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Because “Green Zone” is set in Baghdad in March, April and probably May of 2003, and that’s gonna be a sore subject for a while, we have to ask the question we don’t normally ask of an action-adventure movie: What does it get right?

Well, the U.S. Army can’t find WMD. That’s a start. Various American agencies are working against each other rather than with each other. The press is duped by an unmentioned high-ranking official (Cheney!), while an unseen Paul Bremer disastrously disbands the Iraqi Army and more-or-less starts the Iraqi insurgency. Finally, it’s suggested that officials in D.C. believed the false intelligence about WMD because they wanted to believe the false intelligence about WMD; because they wanted war.

That’s not bad.

What does it get wrong? It doesn’t suggest this last item forcefully enough. It also implies a lowly Pentagon official was the source of the false intelligence. Basically it implies that a few bad apples spoiled the whole bunch, girl. I tend to agree. But my bad apples were cabinet officers and vice-presidents and presidents. “Green Zone” tries to avoid being overtly political, but you can’t do this shit without being overtly political.

Matt Damon plays Roy Miller, an Army captain whose team is sniffing for WMD a month after shock-and-awe, and at the start he’s perplexed, genuinely perplexed, that the intel he’s getting is leading to pigeon shit and toilet parts. He brings it up at a meeting, but is assured by Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear), a Pentagon special intelligence officer, that the new intel is solid and current. Afterwards, a CIA officer, Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson, doing a sometime-Chicago accent), buttonholes Miller. “Something’s wrong here and we’ve got to find out what it is,” Brown says.

At the next WMD site, Miller’s team is digging purposeless holes in the ground when a limping Iraqi named Freddy (Khalid Abdalla of “The Kite Runner”) tries to get through with real intel and has a knee put to his neck. But Miller reluctantly listens, then forcefully acts, and in the process gets a glimpse of a fleeing Iraqi general, Al Rawi (Yigal Naor, Saddam Hussein in “House of Saddam”), who, in those playing cards developed by the U.S. military, is the Jack of Clubs. He gets away, but Miller and company capture his assistant, Seyyed Hamza (Said Faraj), along with a small black book filled with safe-house locations. They’re just about to turn Hamza when special forces, led by the mustachioed Briggs (Jason Isaacs, Lucius Malfoy himself), swoop in, black-hood Hamza and take him away. They would’ve taken the notebook, too, if Miller, in the middle of getting his nose bloodied by Briggs, hadn’t planted it on Freddy, who flees. “Why are you running!” Miller demands when he catches up to him. “Why are you chasing me!” Freddy demands back. Freddy’s limp turns out to be the result of a prosthetic limb. “My leg is in Iran,” he says. “Since 1987.” He insists that Miller trust him. “Whatever you want here,” he says, “I want it more.” All good lines.

Because of its time and place, parts of “Green Zone” are inevitably roman a clef—or, I suppose, film a clef. Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan), a reporter who adds little besides hand-wringing over her pre-war WMD coverage, is obviously Judith Miller. An Iraqi politican returning to Baghdad to mostly U.S. fanfare is obviously Ahmed Chalabi. Since much of Dayne’s bad intel came from someone code-named “Magellan,” I immediately assumed Magellan was this Chalabi-type pol, since Chalabi himself, once dubbed the “George Washington of Iraq” by the neocons, was the source of so much of our bad pre-war intel.

Nope. Magellan is Gen. Al Rawi, who met with Poundstone in February 2003 in Jordan, and told him Iraq had no WMD, no programs. They’d dismantled everything in 1991.

And Poundstone went back to D.C. and lied about it.

Now Poundstone, via Briggs, wants to kill Al Rawi to cover this up. And so it’s a race between the two men, Briggs and Miller, to see who can get to Al Rawi first. Miller wins, but from a disadvantaged position. “Why are you here?” Al Rawi asks Miller, who’s tied to a chair. “I came to bring you in,” Miller says straight-faced. After Miller informs him that Poundstone lied to everyone about the meeting in Jordan, Al Rawi dismisses the excuse. “You’ve got to want to believe the lie, Mr. Miller,” he says.

This is a great line, a necessary line, but the film still lays too much blame at the feet of Poundstone. He lies, so we go to war. He covers up, so we get an insurgency. If it weren’t for little Greg Kinnear, the movie implies, the Bush years might not have been so bad.

And what’s with the leap in logic? So in February 2003 Al Rawi tells Poundstone there aren’t any WMD. Why, from that, assume Poundstone lied to officials in D.C.? Why not assume that Poundstone reported these very facts to his superiors, who decided not to believe in them or act on them? And why would they believe in them? Al Rawi tells them, just as they’re about to invade his country, that the reason they’re about to invade his country doesn’t exist. I’d have trouble believing him, too.

“Green Zone” makes it all about the conspiracy, all about the lie, but the problem isn’t the lie; it’s believing the facts you want to believe until they become the lie. The problem isn’t a cover-up; it’s the self-delusion and gross incompetence that make a cover-up necessary. Conspiracies generally aren’t born fully-formed and armed like Athena from the head of Zeus. They need time to mature.

Some critics have called the film “The Bourne Zone,” because it shares star and director and shaky camera movements with that series, but this is a misreading. Jason Bourne is three steps ahead of everyone. Roy Miller is three steps behind even us. He spends half the movie realizing what we know going in. Plus he gets his ass kicked in his one fight. This is not wish-fulfillment, kids. This is Iraq.

More verisimiltude. Director Paul Greengrass has real U.S. soldiers play U.S. soldiers, he gives us chilling hints of Abu Ghraib, and he doesn’t use the Iraqis merely for background music. Several Iraqis come to the forefront as main characters. In the end, Freddy gives Miller, and by extension us, the lesson every American generation apparently needs to re-learn. “It isn’t for you to decide what happens here,” he says. Not bad for an action-adventure movie.

Final thought: Since most of the movie takes place outside the green zone, why call it “Green Zone”? A possible answer, possibly in the source material—Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone”—is the idea that the green zone isn’t just a location but a state of mind. It’s the safe place you go when unpleasant facts and realities become overwhelming; where you believe what you want to believe. Many Americans spent the eight years of the Bush administration there. Many haven’t left.

—March 13, 2010