An audience with Nick Broomfield- Haditha from all angles

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Watching “The Battle for Haditha”, Nick Broomfield’s latest distinctive docu-drama treatement of the Iraqi occupation’s most notorious coalition atrocity, I was gripped by the overwhelming certainty of one thing. Of the many misfortunes that might befall you in going about your daily business, and in the case of this hapless Iraqi family, it was party preparations, nothing could be more terrifying, and lethal, than being in the way of a battalion of totally pissed off US marines.

As an inveterate doom monger who has played close attention to the Iraq war from invasion and throughout the years of its grisly aftermath, the facts of this incident in November 2005, have long been known to me. I still recall the day it happened, and the subsequent unravelling of predictably covered-up details.

The massacre at Haditha only came to light because a local had taken footage of its aftermath. In the absence of this evidence, the American military’s non-incriminating version would certainly have gone uncontested. On the basis of this intended evasion of the truth, and given the (characteristically euphemized) rules of engagement (in this case to “clear” four houses) we can all be very confident that there have been many more Hadithas that will never be known about.

The film itself captures all the chaos and harrowing reality of that grim day, but the manner of its making has a poignancy of its own too, and, on Friday in the Edinburgh Filmhouse, Nick Broomfield was on hand at the end to elaborate further.

Broomfield shot the entire film in Jordan with a crew small enough, he says, to fit into one car. He enlisted a cast comprising of both real Marine veterans of the conflict, most of them still struggling to re-integrate into American civil life, and local Iraqi refugees, many of whom had fled the country after losing relatives in the rout of Fallujah. The real-life challenges of such an enterprise, with all the residual trauma, of both groups, and the problematic dynamics between them, provided a powerful story of its own.

Initial contact between battle-hardened young American troops, with all respect and trust for Arab people trained out of them, and the Iraqis, some of whom’s relatives may even have been killed by their fellow cast members, was understandably fraught.

Throughout the filming, there were marines who had to cope with the paranoia of being killed or kidnapped. To them, Jordan must have looked, felt, sounded and smelt just like their patrols of death so recently endured across the border.

Even with the issues of cast dynamics beginning to settle down, Broomfield had several on-set challenges to overcome. With the natural modesty and cultural expectations of Muslim women, some of the critical scenes were more difficult to capture then they should have been. This was especially true of a kissing scene, the only obvious application of artistic license in the film, but an important way of showing a human reality not often depicted in the Arab world, for which Broomfield had to recruit an Iraqi female from the US.

And then there was the trauma. With the exception of the hired American actress, every other cast member had lived through scenes of fear, horrific violence, loss and suffering that none of us are ever likely to get close to.

The lead American marine, acting out one particularly poignant post-massacre scene back at the barracks, which Broomfield retains in the film, was tripped so intensely into the recovered emotions of his own combat experience that it took him several days to recover.

Similarly, for those Iraqi women called upon to dramatise the grief of bereavement after the murderous spree is over. A despair grounded in recent family losses of their own takes over and gives the spectacle of wailing and breast beating an authenticity which is all too familiar from years of newsreel direct from the killing floors of Iraq.

Broomfield comes across as urbane and measured, an impression strangely at odds with the troubling nature of much of his work, and he clearly treats this incendiary subject with a careful sense of balance. His non-partisan treatment of that day in Haditha, together with the sequence of events on either side of it, seeks most of all to depict the victimhood of all involved.

The Iraqi people may well have been appallingly betrayed by their invaders (and I still recall the grave, imploring face of George W Bush, addressing the civilian population of Iraq just as the first night of shock and awe was kicking off, and giving his personal assurance that they would not be let down) but America’s own service personnel have largely been abandoned to their fate too.

It has long been a matter of the grossest shame for governments of supposedly civilised military nations that for all the training and investment made available to brutalise and dehumanise young men for the efficient killing of an enemy (and nobody should be in any doubt as to this is what it is), there is so little acknowledgement of or support for its consequences. Human beings are simply used by the state to carry out its war aims and then dumped. Those servicemen unfortunate enough to have sustained injuries requiring a lifetime of care may garner a little state benefit, but for all the mental and emotional scarring suffered by so many others, there is nothing.

And as the modern world unfolds to a pattern of such assymetrical warfare, where the capacity for inflicting untold carnage on largely defenceless populations as part of the so called “War on Terror” is so great and where the principles and legality underpinning it is so less certain, i can only imagine that the mental fallout necessitating such help and support would be only the greater.

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The marines who convened in Jordan, under Broomfield’s care were quite able to admit that the events of Haditha were a momumental screw up. But many of these same men felt themselves let down by the united states marine corps and the policies governing their behaviour in theatres of conflict. The army report, and ongoing legal proceedings in this case are all testament to the reality of what happened and why. Meanwhile, a sequence of dropped charges and plea bargains has largely left the perpetrators of these crimes to pursue free lives. To walk the streets, perhaps, but forever incarcerated inside minds that their superiors, via all their chains of command, may have somehow colluded in breaking forever.

As Broomfield himself pointed out to his Filmhouse audience, which included one or two folk still inclined to make excuses for western indiscretions, accountability for any blatant disregard of the international laws governing the waging and prosecution of war must be seen to be enforced. To his mind, however, the buck only really stops at the very top, and in this case, those jauntiest of alleged war criminals, Bush and Blair themselves.

I’m inclined to agree.