“The world is a battlefield, and we are at war”
I recently wrote an article about the representation
of the Iraq War in Hollywood fiction and how American filmmakers had failed
to reflect the long drawn-out conflicts in enough of their cinema. For such a profoundly important subject
matter, it surprises me how little fiction writers had explicitly written about
it.
The opposite is true of documentary
films – relying heavily on televisual broadcasting conventions, a huge number
of non-fiction films were made to show ‘the realities’ of war that in fact did
nothing more than over-saturate the audience with scenes of conflict and
horror. Dirty Wars is a work that combines Rick Rowley’s artful
cinematography with Jeremy Scahill’s relentless determination to tell a story
to create a harrowing, yet personal film about the last 10 years of American
history.
The story that Scahill is trying to tell
starts with a nighttime raid conducted by the United States army on a house in
Gardez where an extended Afghan family is having a celebration. That night, 7 people were killed including
one man’s wife, sister and niece. He
later describes how the soldiers dug the bullets out of the bodies and
disappeared back into the night – later a NATO press release would inaccurately
described the fatalities as ‘honour killings’ carried out by the family on
their own women. Scahill testifies about
this incident to the US congress but none of the congressman bother to show up…
This incident leads Scahill deeper into
the conflict to uncover a special-forces unit called JSOC (Joint Special
Operations Command) who are given increasingly more power to hunt ‘Taliban’
operatives across the Middle East. Years
later they would achieve legitimacy and notoriety for being the tem that killed
Osama Bin Laden, yet they were also the team that killed Anwar al-Awlaki and
later his 16 year old son – both United States citizens.
There is a moment early on in film that
seems to summarise the mission statement of the rest of the narrative: to highlight the dangers of cause-and-effect
in geopolitics. One of the survivors of
the Gardez killings claims that he refers to the US special-forces team as “The
American Taliban.” Another survivor, the
man who lost his wife, then claims that he wanted to attach a bomb to his chest
and kill Americans, until his remaining family talks him out of it. This theme is revisited over and over again –
that the war on terror is making the world less
safe by increasing the number of potential enemies, through the indiscriminate
killing of civilians, as opposed to the opposite.
Scahill and Rowley then venture into
Somalia to see the extent of the JSOC operational perimeter and meet up with a
number of warlords who have been enlisted to help find and eliminate people on
the US kill
list. One of them freely admits to
the filmmakers that, “America knows how to fund a war… They are the great
teachers.”
The expanding scope and resulting
mission creep of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars are a nightmare to behold and
films like this manage to shock and disgust before eventually leaving you
ashamed and hopeless at the situation.
But they are a valuable document with a noble cause – to bring a
narrative to the lives that are affected by the tragedy, without
sensationalising the process of presenting the information.
Documentaries are constructions of
reality and never objective, but they are often moral exercises. Where most American news media repackages
statements from the government or ignores the humanity on the ground during
wartime, Dirty Wars is an important
counterbalance to the deficit of investigative journalism that has appeared
onscreen in the last decade. Let’s hope
that it wins the Academy Award of which it has just
been nominated…
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