By Michael Greenwell, 6th April 2007

I wonder if when it is all finished there will have been more documentaries made about the Iraq war than there will have been soldiers killed. At any rate, if you add up every distortion, every sleight of hand and every downright lie that has been told – and there have been a lot - you won’t come anywhere near the number of civilians killed.

I feel somehow obliged to sit through them all - even though they mostly contain the same information. There are usually one or two new snippets in each one which join a couple of dots and lead you toward completing the full and depressing picture.

This documentary was made in 2002/3 (its good to be on the ball!) by Helmuth Grosse  and features people heavily involved in the policy process in the USA such as Richard Perle and Gary Schmitt and it also features the usual critics such as Seymour Hersh, Ray McGovern and Danny Schechter .

The documentary follows the basic narrative of most Iraq documentaries in that war plans were worked out for what is going on now when the first oil embargo gave the USA a real shock in the 70s. At that time there was a feasibility study done called ‘Oil Fields As Military Objectives’. The plans were then further developed by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) who were frustrated  in their ambitions by Clinton. However, the election of Bush and then  9/11 gave them the perfect excuse to get their iniquitous plans (the words ‘new world order’ are used) put into action.

The Office of Special Plans was then set up to help push it all through, the CIA was ignored when they said there wasn’t a threat and then there was the dodgy dossier, media complicity and so on. There is the allegation featured in other books and documentaries (and to my knowledge still undenied) that the famous scene of Saddams statue being toppled was a set piece planned in advance for the Bush reelection campaign. We all know the story by now.

Some of the little things I didn’t know were that the backdrop of Picasso’s Guernica was hidden behind a screen for the duration of Colin Powell’s UN presentation and that, according to Seymour Hersh, the Bush people jokingly call themselves “the cabal”.

Israel is not often mentioned in the Iraq war documentaries I have seen and this one mentions it only once. Ray McGovern, when talking about the dodgy dossier, asks “cui bono?” and answers his own question with “the US for selling its position, the UK for selling its position and Israel for having aims that are identical to the United States in this case.”

This film also explicitly asks if there is a link between terror alert codes and political expediency though it balks at answering its own question decisively. I think they struggled to get a British person to speak to them because at this point they interview Peter Willdridge the former planning officer for Buckinghamshire county council.

There is a scene in an episode of Yes Minister, where the vacillating Jim Hacker MP is lamenting being in a situation with only two options. If he takes the first one he will appear heartless and if he takes the other he will appear mindless. One of his aides tells him that it is better to appear heartless than mindless, the other suggests that perhaps he should try appearing heartless and mindless alternately and that way no one else could make their mind up which of the two he was.

As the Iraq disaster has progressed the story of it has now been told so many times in so many different ways that the phoney debate about if it was justified or not or the secondary phoney debate about whether it would it do more harm than good if the troops left are over.  The only debate that seems to be going in the supposedly left-wing press now is whether or not the planners of this war are heartless or mindless? All of the Iraq war documentaries I have seen so far fall into one of the two categories.

It comes back to an idea about two competing theories of history, there is the cock-up theory (the road to hell is paved with good intentions) and the conspiracy theory (all of this was orchestrated to happen exactly this way by a few all-powerful and extremely nefarious people). However, every political generation has groups of people who mean well and people who don’t. Furthermore, the people that elected representatives spend most time with are the lobbyists who permanently barrage them with skewed information - it may be that some of them are acting from what they perceive to be the best interests of their extremely selective community.

That said, I for one will never be able to look at Dick Cheney and truthfully say “that man has good intentions.”

This documentary is thoroughly on the side of the conspiracy view of history and by and large what happened pre-war was planned and orchestrated by a nefarious group of people. However, it is rarely pointed out that conspirators usually need people to carry out their plans for them. This documentary does say that there was/is a disturbing lack of people willing to resign rather than proceed with a war they knew/know to be based on deception.

Most of the documentaries have focused on how a hoodwink was performed on the public or how the policy was flawed. Very few have been about those who have had to suffer the consequences of these policies. For those people, instead of being an academic argument about ends and means and secret motivations it has been nothing short of a brutal and murderous rampage.

Whether the planners of this war are nasty or just stupid (or both) is no longer the point (if it ever was). The point is that they should not be in power if the end result of their mistakes or strategies are the bombing and burning of hundreds of thousands of people.

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