By Susan Gerhard

BY NOW IT'S clear there are two Iraqs: the one in President George W. Bush's mind, which he's succeeded in downloading to U.S. television screens, and the one many people are dying in. You know you're in that other Iraq when you watch the movingly awful images in Michael Moore's new cluster bomb of a documentary. There's the shrieking pain of a boy hit by a bomb having his skull put back together again. A man worries over limbs that are floating amid the wreckage of destroyed homes. U.S. soldiers are seen hooding Iraqi prisoners, jeering at their humiliations ("Ali Baba's still got a hard-on!" one shares with the troop). You're there, which is supposed to be far from here. And yet you're not watching the BBC; you're watching a Moore film, and you know – no matter how difficult it might be to get there from here – Moore will take us back to the United States, back to a once-thriving town called Flint.

He has to – he's won the Palme d'Or; he's now an auteur. His Michigan is like Nick Broomfield's boom microphone. It's like Errol Morris's Interrotron. It's like Cassavetes' Rowlands. And when the pomo left slimmed down and lost its fat – its big-labor belly – Moore found Michigan as his axe. I've never been there. But I've lived close enough to recognize and appreciate his take on the lost worlds of the formerly industrial Midwest. Moore's Midwest roots make him a good match for Bush, who likes to talk Texan when it's long past the point for him – just as Moore lives in Manhattan but retains a flat midcountry accent.

He uses that inflection in a heart-to-heart with Lila Lipscomb, a Flint resident, whose son went to war for the United States and died in Iraq. Lipscomb reads out loud a letter from her son, written months before he died, about just how pointless he felt the war was. Moore rides along with Michigan Marine recruiters to a Flint strip mall, as they target African American men of seemingly little means. He finds his old Roger and Me-era complaints – the joblessness and corporate ruthlessness – getting new life: even Lipscomb admits military work is as good employment as her children can expect.

Moore doesn't need to "revisit" Roger and Me, though: the template has informed every film he's made. The primary cast Moore has assembled all came from Flint, conceptually. There's Katherine Harris playing the bourgeois woman to be scorned (standing in for the color consultant of Roger and Me and the literary escort of The Big One). Bush plays the evil white man better than Roger, Charlton, and Phil before him (and is given better lines, as when he states to the press, "I love to dig the soil looking for bugs"). Taking the City of Ridicule role this time is Washington, D.C., with its black-tie party circuit, as opposed to San Francisco and its so-called pretentious café culture. And playing Moore is a shadow of the every-frame-filled-with-him version of Moore. Like other bad guys in Moore's past, Bush does aim a glancing blow at the filmmaker, joking that Moore should get a real job. (And if Bush has his way, he may need to very soon.) But in the starring role: it's still Moore's Michigan that is, reliably, oddly, front and center.

In this case, Moore didn't even have to go all the way back to Flint, really, to find Michigan. He locates it inside the tanks in Iraq, where young soldiers are flipping CDs into their tanks' "Charlieboxes" so "motivational" music can accompany them on their disengaged murders.

Yet the trip back to Flint is essential not just to aid in the Michael Moore-ification of the story; it's the primary vein into the bigger story itself: the United States' ability to buy this film as the counterpropaganda to believe in an election year. The people who've made him an auteur, the ones he keeps remembering in Flint, are the ones fighting the war making Bush's family and its friends rich – and the reason Americans, even jingoistic, xenophobic, imperialistic ones hoping manifest destiny pushes this country further and further across the globe, should vote Bush out of office. Moore backs this point up: he visits a war profiteers convention (!), where shameless "opportunities" in oil-rich Iraq are discussed, then returns to soldiers complaining about their wages – and not just the wages of war. He follows the money, Investigative Reporting 101, as it flowed in and out of Afghanistan after a "short" war that may not have won the United States any friends but did manage to win it a pipeline to Asian oil.

True: his foray back into the homeland takes precious time away from his many other targets. It slows down an initially tightly controlled critique of Bush's presidency, one with a lot of classic Moore black comedy at Bush's expense: his penchant for working "outside the office" (or the state, for that matter), his lack of leadership at crucial moments (say, the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when Bush, after being informed of the attack on the second World Trade Center tower, continued reading My Pet Goat to Florida schoolchildren), the small fact that he didn't actually win the election, by many voters' estimations, and the major one that his family has deep, strong connections with elite Saudis, including the bin Laden family.

I too expected more on the Bush family ties to the bin Laden family, as opposed to a superficial sweep through elite Saudi Arabian faces, after so much buildup. But I can't join the chorus calling for less Moore. What's essentially interesting about Moore's work is his persona: his literal journey, his predictable obsessions, the fact that his complaints still resonate, and, strangely, stand alone in a mind-deadening media landscape. As in one major Michigan moment when young black men look around their own neighborhood and notice that the blight they live with looks an awful lot like the war zones they see on TV. After which Moore pans down a wasted street.

No one ever accused Moore of subtlety, or lack of sentimentality. He's a comedian, muckraker, and propagandist who can sling mud with the best of them. He, like Bush, clearly likes to dig the soil for bugs. He's almost as good at smashing them.