"In the Loop":

A truer-than-true fictional film about war

Baghdad is never mentioned. The American president and British prime minister stay entirely off-screen. And no parliamentary or congressional sessions figure in the action.

Yet "In the Loop" — a motor-mouthed and epithet-strewn Anglo-American comedy — comes as close as any sobering news report to explaining how the U.S. steered itself into Iraq, with the U.K. at its heels.

The film by Armando Iannucci, director of British television's political satire "The Thick of It," feels like the "Dr. Strangelove" of the Iraq War era...

Q: What were the guidelines in sticking to and departing from reality? It's a bit of a parallel universe, yet there aren't exact correlations.

Exactly. ... That's the genius of this film. Naming individual personalities and blaming them is a distraction from the real condition that allows wars to be popularized and sold.

Q: You don't mention Iraq either. Was that always the rule?

Yeah. We weren't mentioning anything. Armando wanted a universal film about the behavior of people who are not at the top of the power pyramid. More