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.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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