Dreaming America: The Iraq War from a US perspective

After watching the films of the ‘America – Post America’ section, I couldn’t help but stumble away feeling slightly queasy. The ongoing situation in Iraq has become increasingly complex and raises ever more questions that beg for answers. In a time of extreme measures and radicalising opinions, who is going to pour some nuance into the mix?

Taxi to the Dark Side by Alex Gibney introduces Dilawar, a taxi driver who was tortured and killed in Bagram prison (predecessor of Abu Ghraib) in his country Afghanistan after being wrongfully accused of terrorism. His story opens the door for an exposure of the American government’s breaking of the 1949 Geneva Convention, through torturing prisoners of war by means of sensory deprivation combined with psychological and sexual assault. The film’s structure is mainly based on the eyewitness accounts of the torturers themselves which, paradoxically, attempt to convey compassion.

These soldiers, who were convicted for their involvement in what happened at Bagram, are presented as scapegoats, fallen victim to the whims of the higher echelons. In contrast, Dilawar and the other prisoners stay out of reach, only seen in photographs and through the guiding voiceover. Further distance from the prisoners is created through the imagery used; we see the tortured as they were seen by their torturers, in their sickening uncensored snapshots and videos.

While the film attempts to ask some interesting questions about democracy and what this still means today, I found this movie not only hard to watch because of these images, but moreover because it’s ignoring more fundamental questions. What is guilt exactly and where does it lay? Who are these people treated so inhumanly? Just one villager is asked a question at the end of the movie, but his answer fits neatly into the story and does not add any new or interesting layer.

At a time when we in the West are becoming almost indifferent to the next news item of a suicide bomb in Baghdad, a film dealing with this topic but ignoring those questions does not facilitate a genuine compassion for the other side of the story. The xenophobia that partly created the escalation of events in the Middle East is still in place.

But where Taxi is in a way critical of the American system, Full Battle Rattle by Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss is not. Somewhere in the Mojave Desert the US army has recreated a small-scale Iraq with several villages temporarily inhabited by Iraqi refugees. Here battalions are trained before going on to the real deal, during a two-week life role-playing program. In a way, this movie is a metaphor for the war and an alarming insight in the hopelessness of the situation, even if it’s just in staged form. Some of the participants, like Lt. Col. Robert McLaughlin, will leave for Iraq with more self-doubt. But the way this movie is structured and edited undermines the intention of being observant. A combination of interviewees mostly saying things that fit in a pro-American frame and an underlining of manipulative music make this film highly subjective. I was waiting for the soldiers to really go to Iraq, but the movie never took me there. It stayed in its comfort zone, on its own side of the ocean.

My feeling of discomfort after watching these movies came about through a clash with my own opinions and expectations. I was expecting answers I never got. But how do these looks at the war and at America equate to reality? Are Americans dreaming America? Or does everybody dream America? How well do we know it through just the pictures we see? This perhaps touches on the ever-problematic aspect of the documentary genre: we are expecting to see a reality, but whose reality is this and what are we going to do with it? If these are the kind of movies which represent and are shown as the reality of the current attitude of America towards Iraq and the Middle East, I cannot help but wonder if they will just polarise opinions even further, or if they could be used to start useful debate.

By Maartje Alders