I do, and it does fit the bill sometimes… One of the best episodes of The Unit was an hour-long gunfight at a logistics base in Afghanistan. They’ve also done creeping and crawling missions (the “Unit” in question is supposed to be a team of Delta Force style commandos) in Iran and Israel. I think they’ve only gone to Iraq once, for a silly episode where they had to pose as MPs to protect a slutty young pop star who was performing for the troops. But by and large they haven’t done much with Iraq. I have a feeling this is due to the very jingoistic nature of the show and the fact that if you can’t say something nice…
For a start, we don’t have clear cut, identifiable Bad Guys the way we all did back in WWII- the Nazis or the Japanese Military had distinctive uniforms, did beastly and unpleasant things, and everyone could generally agree that they were, in fact, The Bad Guys.
But in this current situation… well, it’s very hard for your average Person In The Street to separate Arab militants with AK-47s and a dislike of The West and a desire to blow it all up from Abdullah the shop-keeper, who is also Arab, wears the same clothes, but rather likes The West and would like to visit someday. So, you either have to make The Bad Guys so comically and obviously Bad that the movie instantly becomes a B-grade straight-to-video/cable TV event, or you end up with a lot of confusing moral ambiguity about who the Real Enemy is etc.
Modern Warfare also isn’t very cinematic, either- some guy in a different country presses a button and a Tomahawk Cruise Missile drops on top of the enemy’s fuel dump, or two guys with a .50 calibre rifle pick off a vague shape two kilometres away. Rather a lot of it also seems to happen in Night Vision Green, which is fine when there’s a BBC correspondent standing there giving you a narration for a couple of minutes on the evening news, but is somewhat less compelling on a screen the size of a tennis court for two hours.
That and I think the Afghanistan/Iraq war is still Current Events, and movies made about them now are going to reflect how we see the events as they’re happeing- which could make them look very dated in the not too distant future if (to quote Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski) “New shit comes to light”. Better to stick with things comfortably in the past, and save the social commentary for bloggers, the evening news, and student film-makers.