Nick Broomfield’s Bad Film Trying to be Good

A lovely old friend who I used to know from a past life called me up recently to suggest attending The Battle of Haditha, a film made by Nick Broomfield, complete with a Q&A session with the Director at the Russell Square Renoir. Of course, yours truly can’t resist a good bust-up with a Director after a film, and Nick Broomfield has always been on the recommended list. Back in the good old days, Broomfield had set out to visit the besieged Yasser Arafat in his RamAllah compound, and was famously served an unfinished ear of corn from Abu Ammar’s plate. More famously, the filmmaker had made the amazingly challenging and intelligent documentary film Aileen, later immortalised by Hollywood through Charlize Theron in Monster. In nearly perfect symmetry, Broomfield, whose documentaries once found their way into Hollywood, was now leading himself down the reverse journey: Instead of his usual forte of documentaries, Broomfield was this time de-documentarising his subject matter, the much-publicised massacre of innocent Iraqis by US Marines in Haditha in March of 2006.
The major problem here is that Broomfield took the fact that The Battle of Haditha was not a documentary as license not only to dramatise the events and breathe into life characters who became known to the world through the affidavits of witnesses, but, astonishingly for a man of Broomfield’s liberal credentials, to find a way to create a moral equivalence from the Iraqis of Haditha and the Marines who butchered them. Oddly enough, this humanisation of the US Marine Core was the only theme on which Broomfield chose to depart from the strict re-enactment of events which came to light thanks to investigative journalism, after an attempted cover-up by the US military.


The disappointing thing was that the film started off well enough, with the audience being shown the passionate sex life of Rashied, who was shot dead by the Americans in Haditha, and his wife Hiba. “Arabs having sex!” as my friend pointed out in a hushed tone. “But we’re like amoebas” I retorted to her. While it could easily have been misinterpreted by a Middle Eastern audience, the intimacy within the marriage is probably a much needed wake-up call for film goers in Bloomsbury: Arabs, like them, are sexual beings and, when we’re lucky, we can express that in a relationship. That alone went a long way towards humanising the other. Unfortunately, Battle of Haditha went downhill from there to re-hash some seriously dubious Orientalisms.
Where the film fell down irredeemably for me was towards the closing, when Broomfield allows the character of Cpl. Ramirez, the most senior Marine on the ground over 2 hours of killing in Haditha, to re-imagine in a dream-like sequence what he would have done differently, had he been given the chance. Ramirez is shown going into a room full of sleeping children and decides to leave them in peace, later helping a frightened young girl out of a bath she has climbed into while clothed out of fear. In the actual sequence of events, which astonishingly Broomfield had depicted just shortly before, Ramirez had shot the innocents dead, not one of them having ever posed a threat. Why the need to absolve Ramirez of sin? And why am I so worked up about it?

As Nick Broomfield pointed out when I angrily put this to him from the audience, he never wants to stop humanising Ramirez and people like him, even going so far as to claim—wait for it—that the Marines were also “victims” of the war in Iraq. I have no problem understanding that, as my companion pointed out several times, the enlisted men in the US armed forces are drawn from the bottom of the US demographic barrel, with “kids” using military service as a means of avoiding a life of grime and crime. But this can hardly account for the events which took place in March of 2006. Well-armed, trained soldiers fighting for the world’s most powerful country were in charge of a large civilian population and choose to mercilessly slaughter them. While the individual persons might have done things differently before they joined the army, the wearing of a uniform does not, I fear, give them carte blanche when in warmer climes. Instead, what Broomfield did, whether intentionally or otherwise, was to produce a film which fits into a long pedigree of American crappers, designed to make them feel warm about their boys in uniform when abroad.


In countless films on Viet Nam, we see American soldiers needlessly killing civilians, but, through some cathartic mechanism, we come to realise that they are not the villains: Instead, it is men in grey suits who operate in Washington, DC or perhaps commissioned officers giving orders. Hell, it was the Communists who started it anyway, right? As Broomfield stated while he was trying to shut me up, it’s the “Bushes, Blairs and Rumsfelds” of the world who should carry the blame. While I don’t disagree with that, I don’t see how letting Kilo Company of USMC off the hook is going to help the cause of justice.


Many of us have had jobs in which we are told to do things which go against our better judgement, sometimes against our very humanity. Yet most of us know that there are limits which are not to be crossed. Bus drivers in London are told not to wait long for commuters running after them, no matter how close. Recently, I witnessed one bus driver who, against the protests of everybody who was on board, refused to wait for a man on crutches to catch up. I also know of another bus driver who would never dream of such a thing. Can these two bus drivers really be equal? One of them accepts the banality of evil implicit in his job, another refuses to bend, insisting on being human. The Marines in Haditha, armed to the teeth and backed-up by enormous fire power could have chosen to the latter, but instead followed the path of cowardice, and shot dead the occupants of a small car, for no good reason other than being bystanders when an IED went off near their Hummer. (Again: Broomfield was largely true to the facts of the case on these parts.) Can anything Cpl Ramirez have said, thought or felt make up for that? Through the looking glass of Broomfield’s incomprehensible Absolution of the Sins of Ramirez—who is in fact a defendant in an ongoing court martial—other aspects of the film begin to take on a more sinister meaning.


Ramirez, who was a friend of the one Marine killed in Haditha in the IED explosion which forms the denouement of the film, grieves in a dignified, noble way for the slain man, tormenting himself while shaving and protesting that he, poor soul, “will live forever with his guilt”; while Hiba, who lost the father of her unborn child in the rampage led by Ramirez is seen to do nothing more than dumbly beat her chest and attack mindlessly, savagely at the Earth. It was here that Broomfield could have lent some humanity where humanity was due: to explore, perhaps, how Hiba would feel as a newly widowed young woman in Iraq, to think perhaps about how the child would grow and with what kind of bitterness.

Of course, as Broomfield did point out, “the Iraqis, particularly in the area around Haditha, are very tribal”. This of course means that they will “never forget” the massacre and, in one full swoop, it is the Americans who really need to start worrying about Iraqi violence.


Moral relativism has to have its limits somewhere, and trying to depict Ramirez and Co. in a way which justifies the killing of innocents crosses one boundary too many for this reviewer, and so I will urge you all to save your ticket money for something more fulfilling. I can recommend Maison Bertaux, the world’s greatest cake shop, in Soho, which is also holding an exhibition of Noel Fielding’s art work.

A rather worrying deduction....

I received the following extract from the Al Jazeera website by email... if things are actually working the way suggested, we're in for some serious trouble. Of course, at the time, everybody thought that sending Negroponte to Iraq was mad, but then, at the time, we were all being accused of being Saddam sympathisers. How strange that Saddam's era now seems like an idyllic, quiet and peaceful time.


http://www.aljazeera.com/me.asp?service_ID=11542

"Who’s behind the active death squads running in Iraq? ""......From the time of invasion of Iraq in March 2003 till June 2004, ththe phenomenonf death squads was unknown to Iraq and the U.S. soldiers wewere beingilled and injured daily by the Iraqi resistance, something ththe Americansere unprepared for and had not expected. The U.S. response was toto sendohn Negroponte, the former U.S. ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to1985 - during the worst of death squads operations there, to Baghdad as‘ambassador’. Negroponte was notorious during his tenure in Honduras for not only failingto admit to existence of death squads there, he was almost universally believed to be directing death squads in both Honduras and Nicaragua.His appointment as ambassador to Iraq by Bush in June 2004 until April 2005marked the development and the formation of the now notorious Iraqi death squads....."