Guilt and Grievability at War: Military Accountability and the Other in 'Mark of Cain' and 'Battle for Haditha'

Abstract

This article conducts a critical reading of the British war films Mark of Cain (Munden, 2007) and Battle for Haditha (Broomfield, 2007). Establishing the significance of cultural representations for politics and collective memory, I first locate both films in their historical and cultural contexts before I offer analyses that focus on the representation of US and British soldiers, Iraqi insurgents, and Iraqi civilians. I argue that Mark of Cain dissects how misunderstood loyalty, peer-pressure, and military organization facilitated abuses by British soldiers against Iraqi prisoners, but at the same time narrowly frames the Iraqi other as either largely invisible threat or hyper-visible helpless victim. In contrast, Battle for Haditha draws a more sophisticated picture of the Iraq war focusing on structural aspects of the conflict. In presenting the Iraq theater of war as a complex political economy with shifting allegiances and blurring loyalties, Broomfield offers insights in the backgrounds and rationalities of US soldiers, Iraqi civilians, and insurgents and this way alerts the viewer to structural aspects of evil in war as a system that reduces the paradigm of possible actions on all sides until only wrong decisions can be made. This, I conclude, makes Battle for Haditha an anti-war film proper.