"Intelligence"

One striking cliché I noticed in the film was how Team America relied on a super-computer, “intelligence”, for all of its, intelligence needs. This type of situation appears in scores of action/thrillers and other Hollywood productions, where a team of evil-fighting good-guys relies upon a super-powered computer to alert them of all the information they need to know, yet have know way of figuring out themselves. Of course, in the war on terrorism, such a super-computer is pretty essential when trying to figure out where on “Dirka-Dirka” street the terrorists are meeting. Furthermore, in America’s actual response to 9/11, (think of the lead-up to the Iraq war), it was pieces of “intelligence” about Iraq’s nuclear arsenal that compelled us to go to war.

However, as in real life, “intelligence” seems to get a lot wrong. For starters, “intelligence” sounds like a 25 year-old stoner who hasn’t had a job since selling weed in high school. Plus, a bulk of the info he provides to Team America is obviously wrong. Thus, “Intelligence’s” role as a provider of false information to team America is a strong satire of the Bush Administration’s over-reliance on false information in the days before the Iraq War. Iraq trying to develop nuclear weapons from African Uranium? Is this a piece of information from “intelligence” in the movie or a piece of information that the Bush Administration relied upon in its decision to invade Iraq? Its hard to tell, but it could have been from either contexts! And that is the point. In the movie, the team’s over-reliance on “intelligence” was an obvious statement about America’s over-reliance upon similar, faulty intelligence-gathering schemes.