Three Kings

What if they gave a war and no one understood it? This is the premise of the new movie Three Kings. 
Critics are giving this movie a good review. The movie is about war. But at the start of the movie, the movie declares: THE WAR IS OVER!! Is this just more "psy ops" or media bull? Then the movie opens with a scene in which a military officer is screwing the media, or at least one of them literally. But in the end, another media type ends up "screwing" the military by reporting the truth about a certain action forcing the military to resolve an issue in a moral light. Remember, what goes around comes around.
The name of the movie is Three Kings. The setting for the movie is March of 1991 and there is a cease fire in the Dessert Storm War. Four American soldiers have come upon an alleged treasure map showing where Saddam Hussein's soldiers have stored a large cache of gold taken from Kuwait during the war. The plot is simple. How far would you go to become rich? If you were an army soldier would you risk court martial and death to get into an army Humvee and go off with your friends to recover the gold for yourself without the army knowing? Yes if you are George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube and Spike Jonze who play the four Americans in the movie. [Don't be concerned about the fact that the title is Three Kings. One of the four dies before he has an opportunity to come out as a king. After all, four stands for things of the world while three stands for completion of the church. The world must die in order to bring in the salvation of the church.] But somewhere along the way, the private greed of the four individuals changes as the four realize that soldiers have a public duty to protect civilians from adverse military affects.
Three Kings is a study of the relationships between the public and the private sides of both governments and soldiers within the relationship of war. This movie is not about the good old UNITED STATES and the bad old IRAQ. It is not about public corporations as much as it is about people and what they understand and what they stand for.
The movie is the message and the message is the movie. One character states in the movie: "The Gulf War is a media war. It is being fought in the media, not on the ground. The army soldiers are discussing what the war was all about. They went into Iraq a little ways. Then a cease fire went into effect. The soldiers turned around and went back to the border. The media types covering the war were also confused. There was no decisive victory over the enemy. Saddam Hussein was still alive. The media had reported on all the obvious collateral things that had happened such as the oil well fires, the wildlife which had been caught in the oil spills, etc. And there was no apparent rhyme or reason to the war which was no described as over.
Into this fray go our four heroes on their private mission to enrich themselves with stolen gold. The treasure map turns out to be real. The gold is located after some difficulty. Getting the gold is no problem. It is discovered hidden underground in a small dessert village concealed by a village well. It is guarded by a number of Iraqis soldiers. The Iraqis soldiers primary duty is to guard the villagers and prevent an uprising of their own citizens against the government. Several citizens within the village have been taken prisoner by the Iraqis soldiers and interrogated. The arrival of the four American soldiers to retrieve the Kuwaiti gold is tolerated by the Iraqis soldiers as long as the Americans do not interfere in the internal Iraqis affairs, and as long as the Americans do not become hostile to the Iraqis soldiers [remember there has been a cease fire declared between the two nations]. 
It is obvious that at this time in the story, the Americans are only interested in their own private goals of enriching themselves upon the stolen gold they are about to take. They are not doing this in the capacity of their "public" title of army officers. In contradistinction, the Iraqis army officers are carrying out an army order from Iraq to put down any uprising from their own civilians who might try to turn against the military government of the nation of Iraq. This is not a normal function of an army. The normal function of an army is to attack or repel foreigners and invaders who would do the people of their own nation harm. The army is not used against their own people except in times of exigencies when the people have become the enemies of the state.
Could this movie possibly be a story about the evils of a military government [like in a democracy] and the throwing off of this evil military government and the fighting [in one's private capacity] to restore liberty for the people?
Needless to say, our heroes, the four private army men who have gone for the gold, get very upset when they observe the Iraqis military personnel, kill a civilian woman for merely wanting the Americans to protect her husband who had been interrogated by the Iraqis soldiers. The Iraqis civilians believed that the Americans were there to liberate them from their military government. How WRONG! If the Americans were there to do that, then America should first have liberated itself from its own democracy. Besides, wasn't the CIA the entity that placed Saddam Hussein in power to begin with. The Americans informed the Iraqis soldiers that they would have to leave the town and leave the civilians behind. The Iraqis soldiers countered that they could not do so. They would be killed by Saddam Hussein if they did not follow their orders to put down civilian challenge to the military government. One thing led to another and warfare started between the Iraqis and four American soldiers. One of the four American soldiers was killed. Many Iraqis soldiers were killed. The three remaining American soldiers and the Iraqis civilians were on the run from more Iraqis troops.
Three Kings raises many good questions. Is it the duty of a public government to repress its own citizens by the use of the army? If an army is used to repress its own citizens, who is the army really fighting for? Is it fighting for a public policy or the public rights of its citizens? Who does the public policy benefit? What was the American army doing there? Was the American army fighting for some public policy or for the public rights of civilians who were being wronged by some government or other entity? 
It was obvious that the Iraqis military was carrying out their orders to suppress and oppress their own people because they feared reprisals from their own military commanders more than they feared the unarmed people. It was equally obvious that when the four American army soldiers intervened for the Iraqis civilians, that the Americans were outnumbered. They were also interfering in another nations internal problems not to mention that they were where the should not have been with no military orders or policy allowing them to do what they were doing. It was the private side of the Americans that caused them to interfere in behalf of an underdog to do that which was right. So the four Americans who had been sent to Iraq to fight Iraq as an opposing military army because supposedly Iraq was an evil military empire, were involved in a cease fire made as a public policy before the armies of Iraq were defeated. But now, the four Americans in army uniforms, had successfully acquired the Kuwaiti gold from the Iraqis with their help and blessing and had loaded it up in a truck to be taken for their own private advantage. And the Americans had the "stupidity" to privately intervene in a foreign issue and risk their lives and fortune to help some foreign civilians? Are they stupid?? No! They were finally doing what they were supposed to do. Free private civilians from the oppression of a public military. Remember, in a democracy, the military is only supposed to deal with the "public" corporations and not with the people.
Needless to say, when the American army found out about the four American soldiers going off on their own private mission, the American army had only one thing in mind. Go capture the four American soldiers, bring them back, and court martial them for violating every military code in the book. Enter the neutralizer. The woman reporter. [The female gender represents admiralty. One always gets his "common law" remedy through the admiralty process during times of war- or the democracy.]
The four Americans, before their little private mission, had sent a woman reported on a decoy mission. Once she found out that she had been decoyed, she was smart enough to eventually find the action. When she found three American servicemen trying to rescue many Iraqis civilians from their own government's repressive army, her stories to the American people prevented the American Army from bringing court martial proceedings against the Three Kings. In order to save the Iraqis civilians, the Three Kings needed to redeem them by purchasing them with the Kuwaiti gold bullion. A neat story of freedom by redemption in the year 1999.
Who are kings? What do they do? Isn't a king one who works for his people to set them free and keep them from harm in the face of their enemies. Would not a king gladly even die to save his people? Is this not what the Three Kings did? The three American servicemen who survived would have died in order that their people, the Iraqis civilians adopted by the American servicemen, could have been saved from the enemy- which was their own government army. The American army was not there to save them. The Iraqis government was not there to save them. I guess the real question is WHY?