by Tom Bissell
A good deal of the film serves up what are by now many visual commonplaces of the Iraq War, in particular the chaotic nocturne of American soldiers on insurgent sweeps, bashing down Iraqis’ doors and screaming at people who do not speak English. The familiarity of these scenes makes them no less disquieting. “That might not look all that great,” an officer admits. “but it’s a necessary evil that’s inherent in war. People are going to be inconvenienced and pissed off. If their husbands weren’t trying to kill us, we wouldn’t be there.”
Soon enough the mood turns ominous. One suspected insurgent explains to an American through a platoon interpreter: “I’m not opposed. Do you understand me? I’m not opposed.” “Fuck this guy” the soldier responds. “Zip him up.” The Iraqi is next shown being hooded and cuffed and pushed into the back of a truck while nearby some young Iraqis watch mutely. Later, while an outraged Iraqi buttonholes the camera about the “indecent” actions of Americans taking Iraqi women from local homes, a nearby soldier explains where he is from to two supremely unmoved Iraqis. “What is ‘California’?” one Iraqi asks the other in Arabic. The soldiers themselves realize these pathetic public-relations attempts are scarcely worth the oxygen, yet one of the film’s most heartbreaking scenes—filmed in night-vision-goggle green—shows an American soldier stopping to make small talk with an Iraqi man near Dreamland’s perimeter. An effortful, translation-error-ridden conversation ensues, and one senses that this soldier is so urgently attempting to communicate because he feels his very humanity is at stake. Many of the soldiers, to their credit, acknowledge the legitimacy of Iraqi anger and fear. As one says, “If this was home in Chicago, and there were some Iraqi soldiers shovin’ up on my door, I’d be running up there with a couple guns myself.” Sergeant John Blyler, one of his platoon’s most outspoken Republicans, says, “When I first got here, I wanted to help these people. But now after my old squad leader got killed... I just don’t really care about these people.” A few scenes later, Sergeant Blyler is wounded in an IED blast, which quickly serves to underscore the mindless retributive logic of war. One of the soldiers present at the blast later regrets not gunning down an Iraqi who, understandably, began to run away: “I should have fucking killed him. I hate these people.” None of these moments—and there are several—are played for “gotcha” effect. Although their film occasionally feels like an elongated 20/20 segment whose profanity has been left intact, Garret and Olds are sensitive without being credulous and unimpressed without seeming cynical.
The overall atmosphere in Occupation: Dreamland is churchy, Skoal-drooling, almost exaggeratedly heterosexual, and not quite Southern so much as southern Indianan. In Gunner Palace, the overall atmosphere is pass-the-mic ebullience. Several soldiers freestyle some not-too-swift rhymes (“We live from Baghdad / Man, it’s so sad”) and another plays the “Star-Spangled Banner” on his electric guitar before a molten Baghdad sunset. Narrated by its whisky-voiced director, Mike Tucker, Gunner Palace takes a markedly different view of the war from Occupation: Dreamland. In Gunner Palace the war is presented as deadly but vaguely ennobling. Gunner Palace itself, a ruined and colonnaded home that once belonged to Uday Hussein, is described by its commanding officer as an “adult’s paradise.” Tucker never really steps back to examine the wisdom of American soldiers locating themselves in the opulent mansion of a murderous regime they came to depose; instead he employs his most pointed ironies by overlaying Donald Rumsfeld saying things like “Baghdad is bustling with commerce” upon scenes of a Baghdad bustling with flying lead. Which is not to say that Gunner Palace lacks a moral measuring tape. In the film’s most moving interview, a young Army intelligence analyst, clearly frustrated by the war, says, “I don’t think, anywhere in history, somebody has killed somebody else and something better has come out of it.”
Many of the subjects in Gunner Palace talk about how no one can understand what they are going through, how to their friends back home Baghdad is one big action film. “For y’all it’s just a show,” SPC Richmond Shaw, the “palace poet,” tells the camera. “But we live in this movie.” Tucker’s narration also addresses this existential quandary: “Unlike a movie, war has no end.” But by the end of the film one is fairly sure that viewing the Iraq War as a movie is less our problem than that of these soldiers. Enriched by its metal-and-hip-hop soundtrack and littered with dramatic comeuppances, Gunner Palace feels just like a movie, and moreover appears to know it: one of its wittier touches updates the famous “Ride of the Valkyries” scene from Apocalypse Now. What is strangest about Gunner Palace is its appeal both to the ardently pro-war and militantly antiwar. No doubt this is due to its obvious affection for its subjects alongside its unblinking portrayal of what they are forced to do.
There are only a few species of American soldier to be found in Control Room: shouting brutes, grinning rationalizers, and incompetent morons. The brutes all come to us through third-party footage, the rationalizers through intimate interview, the morons from behind press-briefing podiums. Directed by Jehane Noujam, Control Room is a sleek inquiry into the nature of media in a time of war, and what Noujam discovers amounts to a murky casserole of McLuhanesque ingredients. Unlike the makers of Occupation: Dreamland and Gunner Palace, the makers of Control Room were never in actual physical danger, which probably explains its icier gaze. But in telling the story of the Iraq War through the prism of Al Jazeera Satellite Channel (with 40 million Arab viewers, the largest and most influential media force in the region) and CENTCOM (specifically the American military’s wartime information clearing house, located in Doha, Qatar), Control Room achieves a tone as apocalyptic as that of Gunner Palace and Occupation: Dreamland, but in a far quieter key. It is an assassin to their blundering grunts.
Donald Rumsfeld groused that Al Jazeera “has a pattern of playing propaganda over and over and over again. What they do is when there’s a bomb that goes down, they grab some children and some women and pretend that the bomb hit the women and the children.” At one point in Control Room the winningly bitter Al Jazeera producer Samir Khader, who appears to have had a cigarette surgically attached to his finger, points to a television screen which holds the image of a wounded Iraqi child. “Rumsfeld called this incitement,” he says. “I call it true journalism.”
In most of the Iraq War films this is as close as we get to the victims of American violence and insurgent terror. The war Peter Davis filmed in Hearts and Minds is not the sort of war American filmmakers in Iraq are privy to—at least, not without risking their heads. Davis could, and did, talk to average Vietnamese who had been bombed and maimed. Such victims are virtually absent in Occupation: Dreamland and Gunner Palace, and they are footage of footage in Control Room.
What Control Room seeks to illuminate (where truth devolves into propaganda, and where war and media join hands) is much less interesting than its incidental illuminations, among them the ineptitude of the U.S. military’s press office, such as when an American press officer obliviously attempts to interest a roomful of hostile Arab reporters in the story of Jessica Lynch’s rescue. “We’re not here to give coverage to the press,” announces a U.S. Navy press officer giving coverage to the press. “We’re here to liberate the people of Iraq.” It all builds into a frieze of cluelessness.
Noujam’s method is to wait around long enough for something to happen. Her patience is both dreadfully and movingly rewarded. An Al Jazeera reporter is killed by American forces, perhaps intentionally and an unlikely friendship develops between Hassan Ibrahim, a portly Al Jazeera producer, and Lieutenant Josh Rushing, a handsome and sensitive Marine Corps press officer. Rushing’s moral awakening provides Control Room with much of its arc. Routinely slaughtered by Ibrahim in conversation, Rushing struggles with his memorized talking points and the reality of what he sees, ultimately recognizing that Fox News and Al Jazeera are simply two sides of the same cathode and deciding that improving Arab-American relations is the duty of his generation. (Rushing now works for Al Jazeera.)
The Dreams of Sparrows, Iraqi director Hayda Mousa Daffar’s account of life within the occupation, opens with a reenactment (the film’s only obvious fictional interlude) of a mother giving birth during the U.S. invasion; she dies. “This movie,” Daffar tells us, “is about what happened to that child, to the new Iraq.” The new Iraq is not of much interest to Scott and Olds, Tucker, or Noujam. Nor are they much interested in the old Iraq. They are concerned with the minute-to-minute Iraq, which their cameras devour. Through the eyes of Iraqis, in The Dreams of Sparrows, we can finally divine what really emerges from the war’s digestive tract.
Daffar notes that, before the invasion, filmmaking in Iraq was completely controlled by the Baathists, and one can sense not only his excitement but also the unfamiliarity of his excitement (“I couldn’t believe I was finally making a documentary about Iraq!”) at being able to drive around Baghdad photographing everything from smiling American soldiers to fly-covered dog carcasses lying roadside amid empty Pepsi cans.
If The Dreams of Sparrows has a fault, it is that it too consciously addresses Western viewers, and too reductively assumes the worst of those viewers. But it is when Daffar is thinking less of his presumed audience and more of his subjects that his film stuns. Perhaps most notably, The Dreams of Sparrows suggests an emotional complication about the war that few Americans, whatever their feelings, appear willing to entertain. Daffar’s sweet, huggable, pro-America cameraman, Hayder Jaffar, carries a picture of Bush in his wallet: “I love him as much as I love my father.” Khariya Mansour, a red-haired Iraqi filmmaker, tells Daffar, “The occupation is bad, and Saddam is bad.” Daffar asks her about the portrait of Bush in her living room. “I like Bush,” she says. “I like him so much I am in love with him. I love him because he gave us freedom.”
Much of what Daffar shows us is revelatory. From Baghdad’s necropolis of slums and nightmarish refugee camps we travel with Daffar to middle-class apartments, artists’ hangouts, mosques, and the headquarters of the Communist Party. This is a city of armed men and of stylish women nervously chain-smoking in their apartments; a city where children studying in a private school hold up crayon drawings and say, “Here the tank is aiming at the helicopter, and they exchange shells and rockets.” Some Baghdad taxi drivers complain about the Americans (“God willing, [Saddam] will come back and will bring peace to the country”), while former Iraqi soldiers trained to kill Americans are interestingly divided. One calls America a “by the book” terrorist state, while another says, “Saddam’s party was a terrorist regime. He was strangling us. It was an unbearable regime.” Daffar does not soft-peddle on the issue of Baathist brutality. “Do you have any cases affected by the regime?” he asks a doctor at an insane asylum. “They are all affected by it,” is the response. Here Daffar’s moral vision is unassailable, and one realizes the truly flea-market nature of American anti-Baathism.
When asked if cinema is necessary for Iraqi society, Daffar’s cameraman Hayder Jaffar says, “Cinema is very necessary. Cinema is language... the fastest way to reach the people.” One suspects the makers of Occupation: Dreamland, Gunner Palace, or Control Room did not have “reaching the people” in mind while cutting together their footage, and, perhaps consequently, around the edges of their films lingers a grim irrelevance. Control Room in particular is so resigned to its futility it achieves a kind of depressed self—hypnosis.
In the closing minutes of The Dreams of Sparrows, the lovable Hayder Jaffar tells us that, because of a checkpoint misunderstanding, a friend of his and Daffar’s has been killed by American soldiers, who accidentally pumped more than a hundred bullets into the friend’s car. “He was,” Jaffar says of his dead friend, “the first one to be happy at the fall of Saddam’s regime.” The film cuts to Daffar, who is smoking, raccoon-eyed, wearing a tank top, and addressing the camera directly.
“Baghdad,” Daffar says, “Baghdad is hell, really is hell.” He laughs bitterly. “U.S. troops and government of U.S.A. is very dirty here. In start, when Baghdad is fall, when Saddam is gone, I am very happy. Not just me. Believe me. All Iraqi people... U.S. troops is very hard-hearted.” This shattering film ends with Daffar shaking his head, unable to remember his English. His despair does not come off as predatory but personally and harshly earned. Very few of us live in this movie.
—2005
EUPHORIAS OF PERRIER
The Case Against Robert D. Kaplan
[A]n embattled democracy... soon becomes the victim of its own war propaganda. It then tends to attach to its own cause an absolute value which distorts its own vision on everything else. Its enemy becomes the embodiment of all evil. Its own side, on the other hand, is the center of all virtue.
—George E Kennan, Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin
Throughout his long career Robert D. Kaplan has consistently benefited from the fact that no one has any idea what, exactly, he is. A humble travel writer? A popular historian? A panjandrum analyst of developing-world politics and personalities? The 2001 reissue of Kaplan’s Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan (1990) tried to settle the matter. The back-cover copy refers to Kaplan, pretty much definitively, as a “world affairs expert.” Kaplan’s prolific writing would appear to bear out such stature. The subtitles of his eleven books mention twenty countries or regions. The Mediterranean? Check. Kaplan has even lived there. Central Asia? Too late. Kaplan covered it. Southeast Asia? Nope. Annexed by Kaplan. North Africa? Kaplan. West Africa? Sorry. South America? What do you think?
During his often brave and occasionally astounding career of peregrination, Kaplan has earned an influential readership. Not many authors can expect blurbs from senators, former Department of Defense secretaries, the Director of Central Intelligence, or Tom Brokaw, but Kaplan can. Despite (or perhaps because of) Kaplan’s polarizing worldview, he has been embraced by the administrations of both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and to American civilian readers he has become one of the most prominent lay voices on issues surrounding American foreign policy. Of late, however, there have been alarming indications that Kaplan has undergone some sort of imploded political transformation. His books have grown more vague but also more strident; angrier, but also more complacent. He has, in short, begun to write like a man who knows his audience, with a correspondingly fatal confidence that his words will be contemplated in high governmental and military aeries indeed.
To be sure, there has been previous unrest in Kaplanistan. In 2000, the historian Robert Kagan noted Kaplan’s “cheap pessimism,” his indifference “as to whether societies are governed democratically or tyrannically” and his “weak” grip on history: “Just about every historical event or political philosopher he discusses he gets at least half-wrong.” In 1993, the Balkans expert Noel Malcolm gutted Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts for its many errors of fact and judgment; Kaplan’s hapless response earned this rejoinder from Malcolm: “The basic problem, I think, is that Mr. Kaplan cannot read.” Kaplan’s new book, Imperial Grunts, in which one cannot be sure whether the latter word is a noun or a verb, has unleashed a new offensive. Writing in The New Republic, David Rieff takes Kaplan to task for his “boneheaded nonsense.” In the New York Times Book Review, David Lipsky laments that Kaplan “appears to have become someone who is too fond of war.” But these traits have been visible in Kaplan since his first book, as has his love of intellectual shortcuts and invincible humorlessness. Kaplan’s real problem, which has become growingly evident, is not his Parkinson’s grip on history or that he is a bonehead or a warmonger but rather that he is an incompetent thinker and a miserable writer.
Kaplan came to my attention while I was researching my first book, an account of my travels in the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan, in 2001. I believed then and believe now that the travel genre has much to answer for. Travel writers are seldom scholars. They are, by inclination if not definition, transients and dilettantes. All that can save the travel writer and redeem his or her often inexpert perceptions of fore
ign people and places is curiosity, a willingness to be uncertain, an essential emotional generosity, and an ability to write. Even travel writers well equipped in all of the above are inevitably attacked for missing the point, getting all manner of things wrong, and generally mucking about in questions of history and scholarship to which they—at least when compared to experts or specialists—have only lightly exposed themselves. This does not mean the travel writer is incapable of insight, to say nothing of entertainment, and in some cases the travel writer’s fresh-eyed unfamiliarity with a place can be made a virtue. As Lord Palmerston once said, “When I wish to be misinformed about a country I ask the man who has lived there thirty years.”