Moore uses Bush's momentary inaction as a device to ask what he was thinking, which, to paraphrase Moore's answer, was how to cover his tracks. This allows us passage into the paranoid labyrinth of Moore's mind, which is illustrated by news footage and a string of experts (Moore spends less time physically on screen than in any of his other films, a fact which recommends it, comparatively speaking). He never fabricates out of whole cloth. Rather, Moore the filmmaker takes a perfectly reasonable proposition (our government generally, and the Bush family specifically, have been too solicitous of the Saudis), while Moore the fudgemaker throws entire trays at the wall, never overtly making allegations that amount to anything, but crossing his fingers that some of it sticks.

The insinuation is that Bush had to keep us scared, with color-coded alerts and

Moore mentions that Bush's old National Guard buddy and personal friend James Bath had become the money manager for the bin Laden family, saying, "James Bath himself in turn invested in George W. Bush." The implication is that Bath invested the bin Laden family's money in Bush's failed energy company, Arbusto. He doesn't mention that Bath has said that he had invested his own money, not the bin Ladens', in Bush's company.

The family members who had disowned Osama were mainstays of American business, to the point that they were members of the nefarious Carlyle Group, a fact Moore naturally mentions, along with the fact that George's daddy was a member, too. One of the Carlyle Group's investments was United Defense, maker of Bradley Fighting Vehicles. Moore says September 11 "guaranteed that United Defense was going to have a very good year." See it all coming together? Moore tells us that when Carlyle took United Defense public, they made a one-day profit of $237 million, but under all the public scrutiny, the bin Laden family eventually had to withdraw (Moore doesn't tell us that they withdrew before the public offering, not after it).

At their own request, the bin Laden family was quickly shuttled away after 9/11, back to Saudi Arabia. Moore finds it suspicious, as well he should. Who would be stupid enough to let that happen, without working them over for a good couple of weeks? Actually, according to a May interview he gave to The Hill, it was Richard Clarke, Bush's former counterterrorism adviser and the new patron saint of Bush-bashers. Moore makes use of him in the film, though he manages not to mention Clarke's role in the departure of the bin Ladens.

Here, if we're going to play connect-the-dots, a few questions are in order. For starters, are we really supposed to believe that 9/11 and the ensuing wars were a collaborative profiteering scheme between the bin Ladens, the Bushes, and defense contractors? Furthermore, will Moore's DVD director's cut elucidate Bush ties to the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission, and the Freemasons? Who knows? Who cares? Moore doesn't seem to, as he speedily moves on, making another tray of fudge.

When Moore takes us to Iraq, on the eve of war, he shows placid scenes of an untroubled land on the brink of imperial annihilation. With all the leisurely strolling and kite-flying, it is unclear if Iraqis are living under a murderous dictatorship or in a Valtrex commercial. In Moore's telling of the invasion, the shock-and-awe is less high-value-target/smart-bombing, more Dresden/Hiroshima. According to the footage that ensues, our pilots seem to have hit nothing but women and children. If Moore's documentarian gig were to fall through, he could easily seek employment as an Al Jazeera cameraman.

This is, it nearly goes without saying, his downfall as a storyteller. In his unctuous morality tales, everyone is assigned black and white hats. The white hats mainly belong to the oppressed people of Iraq, subject to our soldiers' midnight raids under the jackboot of occupation, and to other victims of the administration, such as the poor, underemployed people of Flint, Michigan (Moore's obsessively referenced hometown), who serve as helpless recruiting chum for Bush's killing machine.

The black hats (administration types) seem to be motivated solely by world domination and the desire to steer no-bid contracts to Halliburton. There is no allowance for moral ambiguity, or what would've been even more interesting, misguided moral clarity--the possibility that Bush made a bad judgment call, but did so for the right reasons (security concerns, the elimination of a brutal despot, and the liberation of his people).

One of this film's only pure moments occurs when Moore spends time with the mother of an American soldier who died in Karbala. The mother is a conservative Democrat from a family with a long military history. She used to rage at war protestors, but since losing her son, she seethes at the administration who sent him to his death, crying almost animally, "I want him to be alive . . . and I can't make him alive." (But even this is sullied by Moore's smarmy, gratuitous insistence to her that "yeah, it's a great country," an obvious inoculation against charges that he hates America.)

Critics have accused Moore of milking her grief until it moos. But on this, he deserves a pass. Anyone wishing to discuss war, either for or against, should also be prepared to seriously consider its tolls, especially the human ones. Moore being Moore, however, steps on his most effective material by following it with yet another cheap stunt: ambushing congressmen to ask if they will enlist their children to go to Iraq, as if anyone can. He finds no takers, then says he can't blame them, since who would want to give up their child? Nobody, of course. Not the parents of soldiers in Iraq, nor the parents of those who died at Normandy. But few would argue that World War II wasn't a war worth fighting.

Which is not to say Iraq is in the same class. And it is why real questions should be continuously asked, and skepticism applied. The kind of skepticism that forces leaders to account for whether they've taken the right course of action. Not the crank, grab bag of stitched-together conspiracies that encourages Moore's political opponents to be reflexively dismissive--and causes the leftish reviewer sitting next to me to say, "He infuriates me because he makes my arguments badly."

There is plenty of grist for skeptics of the war to argue that the chances of a shiny, happy democracy's flowering in Iraq reside somewhere between slim and nil. But those are still better odds than the ones on Moore's someday making an intellectually honest film.

Matt Labash is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.