Standard Operating Procedure

The foot soldier's view of the Iraq invasion has been the subject of a few feature films in the past year or so – Stop-Loss and Redacted come immediately to mind. Whilst both these films were commendably sincere efforsts neither were particularly engaging I suspect because the “war” seems to be such one-sided affair based on pure militaristic, ideological bloody-mindedness (comparable in some ways to the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia).

Perhaps the most insistent theme that has emerged from these films is the deplorable use by the US government of poor white and black trash as frontline “personnel”. This was made amply evident in the real world when photographs showing American soldiers degrading and abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003 and early 2004 became public.

It is these events that Errol Morris explores in his documentary which has two thematic lines. One, which it has in common with the films mentioned above, is to show us the mindsets of the soldiers who participated in the abuse. His other, more idiosyncratic angle is to explore why they chose to photograph what they did. As always with Morris, the approach is to get the participants to relay their points of view in all their self-serving folly and leave us to gape at the horror of it all. Standard Operating Procedure is in this respect not his best work but if you have not seen any of the films mentioned above and really want to know about the kind of methods Bush, Rumsfeld and the American military rely on to get their dirty work done, this will be more than enough.

FYI: Much is made in the film of the fact that the perpetrators used Sony digital cameras to record their activities. Am I losing my marbles or is this some kind of warped product placement? If not why is the DVD of this film released by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment?

 

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