Atrocities Now!

The recent Wikileaks exposures of widespread and uninvestigated abuse, torture and murder in Iraq bring to mind another exposure. The exposure of film writers and directors who have continued to perpetrate the myth of the ‘Noble American Soldier’ in the catalogue of execrable Iraq War movies in the last 7 years or so. You could pick any of them really but the most infamous is probably The Hurt Locker (poor, conscientious, long-suffering US GI’s is the message from that film) and, more recently, Restrepo. Restrepo is not as guilty of the lie and the myth as The Hurt Locker but it does suggest that the narrative in Iraq is about soldiers rather than the people who live there. I wonder how the directors who have made the string of Iraq War turkeys feel today in the light of the Wikileaks exposures - the real picture of the military squalor which has been rampant in that poor country since US soldiers' arrival. 'It was worse under Saddam' comes back the mantra. But was it? Between pre-2003 sanctions and the results of the occupation(death, displacement, disease and illnesses), the West has almost certainly blighted the lives of more Iraqis, and maybe killed more, than Saddam ever did.

What's the bet that an on-the-make director (Kathryn Bigelow did you say?) is making 'Atrocities Now' even now.