Below is a highly edited draft of a textual analysis of Peter Bowker's Iraq war drama Occupation that I wrote recently (I cannot reproduce anything like the full-length version, as this will be published in due course). But, for what they are worth, here are some key points...
Given the hugely controversial nature of the 2003 allied invasion of Iraq, Western film and television representations of the conflict have generated less public enthusiasm – and less revenue – than might have been expected. In the United States, for example – at least until the release of Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker in 2009 – Iraq war films have fared poorly at the box office (Tofoletti and Grace 2010, 64-65; Barker, 2011: 1) and television depictions of the war have been relatively few and far between, notwithstanding Steven Bochco’s short-lived series Over There (FX, 2005) and David Simon and Ed Burns’ Generation Kill (HBO, 2008). On British television, as Tom Sutcliffe (2009a: 6) remarked in The Independent newspaper early in 2009,
Iraq is the dog that didn’t bark. And when you think about that it seems more than odd. Here’s a hugely significant event – one which continues to engage British citizens in all sorts of ways (some of them fatal) and yet it barely registers on the most significant storytelling medium we have.
A small number of British television dramas have included storylines relating – tangentially, at least – to the war. Peter Kosminsky’s docudrama The Government Inspector (Channel 4, 2005), for example, investigated the life and death of the British government weapons expert David Kelly and indicted the British government’s decision to participate in the US-led invasion of Iraq, while The Mark of Cain (Channel 4, 2007), set in Iraq during the war, explored the problem of bullying in the British army. It was not until 2009, however, that the subject of the Iraq war itself was given significant treatment on British television. Written over five years by Peter Bowker, directed by Nick Murphy and produced by Laurie Borg for the production company Kudos, the three-part BBC television drama Occupation chronicles the involvement of three British soldiers from Manchester in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Broadcast in the summer of 2009, when the occupation of Iraq was stuttering to a drawn-out close, the mini-serial reflects upon the rationale for the Iraq invasion, the consequences of the war for those who fought in it, and the effects of the occupation on the population of Iraq.
[...]
In light of the BBC’s savaging by Hutton and what some have seen as the BBC’s post-Hutton pusillanimity, the BBC might have been expected to deliver a politically emollient, uncontroversial treatment of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. On the other hand, the significant level of public opposition to the war made it unlikely that the drama would present an entirely one-sided view of the Iraq war. In 2003, public opposition to British military involvement in Iraq was far more widespread than it had been to Western military action in the Balkans during the previous decade. One month before the aerial bombardment of Baghdad in February 2003 and the subsequent coalition invasion of Iraq, millions of people worldwide demonstrated against the war. Meanwhile, claims that the justification for the Iraq war was supported by faulty and false information disseminated in the Western media (Miller 2003; Kellner 2004 and 2007; Allan and Zeliger 2004: 8; Kramer and Michalowski 2005; Chomsky, 2006: 24-27; Kumar 2006) circulated widely in the public sphere in the years following the invasion. Thus, while almost all Western intellectual commentary and media opinion supported the invasion of Iraq as a ‘noble and generous’ endeavour (Chomsky, cited in Edwards and Cromwell 2005: 75), public scepticism about the official justification for the war was significant. Given the strength of the anti-war movement in 2003, the widespread public disapproval of the occupation of Iraq, and a somewhat heightened public suspicion of media propaganda, there was little likelihood that Occupation’s perspective on the war would be simplistically pro-interventionist or openly jingoistic.
[...]
Occupation focuses on the experiences of three friends – Sergeant Mike Swift (James Nesbitt), Corporal Danny Peterson (Stephen Graham) and the younger Lance Corporal Lee Hibbs (Warren Brown) – who are first dispatched to Basra in 2003. On their return home after their first tour, each of the men fails to adjust to civilian life in Manchester and is inspired to return to Iraq: one for love, one for money, and one out of a fervent belief in the supposed mission to ‘rebuild’ Iraq.
[...]
Iraq is the dog that didn’t bark. And when you think about that it seems more than odd. Here’s a hugely significant event – one which continues to engage British citizens in all sorts of ways (some of them fatal) and yet it barely registers on the most significant storytelling medium we have.
A small number of British television dramas have included storylines relating – tangentially, at least – to the war. Peter Kosminsky’s docudrama The Government Inspector (Channel 4, 2005), for example, investigated the life and death of the British government weapons expert David Kelly and indicted the British government’s decision to participate in the US-led invasion of Iraq, while The Mark of Cain (Channel 4, 2007), set in Iraq during the war, explored the problem of bullying in the British army. It was not until 2009, however, that the subject of the Iraq war itself was given significant treatment on British television. Written over five years by Peter Bowker, directed by Nick Murphy and produced by Laurie Borg for the production company Kudos, the three-part BBC television drama Occupation chronicles the involvement of three British soldiers from Manchester in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Broadcast in the summer of 2009, when the occupation of Iraq was stuttering to a drawn-out close, the mini-serial reflects upon the rationale for the Iraq invasion, the consequences of the war for those who fought in it, and the effects of the occupation on the population of Iraq.
[...]
In light of the BBC’s savaging by Hutton and what some have seen as the BBC’s post-Hutton pusillanimity, the BBC might have been expected to deliver a politically emollient, uncontroversial treatment of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. On the other hand, the significant level of public opposition to the war made it unlikely that the drama would present an entirely one-sided view of the Iraq war. In 2003, public opposition to British military involvement in Iraq was far more widespread than it had been to Western military action in the Balkans during the previous decade. One month before the aerial bombardment of Baghdad in February 2003 and the subsequent coalition invasion of Iraq, millions of people worldwide demonstrated against the war. Meanwhile, claims that the justification for the Iraq war was supported by faulty and false information disseminated in the Western media (Miller 2003; Kellner 2004 and 2007; Allan and Zeliger 2004: 8; Kramer and Michalowski 2005; Chomsky, 2006: 24-27; Kumar 2006) circulated widely in the public sphere in the years following the invasion. Thus, while almost all Western intellectual commentary and media opinion supported the invasion of Iraq as a ‘noble and generous’ endeavour (Chomsky, cited in Edwards and Cromwell 2005: 75), public scepticism about the official justification for the war was significant. Given the strength of the anti-war movement in 2003, the widespread public disapproval of the occupation of Iraq, and a somewhat heightened public suspicion of media propaganda, there was little likelihood that Occupation’s perspective on the war would be simplistically pro-interventionist or openly jingoistic.
[...]
Occupation focuses on the experiences of three friends – Sergeant Mike Swift (James Nesbitt), Corporal Danny Peterson (Stephen Graham) and the younger Lance Corporal Lee Hibbs (Warren Brown) – who are first dispatched to Basra in 2003. On their return home after their first tour, each of the men fails to adjust to civilian life in Manchester and is inspired to return to Iraq: one for love, one for money, and one out of a fervent belief in the supposed mission to ‘rebuild’ Iraq.
[...]
Occupation begins in medias res, as the soldiers prepare for a dangerous mission. The opening scenes cast the British soldiers in a distinctly heroic role, especially Mike Swift [...] Having first evacuated civilians from the building, the soldiers enter an apartment block in which some ‘insurgents’ are holed up. After a tense stand-off with the militants, Mike saves an injured child from the midst of the fray and carries her, through enemy fire, from the apartment block to a hospital that is full of badly injured people. There the British soldiers manage to prevent looters from stealing hospital equipment. Mike, meanwhile, meets a married Iraqi doctor, Aliya Nabil (Lubna Azabal), with whom he begins to fall in love. Later in the episode, Mike returns to his wife and children in England and the injured young girl is also brought back to Britain for specialist treatment. Mike’s return home is, however, far from glorious: although he has become a hero in the eyes of his family and the news media, his guilt over his affection for Aliya vitiates any sense of accomplishment.
[...]
When Mike attends a fund-raising press conference for the injured Iraqi girl with the visiting Aliya, a reporter questions whether the child’s injuries were inflicted by coalition forces, to which Aliya rather tetchily replies: ‘Iraqi people are grateful for the British forces. I mean, terrible things happen in the war. Everyone is trying to do something to help’. Aliya here expresses a heroising view of the British role in Iraq; but her optimism comes at the expense of any explanation of the causes of the war, an elision marked by her use of the de-agentifying passive construction ‘terrible things happen’.
[...]
In the second episode, all of the men return to Iraq, a country now disintegrating in a vortex of religious fundamentalism. When Mike meets Aliya again, his first conversation with her takes places through a wrought iron window grille. This is the first of several images of confinement – a similar framing device is used in episode three, when the pair gaze at each other through the slats of some window blinds – that signify not only the personal obstacles preventing the pair’s romantic relationship (Aliya now reveals that she, too, is married), but also the lack of freedom experienced by women in the fundamentalist and patriarchal environment of post-invasion Iraq. Aliya, now wearing a headscarf, is regarded with deep suspicion for talking to Mike, who offers to take her out of Iraq. ‘I’ve seen the way things are going here’, says Mike, ‘with the religion and the bombings’. Aliya’s sharp reply – ‘And whose fault is that?’ – provides a counter-hegemonic riposte, even if its critique of the impact of the Western invasion remains implicit.
[...]
Hibbs [...] is kidnapped. Held prisoner in a darkened cell and expecting to be executed, he is interrogated by the ruthless police officer who killed Yunis (and who, ironically, had been trained by Hibbs). The encounter between the two men constitutes one of the drama’s most overtly political and antagonistic exchanges:
Policeman: All you had to do was go home. You got rid of Saddam. But then you should have let us get on with running our own country.
Hibbs: Kill each other, you mean? Like you killed my mate?
Policeman: You know how many Iraqis your bombs kill? Huh? Half a million. So don’t talk to me about killing. Don’t try and [sic] tell me you’re better.
Like Aliya’s earlier riposte to Mike (‘And whose fault is that?’), the policeman’s exposure of Western hypocrisy here raises the prospect of a subaltern perspective on the rights and wrongs of the war. Yet the force of this anti-imperialist critique is somewhat compromised by its being placed in the mouth of the drama’s most unsympathetic character. Furthermore, while the policeman alludes to the massive violence perpetrated by the Western coalition against Iraqis, none of this violence is shown in Occupation and the only acts of deadly force depicted in the drama are committed by Iraqis.
[...]
[...]
When Mike attends a fund-raising press conference for the injured Iraqi girl with the visiting Aliya, a reporter questions whether the child’s injuries were inflicted by coalition forces, to which Aliya rather tetchily replies: ‘Iraqi people are grateful for the British forces. I mean, terrible things happen in the war. Everyone is trying to do something to help’. Aliya here expresses a heroising view of the British role in Iraq; but her optimism comes at the expense of any explanation of the causes of the war, an elision marked by her use of the de-agentifying passive construction ‘terrible things happen’.
[...]
In the second episode, all of the men return to Iraq, a country now disintegrating in a vortex of religious fundamentalism. When Mike meets Aliya again, his first conversation with her takes places through a wrought iron window grille. This is the first of several images of confinement – a similar framing device is used in episode three, when the pair gaze at each other through the slats of some window blinds – that signify not only the personal obstacles preventing the pair’s romantic relationship (Aliya now reveals that she, too, is married), but also the lack of freedom experienced by women in the fundamentalist and patriarchal environment of post-invasion Iraq. Aliya, now wearing a headscarf, is regarded with deep suspicion for talking to Mike, who offers to take her out of Iraq. ‘I’ve seen the way things are going here’, says Mike, ‘with the religion and the bombings’. Aliya’s sharp reply – ‘And whose fault is that?’ – provides a counter-hegemonic riposte, even if its critique of the impact of the Western invasion remains implicit.
[...]
Hibbs [...] is kidnapped. Held prisoner in a darkened cell and expecting to be executed, he is interrogated by the ruthless police officer who killed Yunis (and who, ironically, had been trained by Hibbs). The encounter between the two men constitutes one of the drama’s most overtly political and antagonistic exchanges:
Policeman: All you had to do was go home. You got rid of Saddam. But then you should have let us get on with running our own country.
Hibbs: Kill each other, you mean? Like you killed my mate?
Policeman: You know how many Iraqis your bombs kill? Huh? Half a million. So don’t talk to me about killing. Don’t try and [sic] tell me you’re better.
Like Aliya’s earlier riposte to Mike (‘And whose fault is that?’), the policeman’s exposure of Western hypocrisy here raises the prospect of a subaltern perspective on the rights and wrongs of the war. Yet the force of this anti-imperialist critique is somewhat compromised by its being placed in the mouth of the drama’s most unsympathetic character. Furthermore, while the policeman alludes to the massive violence perpetrated by the Western coalition against Iraqis, none of this violence is shown in Occupation and the only acts of deadly force depicted in the drama are committed by Iraqis.
[...]
The New York Times television reviewer Alessandra Stanley (2009: 1) suggests that ‘Occupation does take a long, disturbing look at the chaos, corruption and mayhem that choked the American-led reconstruction effort’; however, the drama would be considerably more disturbing to conventional narratives about the Iraq war if it clearly identified the forces responsible for initiating the chaos. As in news media accounts of ‘the conflict’ in Iraq – a problematically de-agentifying phrase, as Noam Chomsky (2006: 48) points out – the worsening social conditions registered in the drama are not attributed to the coalition invasion; rather, Iraq appears as a place where, in Aliya’s phrase, ‘terrible things happen’ and where Western forces are ‘trying to do something to help’. At the same time, by analogy with standard journalistic practice in Iraq, Occupation ‘embeds’, as it were, the audience with ‘our’ troops, foregrounding the soldiers’ personal struggles and tragedies. The British soldiers’ arguments and perspectives are pre-eminent in the drama and popular songs express the soldiers’ unvoiced fears and aspirations (The Libertines’ ‘Road to Ruin’ plays when Mike’s son Richard joins the army, while Pink Floyd’s ‘The Gunner’s Dream’ accompanies Hibbs’ preparation to be executed at the end of the first episode). Embedding, as Slavoj Žižek (2004: 3) notes, tends to lend representations of war a ‘human touch’, ‘generating an instant identification of the spectator’s perspective with that of the soldier’. But this in turn can be seen as a means of avoiding awkward questions about political agency, so that, watching the drama, ‘we are there, with our boys, identifying with their fears and anguishes instead of questioning what they are doing at war in the first place’ (Žižek 2010: 30).
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