. To get this oil pumping south towards the US and its global customers (rather than north to the Russians (who are all still Commies anyway) there needed to be a pipeline - but that couldn’t go straight through Iran now, could it?

The answer was to build the pipeline through the Taliban’s Afghanistan and Pakistan. Although, both had pretty unfriendly regimes, they were the best hope.

From here, it gets really dirty.

So what, if, in 2001 the Taliban came to Houston, Texas on a bridge building exercise to help secure the deal for the pipeline?

So, what, if George W. Bush and John Ashcroft has been repeatedly warned of the connections between the Taliban and Al Qa’ida?

So what, if, three weeks later, after 9/11, that same Taliban regime was public enemy Number 1 and got bombed out of power?

So what, if, the guy you install in their place, Hamid Karzai, had money personally invested in the oil company that was to supply the pipeline? Just months after being propped up in government, he signs the deal to give the pipeline the go ahead.

But again, that’s just politics.

In a way this is the whole point of Moore’s film. One after another, he describes murky international dealings of convenience that serve to increase the wealth of those in power, at the expensive and deception of the powerless. If things like that don’t bother you, just carry on eating cheeseburgers. But it should bother you and bother you enough to think that surely there is another way.

Sadly, there isn’t. To get elected to Commander in Chief and Chairman of the Board at the Office of the President of the United States now requires too many political donations. Whoever wins the next election will have made so many promises along the way that they too, will be financially compromised. It is not a good feeling - being left totally powerless - but then at least we have people like Michael Moore to keep us entertained along the way.

As a film, Moore keeps the audience’s attention by blending the ridiculous - Britney Spears’s less than insightful political critique - with his most devastating. He should be excused for periodically tossing up a cheap laugh like the Britney footage - it is a two-hour documentary after all. But in many ways, America is built on its reverence to fame and this is where Moore is at his most nuanced. The raising, falling and heightening again of the terror alert (it even has its own easy to understand colour scheme) is made all the more potent when it has celebrity endorsement. The Department of Homeland Security’s terror traffic light is the political strategist’s dream, acting like marionette strings on the electorate who can be herded with fear, right on cue, into the reactionary fold.

In criticism, Moore does at times degenerate into gouache sentimentalism by devoting a fair proportion of the second half of the film to a grieving small town America Mother who has lost her eldest son in combat. Despite ceremoniously flying her flag every morning - so demonstrating her devout patriotism - she nevertheless will not be voting Republican. She is angry with Bush for misleading her and the American people into believing that this was a just war and the only option left open for resolution of the stand-off. This is a clear attempt by Moore to move away from the major questions and, with ease, anger the audience by highlighting a small, personal tragedy.

But a lost son in combat makes for compelling and distressing viewing and works to divert our attention away from the big issues of post war Senate reports and the minutiae of international law. Too often, the impact of war on individual lives is buried amongst the turmoil and the grandiose debate surrounding the Machiavellian machinations of global leaders. But behind every combatant killed (on either side), there is a story of a grieving family asking, ‘how can this be allowed to happen?’ Whatever the justification used by those that believed that the invasion was right, war kills people.

What most upset the Daily Mail, the Washington Post, The Economist, John Howard et al is Moore’s 20-second depiction of happy Iraqi kids playing on the swings, before the bombs came. There are a number of explanations for the inclusion of this sequence: Firstly, did Moore truly believe that all was sweetness and light in Saddam’s Iraq? What about the mass graves, the torturous prisons and the silent disappearances? Was Moore simply being naive? This is unlikely, as Moore is savvy enough to not leave himself exposed to such easy criticism.

So did he do it just to rile the aforementioned critics? Despite the obvious temptation to do so, this too, is unlikely, as an essential justification for the war, once it was clear there was no WD40 in Iraq, was that Saddam was “a very bad man”. Probably, even Michael Moore wouldn’t like him.

No, I think Moore included this section to demonstrate that however bad conditions were in Iraq, war - and the explicit killing that is a result - is always the worst option. It may satisfy our craving for instant gratification so that we can then shift our dinner party conversation to the next big issue, but the long-term consequences will always be more terrible.

Moore ends his documentary with an extended quotation from George Orwell’s book within a book: The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism; a critique of Stalinsit Russia and of the fictional world in which Winston Smith lived in 1984. The author describes a society where the ultimate objective of those in power is to maintain that power by deploying the vast apparatus of the state to sustain the imbalance of wealth and privilege. A principle vehicle for this, is the prosecution of an endless and ultimately unwinnable war, keeping the less privileged in a constant state of fear and borderline poverty.

The less privileged are disproportionately dying in Iraq. Poor Iraqis bared the brunt of the invasion and continue to suffer most in the calamitous occupation. It is the powerless that are having the front doors to their homes kicked down and their sons rounded-up in arbitrary arrests. Similarly, in the working class shopping malls of American, poor people, from poor backgrounds (and mostly black) are targeted by Marine recruiters plying their trade, offering a winning ticket to a free college education and the deserts of Iraq. The gross irony being, they are dying to preserve the power base of their richer, political masters.

Now it is at this point that your rational sociological analysis, so doggedly maintained throughout, begins to crumble. Your social science instincts desperately cling to Giddens and you try to conclude that the worldview of the House of the neo-Cons is all shaped and self-reinforced by the schools, the colleges, the families, the associations and networks through which they experience life. Their wealth brings them access to power and political influence and they enter office with untarnished regressive attitudes, with the capacity to unconsciously perpetuate the hierarchy.

However, when Moore lays out the facts in such a relentless fashion, filling in the gaps and allowing the viewer to join the dots and infer the rest, your rational account becomes invaded by terrifying thoughts of conspiracy. Suddenly, a wretched sequence of events - like war in Iraq - looks less like the results of the collision between a particular worldview and short term triggering factors and more like the premeditated and orchestrated manoeuvres of a privileged elite, mastering the levers of power to consciously and jealously guard their position.

The ultimate objective of Moore’s film is to remove George Bush from the White House, and in this I hope he succeeds. In attempting to do so he may have been cagey with the facts when it did not further his argument (by not including UK and Australia in the ‘Coalition of the Willing’) and may have judiciously edited his VT to condense the worst excesses into an outrage. But it cannot be disputed that - despite whether you agree with Bush’s decision to go unilaterally to war in Iraq - the House of the neo-Cons is a sinister and artful self serving administration that will stop at nothing to maintain its grip on power.

This is not the quote used by Moore in his film, but one I feel more explicitly defines his analysis of the contemporary American political class.

“War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.”

The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism

by Emmanuel Goldstein

Chapter 3 - War is Peace