Review of Battle for Haditha (2007) by Nick D — 28 Mar 2008

When the awful moment came, when anger, psychosis and cultural schism conspired to make hiding in one's home seem an act of acute provocation, I was overrun with the thought "NO, NO, it can't have happened, not like that!", swiftly followed by "Why can't it have happened like that?", and then "I need to know if it did really happen exactly like that".

Then the film was over and my horror and thirst for truth got too-quickly folded away into abstraction. And that made me think how completely feeble outrage at any such event is against the juggernaut of rationalised, dispassionate justification. "These things do sometimes happen in war. It's regrettable, but you have to see bigger picture." If, for you, the war is right, it's unlikely to be made wrong by one atrocity. But is there a limit on how many atrocities there can be before the box marked "regrettable" is full? How filthy an enterprise armchair command is. Which, oddly enough, isn't far off the offending marine's bitter closing lament.