More than 15 years after Bush and Blair’s invasion, the errors of the greatest war crime of our age are being exposed
Once Upon a Time in Iraq is the most searing anti-war documentary I have seen. In five parts on Mondays on BBC2, it is not bangs, screams and tears. The searing is not visceral. It is intellectual. In among the footage of the 2003 war, we hear simply the calm narrative of people whose lives were traumatised by the conflict, who witnessed the gut-wrenching obscenity of two great democracies using death and destruction to pursue their leaders’ political agenda. It shows that the morality of power projection has not advanced since the middle ages. A corpse is still a corpse.
Now at least we get to hear from the victims. The director, James Bluemel, approached the war not through those who ordered or opposed it, but through the recollections of the ordinary civilians, soldiers and reporters who experienced it. They were not war’s actors, they were its consequences. They leave us to draw our own conclusions.
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