3 Iraqis to Testify About Haditha

I love how liberals use words. For instance, a movie made by British filmmaker Nick Broomfield called “Battle For Haditha” is called an “excellent documentary,” a “fictional drama,” and a “recounting,” all at once. I had no idea those words were synonyms.

Armond White from NYPress.com can’t say enough glowing things about this piece of trash masquerading as a documentary. He talks about how Broomfield “can juxtapose the insurgents cold-bloodedly planting an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) with a U.S. commander deploying a satellite sniper.” How are these two situations at all the same thing?

The movie’s entry in Wikipedia is even better. “The outline is reportedly based on rumours,” says the entry, “as the trial had not even begun when they started filming, with the assumption that the Marines on trial are guilty and the Victims family and neighbours were telling the truth.” And yet you call this a documentary?

Dave Calhoun of the TimeOut London explains that Broomfield does not call it a documentary but glosses over this apparently minor point in favor of rubbing in the “grim scene” where “a group of Iraqi women in the town of Haditha grieve over the deaths of their husbands and sons at the hands of US marines. [sic]” So is that where we’ve come? “It’s not real, but who cares? We’ll still market it anyway.”

Oh, it gets better. In the interview with Broomfield, several interesting points are made. Let’s fisk a bit, shall we?

When questioned, Iraqi eyewitnesses suggested that US soldiers had gone on an armed rampage in the town in revenge for their colleague’s death and that was how most of the 24 Iraqi civilians had died – at least six of them children aged between two and 14.

They suggested it? Does that mean they saw it (as the term ‘eyewitnesses’ actually means) or they just came up with a theory and presented it? If the latter is the case, then I suggest that Michael Moore is gay. Someone should investigate.

Starting last June, Broomfield and producer Anna Telford made several research trips to Jordan (‘We didn’t go to Haditha itself, it was too dangerous’) and held long conversations with ‘five or six people from the town, all of whom were there on the day and knew the people who were killed’.

They made a documentary/fictional drama/clusterf*** without ever actually visiting the place where the events supposedly happened, before any of the details had even come out about the incident in question? Not to mention that their reason for not visiting is because it was dangerous?

Does anyone else out there think this is ironic? They don’t believe that the Marines were taking fire but they couldn’t go in there because someone might shoot them? Someone tell me what’s wrong with this picture. By the way, if you’re planning to bring up the Time magazine story, let me just point out this article. We blew that story out of the water two years ago.

From the marines’ conversations, Broomfield concluded that ‘their standard operating procedure rules are so fu***** hardcore. If, for example, a house is described as “hostile”, then you just kill everyone in the house. It doesn’t matter if it contains two-year-olds or the elderly, which is what they did in Fallujah – where these guys had come from.

I suppose Mr. Broomfield would prefer that the Marines knock and ask to be invited for tea. Hostile means hostile. It means that the occupants inside are trying to kill you. Just because insurgents procreate and get old doesn’t mean that they’re not trying to kill you. This isn’t rocket science.

‘I realised that these soldiers were very, very poor kids, who had all left school unbelievably early. It was the first time they had all been out of the United States. They didn’t speak a word of Iraqi. They had no idea what they were doing in Iraq, and they felt let down by the marine corps. It was hard to condemn them out of hand as cold-blooded killers.’

I see someone’s been talking to John Kerry. Very, very poor kids? Is he serious? Left school unbelievably early? We have the most educated military we have ever had–right now. By the way, how many WWII soldiers spoke German? How many of the Marines in the Pacific were fluent in Japanese? We’re not conversing with these people over candlelit dinner.

“…taking a strictly journalistic approach to the film’s plotting and basing events on his research and conversations with those who intimately understand his characters’ culture, whether Iraqis or marines.

Strictly journalistic? I think we proved that to be fallacy about two sentences into this debacle. And didn’t the author just finish talking about how the Marines in Iraq “had no idea what they were doing in Iraq?” How could they understand the culture so “intimately” if they didn’t know what they were doing?

Oddly enough, the director ends with a sentence that I wholeheartedly agree with.

It’s much more convenient for the US government and the marine corps to make scapegoats of these guys than actually deal with its policy and rules of engagement in Iraq.

Absolutely. It’s far easier to send SSGT Frank Wuterich, Lt Col Jeffrey Chessani, and others to prison, for instance, than it is to tell the world that hey…we’re going to kill a lot of Muslims while we’re over there, and sometimes that will include women and children. War is hell, and the more hellish it is the sooner it will be over. Hiroshima and Nagasaki know.

This film is tripe, it’s false, and it’s a dishonorable portrayal of our men in uniform. The Haditha Marines did their job. Period. Give them a medal–don’t make half-baked films about your personal idiotic theories and call it anything less than what it is: a farce.