‘Meeting Resistance’: The movie

Yesterday I was finally able to get to see the movie ‘Meeting Resistance’, which was showing at George Washington University’s student center. It’s a gutsy, very well-executed look at the early months of the Iraqi resistance to US occupation, told in the form of intercut interviews with ten participants in the resistance.
The film-makers are Molly Bingham and Steve Connors, she American, he British, both of them with backgrounds as war-zone photographers. They had been in Baghdad during the US invasion in March 2003, and stayed around to “shoot” newspix of the aftermath… But soon enough they became curious about the– at that time– small incidents and altercations that the US occupiers met from some of the Iraqis, and in classic journalistic mode they set out to “meet” and try to report on the members of this emerging resistance. This inquiry then took onthe form of film, a new medium for both of them I think. They worked as a small, two-person team. Steve shot the footage and arranged the sound recording while Molly asked the questions in the interviews.
They shot the footage over the course of ten months– up until May 2004– working in the largely middle-class, north Baghdad district of Adhamiyeh. (You can read more about their modus operandi here.)
All the interviewees required that their names not be used. Only one agreed to let his face be shown. The rest are all shot in a way that conceals their identities. One is a woman. One is a non-Iraqi. A number– I think Steve said three?– were Shiites. They come from a variety of social and professional backgrounds. They talk on-camera about, mainly, their strongly nationalistic, anti-occupation motivations for becoming involved with the resistance– though for just about all of them, their Muslim religious belief was also to one degree or another a part of their motivation. One of them actually is an imam.
Seeing the movie was almost a nostalgic experience for me. That era was before the great waves of sectarian fighting broke over Iraq. Indeed, one of the final scenes is some horrifying archive footage of the bombing of the Ashoura commemorations at the Mosque in Kerbala in April 2004, one of the first big apparently sectarian mass-killings of the whole war. Inasmuch as the interviewees have any comment on that or other instances of sectarian violence, they express themselves as completely mystified by it, arguing strongly that no “true” Muslim or Iraqi would do commit such an act, and that therefore those acts must have been carried out by an unrevealed “third force”– the US, Israel, or someone else.
But here we are now, three and a half years after April 2004, and huge rivers of civilian blood have poured throughout the country, much of it shed in acts of horrifying, apparently sectarian violence.
At the showing I went to, Steve and Molly were there and answered questions afterwards. I also went over to the decidedly different ambience of the “Center for Strategic and International Studies” later in the afternoon, to catch the Q&A session after the showing that was held there. Molly and Steve went to some lengths to argue– using the Pentagon’s own figures, which are also presented in the FAQs section on their website– that though many more civilians than soldiers have been getting killed in Iraq over the years, the intention of the reistance’s “men of violence” is still overwhelmingly to strike against military targets. Indeed, they noted that according to these figures of the significant attacks reported between April 2004 and June 2007, 74% of the attacks targeted coalition troops and only 10% targeted civilians.
They also make these same arguments in the fairly recent “video op-ed” they have up on Youtube, which highlights the film and makes some more contemporary commentary on the issues raised in it.
Seeing the whole film yesterday was a big, fairly emotionally draining experience for me. I have argued for so long here and elsewhere that the US military should simply get out of Iraq– completely and in as speedy, orderly, and generous a way as possible. And these arguments, made by many, many other people as well, of course, have had so little effect that I’ve been quite discouraged at times. Even the great “surge” of antiwar sentiment within the US during the elections of Fall 2006 seemed largely to dissipate over the 12 months that followed; and the Dems in Congress have done pathetically little to move the country seriously towards a full and speedy withdrawal.
Also, I’ve been pretty busy writing my book on the whole of US foreign policy, post-Bush…
So seeing the movie was probably a necessary jolt for me, a reminder that I need to do a lot more hard thinking and writing about my country’s continuing occupation of Iraq– and the need to end it a.s.a.p.– than I have been doing lately.
I’ve had a couple of other relevant experiences recently, too. One has been to sit with Bill the spouse through the first five episodes of the recent, epic, 15-episode Al-Jazeera documentary on the War in Lebanon. (You can access the whole thing on-line, through this portal on someone’s blog.) Another was to go listen to the Franco-Israeli writer Sylvain Cypel talking about Israel’s 40-year occupation of Palestine, as I wrote about here, last week.
So regarding the War in Lebanon series, it has been deeply, deeply depressing to be reminded again, so vividly, of the oh-so-many ghastly twists and turns the civil strife there has taken over the 32 years since 197-5– and still with no settled peace there till today. I was there at the start of the war, having arrived in Beirut to launch my career as a journalist just five months before the Ain al-Rummaneh Massacre. I actually lived through all those early episodes… So many lives lost or blighted. So much distrust sown. So many human souls twisted into hatred and violence. So many malevolent foreign hands stirring the violence at every turn.
When the US invasion of Iraq started, I had flashbacks back to my time in Lebanon– but then a more rational part of me said, “No! It can’t possibly happen there! Iraq is a settled, centralized state, not a free-market, politically chaotic place as Lebanon always was!”
But it did happen in Iraq: So much of that same internal breakdown (fitna); so much of that external pot-stirring; so much of a very similar, very insidious process of ever-developing political chicanery driven by outside funding; so much death and destruction.
But here’s a possible difference I see. In Lebanon, the population were always accustomed to surviving with only a very weak state. Indeed, the mountainous geography of the country had almost ensured that that would be the situation. But most of Iraq (apart from the Kurd-dominated north) is a broad, flat plain fed by the famous two rivers. Regulation of the rivers and of economic and social life along their banks requires a strong central authority. So for the survival of all those large cities in the plains, there has to be a functioning central state. Life depends on that, in a way in which, in Lebanon, it doesn’t. At the most basic level imaginable, when there is no effective state regulation in Iraq, the sewage from one city flows down to the next. You get cholera, pestilence, and destitution… But that is only a small part of the story. I just think, in general, that the people of Iraq are actually much more vulnerable to the effects of political fitna than the people of Lebanon ever were.
And finally, Palestine. the thing that Cypel said that really stuck in my mind was to recall how, growing up in France in the 1950s, the left spent a long time talking about “peace” in Algeria before they finally got to the central issue, which was to call for an end to the French of the country. Cypel was saying that that has also seemed to be the case in Israel, with respect to Palestine. But I think this is very relevant for us here in the US, with respect to Iraq. People in the political elite here have spent far too long talking abut the need to attain some kind of “peace” within Iraq, and not nearly enough on stressing the need to assure a total and speedy end to the occupation.
As far back as 2004 and 2005, I was arguing that, while we could not foresee with certitude what the sequelae inside Iraq of a US withdrawal would be, we could predict with confidence that if the US stayed the internal conflicts would continue. Others argued that the US had to stay in Iraq because of some version of the dreadfully dishonest “Pottery Barn rule.” My prediction has been proven correct.
Bottom line: the US needs to end the occupation of Iraq. And people in the antiwar movement need to refocus more than ever before on that goal.
… Anyway, Friday I’m going to spend some more time hanging out with Steve and Molly. Maybe I can tell you more about them and their great film, then.