{"id":263569,"date":"2014-03-03T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-03-03T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/policyoptions.irpp.org\/issues\/take-me-to-the-front\/"},"modified":"2025-10-07T20:51:19","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T00:51:19","slug":"take-me-to-the-front","status":"publish","type":"issues","link":"https:\/\/policyoptions.irpp.org\/fr\/2014\/03\/take-me-to-the-front\/","title":{"rendered":"Take me to the front"},"content":{"rendered":"

During the national anthem at the recent Super Bowl, the television audience got the now customary military component of the pregame presentation: an Army\u00a0colour\u00a0guard on the field, live images of troops saluting from some base in Afghanistan followed by the customary fly-by, the strutting\u00a0of overhead weaponry that Americans somehow find reassuring.<\/p>\n

This year’s fly-by, however, was different. No jets. Instead, we got Apache helicopters, which makes sense when you think about it. Given what the US military seems to be up to around the world these days, it’s not really about jets. It’s about close air support.<\/p>\n

What would have made even more sense would have been a fly-by of drones. The skies over the stadium in New Jersey should have been filled with\u00a0pilotless\u00a0Predators and Reapers. And the video feed shouldn’t have come from\u00a0Bagram. It should have been from a secret location in Nevada or upstate New York, at one of the many military bases where pilots do their remote control thing.<\/p>\n

Drones are the weapons of choice in more and more conflicts these days. This is because they are the perfect tool to fight the new kind of war, the asymmetrical conflicts that confound conventional armies. They also usually confound modern news outlets, which haven’t yet learned how to cover them.<\/p>\n

These are the kind of conflicts Jeremy\u00a0Scahill\u00a0covers in\u00a0Dirty Wars<\/em>, the\u00a0timely\u00a0documentary that\u00a0goes where much of the Western world’s news media does not and tells important stories that usually go untold.<\/p>\n

Getting into the shadowy areas around modern warfare is not easy. Doing it with a video camera is harder. And turning it into a watchable, Academy Award-nominated documentary is harder still.<\/p>\n

Scahill\u00a0made his name and learned his way around the nooks and crannies in and around the US military when he wrote\u00a0Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army<\/em>, his 2008 book on the giant military contracting firm that made billions during the American invasion and\u00a0occupation of Iraq.<\/p>\n

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Scahill in Somalia, Photo: Richard Rowley<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Like drones, Blackwater does most of its work in the dark, off screen (and off the books, as far as Pentagon spending is officially concerned). Scahill’s reporting on Blackwater prepared him well for\u00a0Dirty Wars<\/em> and the three telling stories of secret US military warfare that the film focuses on: Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia.<\/p>\n

All three are tales of black ops, where the US military played a central role in acts of war\u00a0against civilians, by committing them or, in the case of Somalia, facilitating them. As\u00a0Scahill says, in the opening montage, \u201dThis is a story about the seen and the unseen. And about things hidden in plain sight.\u201d<\/p>\n

It seems rather easy nowadays, given what has happened to the news industry, to hide such things. Jingoism\u00a0still mars a lot of the coverage of foreign policy coming out of the US.\u00a0Despite the mea\u00a0culpas\u00a0(or\u00a0kinda\u00a0culpas) we heard after all those anchor people helped cheerlead America, indefensibly,\u00a0into Iraq, they are basically singing from the same song sheet on Iran.<\/p>\n

And with the economics of the news industry collapsing budgets and Justin Bieber running amok and attracting those coveted clicks, what sensible North American news outlet would devote its dwindling resources to chasing stories from which most North Americans would rather avert their eyes?<\/p>\n

Dirty Wars<\/em>\u00a0gets at\u00a0those stories\u00a0through a combination of dogged journalism, thousands of miles travelled, exceptional access and good storytelling, as well as the visual devices born in Hollywood that are becoming more and more common in contemporary documentaries.<\/p>\n

The opening sequence could have come out of the Bourne<\/em> series. The post-production grading of the video creates an effect audiences will recognize as a kind of halfway house between entertainment and documentaries. Call it\u00a0cin\u00e9ma (slightly less)\u00a0verit\u00e9.<\/p>\n