Warfare: How warfare is but oughtn't to be
Warfare purports to be a true story of Navy Seals out on a joint operation in Ramadi, Iraq, sometime in late 2006. The scene of the tactical level action is in what’s known as the Sunni Triangle, Ramadi being one of three vertices a triangle formed by Baghdad and Saddam’s hometown, Tikrit.
Having disposed off Saddam Hussein in 2004, the Americans went on to hubristically dissolve the Iraqi army and the Baath party. The Sunni Arabs thus were left without their power base. They rebelled. Their area became rather inhospitable for the American military.
The movie shows a squad of the Seals occupying a house as stake out along with another squad alternatively engaged nearby. The Seals’ location is compromised; a grenade lobbed; and they suffer a minor casualty.
As they go about evacuating the casualty, they are targeted with bomb, resulting in two of their Iraqi translators being killed. Along with another trooper severely injured, the one who was injured originally is also badly mauled.
The rest of the movie is how the two squads evacuate their two wounded comrades. Even as they vector two Bradleys over to take the casualties away, they come under attack from a constricting dragnet of Iraqi rebels. The movie’s climax is in their staving off the Iraqis as they jump into a couple of Bradleys and make it out of the killing ground, unscathed.
The movie is based on a retelling of the episode by those who participated in the operation, including the director. The set recreates the scene of the operation and the actors replicate the experience of the soldier participants.
The movie is yet another one of the Hollywood’s war genre in the tradition of Thin Red Line of an infantry company participating in MacArthur’s island-hopping strategy; Platoon, that talks of cohesion in the combat against the Vietcong; and The Hurt Locker that showed the heroics of a bomb disposal squad against nefarious jihadists.
It is aptly titled, Warfare, in showing up the brutality in war, or, to phrase it better, brutality of war.
And, perhaps more significantly, the futility of war, with the last scene showing the Americans depart the site, while the Iraqi rebels trickle out of the surrounding houses with the lane back in their hands.
Panning outwards, such denouement is quite like the scenario today: with Americans abandoning their Forever Wars, their victim societies are resuming life in a space – geographic and social - messed up by the Americans.
The film does not suggest any of this, of course. Hollywood films are by Americans, for American and of Americans. Iraqis in the film are shown as conspiratorial figures to be shot at.
This is clear from the only ones getting killed in the operation are the Iraqi translators. Their getting in the way of the explosion is shown as to owing to a miscommunication. That’s far too pat.
It’s not impossible the translators were (ab)used as human shields, even if the movie seeks to paper over their deaths as stemming from orders lost in translation.
In any case, to use the translators for any other purpose than facilitate their interaction with Iraqi public is itself questionable. True, they carry weapons but that is for protective self-defence.
In any case, there is no way that Iraqis – remember their army was put to pasture - could have fit into operations conducted by the specialists as are Seals. At that early stage for untrained Iraqis to be given tactical chores raises suspicion on why exactly did they die, with the film trying rather hard to make a case that their deaths were an accident.
We know how Americans treat those who fight alongside from the manner their former allies fell off aircrafts they were clinging on to as the Americans exited Kabul.
At that juncture there was no love lost between the Americans and Iraqis of any hue. Within months of the self-centered American occupation beginning with the live streaming of Saddam’s statue biting the dust, the insurgency caught steam.
It was not terrorism then. Standing up to occupying forces is a duty. Fighting when denied self-determination is a human right. Remember the Americans invaded Iraq under a false pretext and without Security Council authorisation.
Saddam’s war plan to dissolve the conventional opposition into an insurgency was well in stride, for which caches of arms had been stacked away. Given the manner the American occupation unfolded, the Iraqis were in any case left with no choice.
Rumsfeld’s ‘light footprint’ for regime-change predictably went awry. Such disregard of strategic common sense could only have risen in the racist worldview of neo-cons out to reset the Arab world.
However, Americans got wiser. Even as the insurgency raged, they put their best doctrinal minds at work to come up with a counter insurgency doctrine. This was then put into practice by the head of the team, General Petraeus, being given a command billet in Iraq.
The freshly-minted doctrine emphasized usual counter insurgency principles, well known to armies elsewhere, as the Indian army.
At the time, the Indian army also wrote up its first counter insurgency doctrine, though it had then been countering insurgency all through the preceding half-a-century. Incidentally, there was an unseemly race between the two to release the doctrinal product ahead of the other.
In the event, it can be said the Americans borrowed from Indian experience in low intensity conflict operations, even if it is unclear if it made any difference to their showing in the long run.
Bush Jr., in his final duck year, sacked Rumsfeld and authorized the first - of many later in Iraq and Afghanistan - surge. Playing divide-and-rule with tribalism in the Sunni Triangle in what’s called the ‘Anbar Awakening’, allowed the Americans to restore a semblance of stability. Self-congratulations were premature since soon enough the Islamic State first took root there.
It’s clear that the situation the Seals were up against wasn’t entirely of faulty politics, but also of the dismissive, if not contemptuous, attitudes towards the adversary with which Americans wage wars.
In the period, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, the manner the Americans intruded into houses is not quite as shown in the film. They were liable to beat down doors and invade privacy of families, a practice that had to be stopped by the force of orders in Afghanistan.
Admittedly, in the film, they are shown as setting up a surveillance point, which of necessity required them sneaking in and hold up the family indoors. That the two families occupying the house get to leave only in the very last scene shows that they could well have been held as hostages.
That women and children were held through the firefight shows as much. They could instead have been released, making their way out either in a pause or with a warning given to the surrounding rebels to temporarily hold off.
The setting up of surveillance points is itself a tactic borrowed from the Israelis, who have been using the method to keep tabs on West Bank. Such borrowing from Israelis should ring a bell that mimesis comes at a cost – a lesson Indians could use too.
Not only does the squad vandalise the house, but merrily calls for fire-support from the main gun of the Bradley infantry fighting vehicles. Fearing rebels have managed a purchase on a portion of the terrace, they shoot up the upper floor. While at it, for good measure, the Bradleys spatter the neighbourhood.
Keeping Americans safe is indeed expensive both in treasure and lives.
In fact, force protection needs reached such levels that when General MacChrystal in Afghanistan tried to rein in trigger-happy Rambos, there was a backlash from the grunts, loosening up the rules of engagement once again.
At the time, YouTube videos of American GIs shooting up the countryside when provoked by itinerant Taliban were almost comical. They no doubt terrorized cattle grazing on the opposite slopes.
In the film, the amount of ammo poofed-off sets up a spectacle. What misses the camera is that it is a lived-in locality, with families surely covering in panic. There is also a market close at hand, which shows it’s a heavily populated area.
Into such an area, there is no call to fire off two claymore mines, as the Seals do to deter the rebels and clear the way for the Bradley in its first casualty-collection foray. There is also no call to thrice over call for ‘show of force’ sweeps by fighter jets on air cover patrol.
The havoc that the supersonic booms wreck on the ground when the aircraft is at tree-top level is shown very realistically. Considering what American air power, and that of its allies as Israel, has done elsewhere, as in Libya, Syria, Yemen and Somalia, this was almost humane.
The film does not show what air power had been actually used for just prior, with nearby Fallujah reduced to rubble. Later, Mosul was likewise clobbered over some 11 months, at the cost of – hold your breath - 11 American lives. With drones now also in action, Gaza shows persistence of such means can only lead to atrocity crimes.
Despite the violence – with GI Joe in all sorts of macho poses firing off salvo after salvo –not a single bullet-inflicted injury is sustained by any soldier. Even the other squad, in the open when converging on the besieged position, got away scot-free, though much ordnance is supposed to be flying around.
Unlike in Indian films where villains are sent flying – only one Iraqi rebel sustains a bullet injury. But as everyone knows, what goes up, comes down. And so must bullets someplace as far away as a few kilometers.
Clearly, the firefight was not of the order meriting the din. This only means the squad in a funk dispensed with fire discipline. As loud as their fireworks is that this squad violated most tenets of international humanitarian law.
The film begins with a music video picturized on women at an aerobics class – suggestive pelvic thrusts in scanty attire. The troops setting out are viewing it to warm up at the end of their final brief. The camaraderie is all very macho.
This brings up a wider question: What ‘basic needs’ were Americans fulfilling in their Forever Wars? Were white American males – there were perhaps three non-white men of some 20 men and, very surprisingly, no black men - devastating societies elsewhere because they were unable to measure up to the sexuality of their womenfolk, unleashed by their quest for equality?
Narrowly, the question arises: Can such troops be relied on to hold women and children hostage? And, what of the male gaze? Cannot Afghans choose to ward it off with burkhas?
After Gaza, the lecturing that the West has subject the rest of humanity is no longer credible. However instead of throwing out the baby out with the bathwater they need to be held to the self-same liberal standards they claim universality of.
The ownership of these standards must now go universal. The West’s claim of custodianship – now comprehensively lapsed – must not be allowed to put these standards, rules and laws under cloud.
As to whether the film is pro- or anti-war, I’ll leave to viewers. The blood and gore of the two Americans can hardly wash off memory of figures of Iraqi dead, including six hundred thousand children from the preceding sanctions.
Certain is that the intent of drawing sympathy for the American fighting man stands nullified.
