Clint Eastwood may be many things, but he's not anti-patriotic. Flags of our Fathers shows very well the respect he's got for the men who fought and died, the real ones, not the propaganda super-heroes.

But he's not shy about denouncing the brutality and futility of war. It doesn't matter if WWII was the closest thing to a fair war (if there can ever be such thing), it was a war nonetheless, where people got killed, brutally or not, on both sides. Eastwood shows in these two films that people, no matter what, have dignity, feelings, and get involved into the reckless spiral of war, which brings the worst and best of people. The suffering of actual people is what is futile, a waste.

Being anti-war is not being a naïve pacifist. It's despising all what war means, despite accepting it's some times inevitable and even necessary. Clint Eastwood is an anti-war man, and so I am.