Grant Heslov’s “The Men Who Stare At Goats” is an intermittently clever, absurdist satire of war along the lines of “Catch-22” or “Dr. Strangelove”. George Clooney plays Lyn Cassady, a psychic-Jedi warrior trained as part of a secret Army project to train super soldiers. His story is told by Bob Wiltong, played by Ewan McGregor, a clueless reporter from Michigan who has gotten in over his head by coming to Iraq less to write a story than to impress his wife, who has just left him. Bob is a typical American liberal. He’s not sure what’s going on in the world, he knows he’s overreacting but can’t help it, and he goes along as a passive accomplice on a military mission he’s not quite sure about. His wife has left him for his editor, a creep with a plastic arm. He may be dazed and confused out in the Iraqi desert, but he’s a doofus with a good heart—gone a little crazy, but, the film asks, who can blame him? He’s just a mainstream American journalist, after all.

The chocolate-and-peanut butter conceit here is a bizarre mash-up of new age hippie culture with the severity of the U.S. Army. The unit’s commander, Bill Django, played by Jeff Bridges, comes up with the slogan “Be all you can be”. He makes it sound convincingly like an exhortation to live a full, enlightened life rather than the ra-ra slogan the Army soon broadcast in its propaganda. Clooney’s Lyn is a gifted psychic spy (or “remote viewer” as he clarifies a few times) whose moment of personal liberation comes courtesy of Billy Idol’s “Dancing With Myself”. The film works to the extent it does because Lyn believes in the snake oil he’s selling—actually, he’s his own best customer—and MacGregor’s Sam wants so badly to believe him that a lot of laughs come from the moony expression he wears as Lyn dishes out nonsense with a straight face. When he listens to Lyn call himself a JedI warrior, there’s a good sub textual joke in play because MacGregor, in the “Star Wars” prequels, was himself a Jedi knight. The casting works as a wink which underscores the insanity of Lyn’s secret unit. Watching MacGregor feign ignorance of Jedi warriors is a delicious thrill, given an even stranger warp by his American accent.

The conceit of hippie soldiers is certainly funny here and there. Django screams at his new recruits, drill-sergeant style, urging them to become “angels of death”. Then the grizzled flower child cracks a smile and admits he’s kidding, while Heslov reverses the shot to show the recruits lined up against a hilarious hippie wall mural depicting “enlightened” American soldiers. The holy Native American eagle feather he gives Lyn is really a dyed turkey feather. Lyn’s new-age warrior skills feature pseudo-scientific jargon like “bi-directional” and “optimum trajectory”. There’s a good bit in which General Hopgood explains why psi-ops are necessary, explaining that the Russians are already ahead of them. His superior frowns and nods his head, knowing what must be done. The military mind at work: if the Russians were ahead of the Americans in gum-chewing, the Pentagon would start a task force to beat them.

Heslov stages a promising set piece in which Bob and Lyn are picked up by a private security force protecting a businessman (Robert Patrick). They roll into a town in two SUVs, with Patrick in the back seat boasting of the money he’s going to make in the new Iraq, eyes gleaming at the thought of Wal-Marts and Starbucks on every corner. “We’re going in with fangs out”, a mercenary tells his buddies, pointing his machines gun out the window. They pull up to get gas, cutting to the front of a long line of Iraqi civilians cars and bumping one poor Iraqi’s car out of the way while the hose is still in the tank. An amusingly literal enactment of American motives: the Yankees are in town for gas, cash, and the thrill of shooting stuff.

If only Heslov had cut the scene short. A backfiring motorbike causes the twitchy mercenaries to start shooting--at two other SUVs also occupied by American mercenaries, presumably employed by another businessman bringing the gospel of greed to Iraq. Heslov gives us the surreal site of American shooting at each other while terrified Iraqis flee for cover. Funny, except the scene suddenly breaks down as allegory. The absurdity of Iraqis stuck between Americans shooting at each at a gas station other works as a bit of inspired absurdist comedy. Then you think, wait a minute. Of all the possible dramatizations of America’s intervention in Iraq, wouldn’t a more obvious—and potentially more blackly comic scene--involve pie-in-the-sky Rambots unwittingly stumbling into a vicious civil war between Sunnis and Shiites?

A clue about what’s wrong here is the disappearance of the two Iraqis on the motorbike. Heslov milks the meager comedy of cowboy Americans shooting at each other, avoiding confrontation with the fact that the two guys on the motorbike would have been shot to hamburger in seconds. There have been many reported incidents of civilian Iraqis being shot by U.S. forces with far less provocation, yet the Iraqis on the bike scoot right out of the scene. They’re incidental to the comedy because, as is plain when Lyn first tells Bob of “the dark side”, the film is about America’s struggle for its soul. The war in Iraq is just scenery. The film unwittingly mirrors the neocon contempt for “reality on the ground”: in the stories it tells itself, even the “smart” leftist kind, the American imperial imagination cannot face its own victims. A traumatized Iraqi named Mahmoud is there only to play straight man to Clooney’s insane psychic spy, hanging around for a few scenes only so that he can mistakenly be called Mohammed.

In this way “The Men Who Stare At Goats” wallows in the sterile no-man’s land between surrealism and satire. A comic conceit does not a political message make. This is clear when Lyn, Bob and Tom distract the base’s troops with an LSD-laced breakfast in order to free some Iraqi prisoners. Like the earlier encounter with a trio of kidnappers, the movie doesn’t even grant them enough agency to make us wonder what their intentions are. We are meant to laugh as Lyn, like a demented Christ, leads a flock of innocents past tripping soldiers into the freedom of the desert. He frees a shed full of goats, too, and once again the movie’s sense of the absurd clashes with its satiric structure; surely Heslov didn’t mean to suggest that Iraqis were dumb animals in need of assistance from magnanimous American shepherds.