Coming this holiday season to a theatre near you: Hollywood Celebrates The Spirit Of America, a patriotic trailer made by Oscar-winning filmmaker Chuck Workman (Precious Images). The three-minute montage of classic film images is just one initiative of a new alliance between Washington spin-doctors and Hollywood moguls designed to promote America and “American values.”

While a small group of skeptics, including Robert Redford and Oliver Stone, has voiced concerns about interference with content, the majority of the entertainment industry has jumped on board.

Free DVDs and CDs are being sent to U.S. troops; pro-war public-service announcements will soon air on the Fox network; ABC has already taped a special armed forces episode of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and MTV is sponsoring a USO show to be broadcast on New Year’s Day (here’s betting they call it “Rumsfeld Rocks!”).

To foster cross-cultural understanding, plans are in the works for musical collaborations between top U.S. pop singers and Arab musicians, while one TV writer has recommended to the Senate International Relations Committee that television programs like The Practice, Third Watch and ER be given free to Arab nations to help illustrate what life is like in the United States.

It’s quite an olive branch to Hollywood, which only last year was being called on the carpet by the U.S. government for making violent films for children.

Now that the U.S. military is enacting real violence upon children in Afghanistan, apparently that’s all water under the bridge.

But what’s truly curious is: Why the sales pitch at all? Why does anyone in Washington still think people need convincing or that the American values and resolve need propping up?

After all, President George W. Bush’s public approval rating is through the roof.

The entertainment industry, meanwhile, has already proven its support with musical tributes, stars-and-stripes logos, fundraisers for the Red Cross, NYPD baseball caps popping up on celebrity heads and flags framing every television newscast and sporting event.

Preparing for the next instalment of Mission Impossible, Tom Cruise has met with the Central Intelligence Agency in order to present it in “the best light possible,” and the hosts of The View recently took turns on air whacking an Osama bin Laden piñata.

And it’s not even as though Bush has a hard sell.

Bin Laden, a villain straight out of central casting, was behind an abominable terrorist attack that killed thousands of innocents. He hides out with a corrupt regime that denies its female citizens education, healthcare, even sunlight, and then mocks the attacks and promises more to come. How could anyone possibly be against the American campaign?

Yet, dissent — however limited and marginalized — persists. And if Americans would just stop waving those big foam “We’re Number 1!” fingers for a second and stop endlessly congratulating themselves on their extraordinary bravery, courage and resiliency, they might just learn something from the dissenters.

It’s utterly callous to suggest, like some have, that America deserved what it got, but it is fair to say that past American deeds have rightly made many skeptical about its tactics in its war on terrorism.

Because even those of us who recognize the necessity, in some circumstances, of a military response still question the overkill in Afghanistan, where the humanitarian aid group Médecins Sans Frontières reports “an unacceptably high toll on civilians” and where tens of thousands of children are dying of starvation because the U.S. military, while it will gladly drop bombs from planes, won’t put enough troops on the ground to assist with relief efforts.

And even as it’s powerful to see the women of Afghanistan reclaiming some freedoms, it’s clear that if liberation were truly the goal, America would be invading its ally, Saudi Arabia, next and freeing its women from their Taliban-esque constraints.

More frightening now, of course, is the push to start bombing Iraq — a nation that would very likely retaliate with biological and chemical weapons (some, ironically supplied by the U.S. in the early 1980s when Saddam Hussein was an ally) in a region already unstable as violence escalates in Israel and the Occupied Territories.

Though potentially devastating to its anti-terrorism efforts, attacking Iraq would satisfy the Bush administration hawks who regret the “unfinished business” of 1991’s Gulf War — a war notable for its action-movie visuals and for the creation of another cinematically evil villain.

Nope, America really doesn’t need Hollywood to assist it with its mythmaking. It does that well enough on its own.