Paul Chan has become a kind of poster child of the politicized art world––and with good reason. In the late 90s Chan organized with the group Voices in the Wilderness to end sanctions against Iraq. Before the Iraq War, Chan traveled to Iraq where he interacted with Iraqi folk and made videos intended for educational purposes.

The results of Chan's trip to Iraq are three videos which chronicle the before, during, and after of the Iraq War. The first video, RE: The Operation (2002), imagines Bush administration officials writing home from Afghanistan during the American operation post-9/11. As such, it is a witty satire of the Bush administration's conduct following 9/11. The second video, Baghdad In No Particular Order (2003), consists of more or less raw footage of Chan interacting with people in Iraq before Iraq was invaded by the United States in 2003.

Riffing on the experimental ethnography of Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Agnes Varda, Trinh T. Minh-Ha and others of the Cinéma Vérité film tradition, the video shows scenes from ordinary life. Twin girls dance to American pop music in their family home; a monkey sleeps in a hotel lobby; a boy dances enthusiastically (as if in trance) during the religious ceremonies of a Mosque. In the third video, Now Promise Now Threat (2005), Chan returns to his native Nebraska where he gathers footage, once again, of the folk. What this video reveals is the contradiction of people's cultural attitudes, which are less connected with a national political discourse than ultra-local religious ones. Now Promise Now Threat, Chan claims, led him to think more about theological questions as they connect art and politics.