American Sniper fails completely to make an to understand the experience of the Iraq war from the perspective of the Iraqis.
American Sniper is a fictionalized movie version of the war stories associated with Chris Kyle’s experience as a Navy SEAL in the Iraq War as recounted in his best-selling memoir. The film can be viewed from a variety of angles, including as one more indictment of war as hell.
A second line of interpretation focuses on the intense psychological tensions experienced by this single American soldier and his comrades caught up in the horrors of urban warfare in Iraq. A connected theme is the adverse impacts of Kyle’s war service on his family, who are made to cope with the complex and contradictory traumas of his absence (confronting his potential death on a distant battlefield) and his alienated presence whenever he returns, a scarred individual who longs to go back to Iraq to resume his assigned role as ‘legendary sniper.’
Multiple scenes in the movie portray Kyle as haunted by his service. In his book, Kyle consistently treats his victims as “savage, despicable.” At one point he makes such statements as “I only wish I had killed more” and “I loved what I did. I still do. If circumstances were different – if my family didn’t need me – I’d be back in a heartbeat. I’m not lying or exaggerating to say it was fun. I had the time of my life being a SEAL.”
The film avoids giving emphasis to such extreme statements, but it does portray this sniper as convinced he was cut out for the combat role given to him, and that he seems more alive and content when active in the killing fields of Iraq than when back home.
Kyle’s own violent death is also metaphorically significant; actual events disclosed by text in the film but not depicted, Kyle was killed by an American soldier wounded in Iraq whom he had helped at a nearby veterans’ hospital, where he worked at the advice of a psychiatrist to overcome his own version of PTSD.
Such an ending of his life conveys the irony that, for Kyle, the more dangerous battlefield turned out to be in the neighborhood of his family residence, his assailant not the evil ‘savages’ he mowed down in Iraq but a fellow American veteran who had experienced those very same encounters. Kyle had survived four tours of duty as a sniper in the midst of the most bloody military operations in Iraq, but these survival skills proved irrelevant to the minefields of innocence that now made the American countryside a dangerous war zone.
From box office success and right-wing praise, American Sniper, is obviously most commonly regarded as a celebration of Chris Kyle as war hero who deserves the thankful praise of the country. From this outlook, Kyle killed enemies of America at great risk and cost to himself, and spared the country a repetition of the 9/11 attacks.
It is this self-serving and essentially distorted vindication of the Iraq War that the film presupposes, even to the extent of having Kyle watch on TV as the plane strikes the World Trade Center, with a quick scene shift in the movie to waging war against those presupposed to be the foot soldiers of Al Qaeda in Iraq.
Embedded in this view was a double false narrative that the American mission in Iraq was to carry out a necessary counter-terrorism operation linked to the 9/11 attacks and that the Iraqis being killed in Falluja and elsewhere should be perceived as ‘terrorists’ rather than as fighters against an invasion and occupation of their country by a foreign power that disrespects their religion, culture, and sovereignty.
These narratives dominated my perception of the movie, although those associated with its production deny such lines of interpretation. Clint Eastwood (the director and producer) and Bradley Cooper (who plays Kyle in the film) have publicly questioned employing a political optic in commentary on the film. They insist, in contrast, that the movie was ‘a character study’ of Kyle and ‘apolitical’ in the sense of not taking a position pro or con the Iraq War.
Eastwood has tried to lend credibility to his claim by pointing out that he opposed the Iraq War, and was even skeptical about Afghanistan. Yet whatever he privately feels, this is not how most viewers would experience the film, whether enthralled by Kyle’s exploits or appalled by them. Eastwood may have aspired to tell an apolitical story, but if so, he has failed badly.
The Iraq War was a war of aggression undertaken in 2003 despite the rejection of a well-orchestrated (and misleading) American plea to the UN Security Council for authorization. Against such a background, the attack on Iraq and subsequent occupation were widely regarded as international crimes bearing resemblance to the category of aggressive warfare for which German and Japanese leaders were punished for waging after World War II.
In this light, the Iraqi violence associated with the hostile American occupation needs to be portrayed as a unilateral repudiation of the limits set by international law and the UN Charter on recourse to war by the world’s most powerful country.
Additionally, American Sniper depicts the doomed efforts of an outgunned society to resist a militarily dominant foreign invader that is imposing its will on the country’s future by force of arms. Such a viewing is not meant to imply that we need to endorse some of the horrific Iraqi tactics relied upon, but it should remind us that presenting the Iraqis as ‘evil’ and as ‘savages’ functions in the film as an unchallenged display of Islamophobic propaganda, and cannot be credibly explained away as a realistic exploration of a war hero’s temperament and struggle for sanity and survival.
American Sniper also presents Kyle’s story in such a way as to avoid any self-criticism directed at the American mission in Iraq.
The movie also lacks redeeming artistic merit. It is relentless and repetitive in portraying battle scenes of intensity intertwined with Kyle’s tormented relationship with his wife and efforts to become a father to their two children during his brief interludes of home leave between military assignments. We learn nothing about the realities of our world beyond a tired rendering of the embedded post-9/11 polemic on the necessity of foreign wars to keep America safe from evil forces lurking in the Islamic world.
This orthodoxy is not even interrogated, much less rejected.
And nowhere in the film is there any acknowledgement that the United States in Iraq was acting in defiance of international law and causing great devastation and suffering to a totally vulnerable foreign country, as well as producing a massive displacement of the civilian population—leaving behind a devastated country and widespread chaos.
The Iraqi experience of such carnage in their own country is treated as irrelevant, and is reminiscent of Vietnam War films that were mostly devoted to explorations of the victimization of the young Americans caught up in an experience of war that they could neither understand nor win, while overlooking almost altogether the massive suffering being inflicted on a foreign people in a distant land.
That is, even most anti-war portrayals of these American wars accept the dehumanization of the foreign others.
For me the most significant impressions resulting from American Sniper’s narrative of the Iraq War are as follows:
One, the striking imbalance between the sophisticated military technology at the disposal of the United States versus the primitive weaponry in the possession of the Iraqi adversaries, creating an overwhelming impression that the Iraq War was more ‘a hunt’ than ‘a war;’ such an impression is somehow deepened by a scene in the film in which Kyle is teaching his very young son to hunt for deer.
Two, the failure to make any effort at all to understand the experience of this war from the perspective of the Iraqis, creating the absurd impression that the only victims deserving empathy were Americans like Kyle who had endured the torments of warfare and suffered its admittedly disorienting consequences; the emotions of remorse as associated with the harm done to Iraq and Iraqis is nowhere to be found in the film.
What may be disturbing is the radical subjectivity of likely audience responses—in America, the great popularity of mostly uncritical commentary on American Sniper reinforcing the regressive national mood of glamorizing bloody military exploits as the most admirable expression of true patriotism.
Elsewhere in the world, the perception is likely to be quite opposite: American Sniper inducing anti-American attitudes either out of fear or resentment or both, solidifying the global image of the United States as a cruel geopolitical bully.
That is, American Sniper is wildly pro-American for most domestic viewers, and severely anti-American for most foreign viewers. This gap in subjectivities exhibits the degree to which Americans are living in a bubble of their own devising.
It is highly unlikely that many Americans will appreciate this disparity of perception, and even fewer will pause long enough to assess its significance. If more of us could see ourselves as we are seen in the mirror of foreign reactions it might help end this unhealthy national romance with permanent war that started after World War II with the Cold War and continues now in the form of the ‘War on Terror.’
Such a pattern of delusional geopolitics will never produce peace and security in the 21st century, and will fatally divert attention from meeting the challenges of humanity associated with climate change, nuclear weapons, poverty, and extremism.
To question this American domination project is to antagonize the entrenched bureaucratic, media, and neoliberal forces that benefit from endless war making and its associated expenditures of trillions. In the end, it is this grand project of late capitalism that American Sniper indirectly vindicates, thereby burdening the nation and the world, perhaps fatally.
[American Sniper was released on Christmas Day, 2014. It is a movie version of Chris Kyle’s memoir, American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History, with 255 kills, 160 officially confirmed by the Department of Defense. The movie set in Iraq is directed by Clint Eastwood; Bradley Cooper plays the part of Chris Kyle, and Sienna Miller is brilliantly cast in the role of his wife, Taya.]
This article was originally published at RichardFalk.Wordpress.com and has been used here with permission.
The glorification of this man as a “hero” is symptomatic of the degeneration of public discourse in America and the new valorization of the military as a class. Kyle was neither a villain nor a hero. A hero is someone who runs through enemy fire to bring in a wounded comrade. A man who hides in a duck blind a mile away and shoots people is a soldier doing his job. Killing is a job which must be done in war, but it doesn’t make a person a hero. It makes a person a soldier. The fact that Americans on the right wing would glorify the killings of 300 people as “awesome” and “heroic” is a indication of a deeply sick society.
Generally speaking, a hero in the military sense is someone who shows exceptional courage and skill in performing his function, which is basically advancing the mission and protecting his comrades in that order. Which Kyle certainly did.
Kyle was a hero in exactly the same sense as Alvin York, who he closely resembles, or Audie Murphy.
Regarding Kyle as a “hero”, see above article.
“a hero in the military sense is someone who shows exceptional courage and skill in performing his function…”
What exceptional courage? Sort of like a drone with courage? Being a sniper is no better than being an assassin.
Was the invasion based on a lie or not? Is that fact mentioned anywhere in the film? Was there any link between 9/11 and iraq? No. But the film pretends that there was a link because the low brow hero sniper says so in the film. It is misleading and false.
Read the review and do not confuse the points being made.
The film would have been meaningful if it could have shown “the the irony that, for Kyle, the more dangerous battlefield turned out to be in the neighborhood of his family residence, his assailant not the evil ‘savages’ he mowed down in Iraq but a fellow American veteran who had experienced those very same encounters.”
Besides: the dialogue in the film reflects the lack of intelligence of its ” sniper hero and family”.
Dude, it isn’t -intended- to show the Iraq war from anyone’s perspective other than Chris Kyle’s. it’s a -biopic-. What part of that is too difficult for you to understand?
You’re criticizing a movie for not being the movie you wanted to make, which is like criticizing a schoolbus for not being a tractor.
You’re criticizing Richard Falk for not writing the film review you want him to write.
Dude, dude… you’re reduced to shouting “you’re another”? Didn’t you outgrow that in Middle School?
Just illustrating what nonsense your comment is.
Oh, and which “Iraqis” are these fighting “foreign invasion”? Would that be Baathists, or Sunni jihadis? (The Afrikaners of Iraq, in other words, fighting to maintain a minority tyranny.) Not Shira or Kurds, evidently — both groups now eagerly welcoming American troops and begging for more. “American Sniper” is playing to packed audiences (I suspect largely Shia) in Baghdad, reportedly shouting “Don’t ask for permission, just shoot”.
What purpose does placing “foreign invasion” in quotation marks serve? As though the US didn’t really invade Iraq.
Same as putting “Iraqis” in quotes. Iraq wasn’t (and still isn’t) a sovereign state in the Western conception of the term; it’s an abortion of Versailles, an attempt to impose that form of organization on a region and culture(s) to which it’s wholly foreign. I could dress up in a gorilla suit, and it wouldn’t make me a gorilla; ditto the Land Between the Rivers and the forms of a Western nation-state. The closest thing in the area, barring Israel (which is Middle Eastern only in a geographical sense), is Kurdistan, and that ain’t too close.
Pretending Iraq was the same sort of entity as say, Denmark or Australia is an absurdity. Not being in politics or diplomacy or running for office, I’m not obliged to pretend to subscribe to this farcical pretense. The people in those unfortunate situations do have to pretend, but let’s not take it seriously.
We didn’t “invade Iraq” because there was no Iraq, just a bandit gang controlling various components, most of whom have no deeper desire than to exterminate each other, as recent events have demonstrated.
There is no such thing as international law. Iraq doesn’t exist. Brilliant arguments.
Furthermore, there is no such thing as “international law” in the misleading sense you’re using the term. There are, at most, customs — which countries abide by or violate as suits them. International affairs is basically an anarchy ruled by force and its threat, and war is the prerogative of sovereignty.
There is very much such a thing as international law in precisely the sense that Richard Falk is using the term.
No, there isn’t. It’s wishful thinking of a noxious sort, propaganda… which is to say, lies for fools.
A war is “illegal” if it isn’t approved by a body on which Russia and China sit?
Oh, pull the other one, it’s got bells on it.
The US is party to the UN Charter as well as other relevant treaties comprising the body of international law, in addition to customary international law.
The war on Iraq was, as defined at Nuremberg and according to the US’s own applied standard there, “the supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes only in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
More generally, it’s profoundly dim to pretend that the rules of interaction which were worked out by closely-related and culturally similar European states and their overseas descendants (like us, or Mexico or Brazil) apply to the world as a whole.
To Japan, maybe. Possibly even China. But to Iraq, or Saudi Arabia, or Syria, or the Sudan? What’s the appropriate response, laughter or tears?
People used to be more honest; nobody treated the Ottoman Empire as if it was a country in the same sense as Austria-Hungary or the US. That’s why, for example, the Ottoman court system wasn’t allowed to try Westerners.
The besetting sins of our age aren’t aggression and violence, which after all are constants of human behavior. What’s really wrong with the world these days is bien-pensant self-delusion and hypocrisy.
Again, the US is party to the UN Charter as well as other relevant treaties comprising the body of international law.