Why do people interpret Millar's Ultimates work as Pro-Iraq War?
I have never understood why a common criticism of Millar's work in the Ultimates universe is that it argues the Iraq War was a net positive for America, when so much of his Ultimates material can instead be read as a critique of post-9/11 American consumerist culture, militarism, and the Bush administration.
The government is portrayed as extremely fascistic throughout the universe. Ultimate X-Men, for example, opens with a DoFP-style scenario in which the Sentinels, originally developed under the Clinton administration, are deployed by Bush, reflecting a common criticism of the 2-party system that the Democrats and Republicans are the arms of the same oppressive institutional body. This ultimately leads to Bush being stripped and paraded on live television, hardly an unambiguous endorsement of his administration.
The first Ultimates series similarly critiques the logic of the military-industrial complex. When the team is initially established, there is no genuine threat for them to fight. Banner therefore engineers one by transforming himself into the Hulk and killing hundreds of people, because he believes the team needs to justify its existence and enormous expenditure of public money. The military apparatus effectively has to manufacture the conditions that justify its own continued existence. This mirrors the broader logic surrounding the Iraq War, particularly the presentation of intelligence concerning Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Colin Powell's 2003 presentation to the United Nations Security Council became one of the major public justifications for the invasion, despite the subsequent failure to find the stockpiles that had been claimed. The war ultimately produced enormous financial costs, with estimates of the direct and immediate costs of military operations and war funding reaching hundreds of billions of dollars and, depending on methodology and what is included, into the trillions.
The critique becomes even clearer through the superhuman arms race. Nick Fury provides corporations such as Oscorp and Trask with information that allows them to reproduce the Super-Soldier Serum and his collaboration with the EU to create the European Initiative . Rather than making the world safer, this proliferation produces many of Spider-Man's villains and contributes to an escalating global arms race. The technology that is supposed to protect America therefore creates new threats that require even greater amounts of military power to contain. The military-industrial complex effectively reproduces the threats that it claims to be protecting America from.
The Liberators are the culmination of this idea. They are not simply moustache-twirling villains whose only motivation is hatred of America. They explicitly state that they do not want to kill civilians and that their targets are the American government and its military apparatus. Their justification is that America has attempted to impose its power and entrench itself in other countries, making the Liberators a kind of Global South mirror of the Ultimates themselves. Millar gives the reader enough context to understand their position, even if their methods are still portrayed as wrong. Thor, meanwhile, functions as an explicitly anti-war conscience within the Ultimates and repeatedly challenges the assumptions underlying American military intervention.
This creates a broader theme of imperial blowback, America develops increasingly powerful weapons in the name of security, deploys them abroad, creates enemies and encourages other countries to develop their own weapons in response, and then uses the resulting threats to justify further militarisation. The superhuman arms race therefore functions as an exaggerated metaphor for the security dilemma and the consequences of American foreign policy. He even takes this further in Ultimate Avengers where he shows how pro-Democracy protests can be used by the elites to destabilise countries for their own gain in Gregory Stark.
Most importantly, the story ultimately resolves this conflict by having the Ultimates become independent from the American government. They cease being simply an extension of American foreign policy and reject their role as state-controlled weapons.
Because of this, I think it is reductive to describe The Ultimates as an argument that the Iraq War was ultimately good for America. There is certainly an aesthetic fascination with American military power the Ultimates are deliberately presented as powerful, glamorous, and spectacular but that is very different from endorsing the political system that deploys them. The actual narrative repeatedly shows militarisation producing unintended consequences, creating new enemies, proliferating dangerous technology, and ultimately becoming something that even the superheroes themselves have to reject.