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ozens of books about terrorism, Iraq and the Bush administration have appeared since the beginning of the Iraq war over three years ago. Documentaries have proliferated also: Fahrenheit 9/11, Gunner Palace, Control Room, Beyond Good and Evil and Why We Fight.

This year's Vancouver International Film Festival has included what may be the greatest of such documentaries: American Zeitgeist: Crisis and Conscience in an Age of Terror. Writer-director Rob McGann clearly understands the conventions of this five-year-old genre, and has both respected them and gone beyond them.

Earlier "Iraq docs" have gained power by showing us individuals caught up in the struggle, whether in Iraq or in the U.S. The Al-Jazeera reporters try to cover the war in Baghdad while U.S. forces target them. Young GIs, living in one of Uday Hussein's palaces, party in Uday's swimming pool when not kicking in doors and arresting residents of humbler homes. American children learn how to shoot enemies in video games before moving on to similar games developed by the U.S. Army. The mother of a slain American soldier debates with another woman who is pro-war.

This personal approach is powerful, and millions of viewers have responded to it emotionally. McGann certainly gives us glimpses of individuals: a businessman sitting on a ledge near Ground Zero, covered in dust; an Arab firing a rocket-propelled grenade and then instantly shot dead.

But the overall intent of American Zeitgeist is not to make us feel for individuals. It wants to give us some perspective and to make us think about the vast movements that we as individuals have been caught up in.

America's bastard child

McGann's thesis is that al-Qaida is America's own bastard child, the direct result of U.S. funding of the mujahedeen who fought the Russians in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion of 1979. American dollars paid for the training, arming and...