Every time another Iraq movie flops (as “Green Zone” did this weekend), pundits line up to say, well, obviously Hollywood will learn its lesson and not make any more anti-Iraq War movies. I’ll take a different stance: Of course Hollywood will keep making anti-Iraq War movies. Why? Because Hollywood is willing to lose money on a shamless campaign of deceit and oversimplification if it makes everyone involved feel nice and warm about having the proper left-wing politics. “Green Zone” reportedly cost $100 million but if all of the talent had been willing to work for scale and some of the action scenes had been cut back, it could have been made for much less. If it comes down to “work for a small paycheck but make a political point” or “don’t make the movie,” I think Hollywood’s top talent will choose the former. A thoughtful Ross Douthat column in the New York Times today points out that “Green Zone” is a gross oversimplification. Says Douthat:

In “Green Zone,” everything is much simpler. “We” were lied to. “They” did the lying. The “we” is the audience, Matt Damon’s stoic soldier and the perpetually innocent American public. The “they” is the neoconservatives, embodied by a weaselly Greg Kinnear (playing some combination of Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Bremer and Douglas Feith) and capable of any enormity in the pursuit of their objectives.

Such glib scapegoating looks particularly lame in the wake of last week’s Oscar triumph for “The Hurt Locker,” the first major movie to paint the Iraq War in shades of gray. But “The Hurt Locker,” of course, was largely apolitical. Throw politics into the mix, and there seems to be no escaping the clichés and simplifications that mar Greengrass’s movie — and Robert Redford’s “Lions for Lambs,” Oliver Stone’s “W.” and all the other attempts to bring the Bush era to cinematic life.