In Hollywood's Warfare, the only good Iraqi is IED cannon-fodder

Art, cinema, and culture are not passive reflections of US imperial ideology — they are active sites of its production. The collaboration of the American military with Hollywood’s global cultural significance is probably the most obvious manifestation of this relationship.

The recent release of Alex Garland’s Warfare (2025) follows the exact same political persuasion, in favour of the US war machine in Iraq. The film was co-directed by a former Navy SEAL, Ray Mendoza, depicting a 2006 operation in occupied Iraq, as they hunt down Iraqis on their mission against the American soldiers.

The Iraq invasion has had momentous implications in modern history; it sparked the world’s largest protests in recorded history and caused what many have described as one of the most audacious and spectacular crimes in modern history. It is estimated that over a million Iraqis have been murdered directly as a result of the invasion. 

The Iraq invasion has arguably produced the most well-recorded war crimes in history. The entire world has seen the images and videos of the infamous Abu Ghraib prison, where occupation forces hurled Iraqis around in chains and leashes, where they were beaten, raped and urinated on. Even today, the BBC is screening a documentary in which ex-UK special forces have revealed widespread war crimes by their former colleagues.

Over one in five Iraqis have been displaced since the invasion, causing the world’s largest displacement after the Palestinian Nakba by Israel in 1948.

Even after so much murder against the Iraqi people, Hollywood and the US imperial cultural warfare we are fed on our global screens continues on, and it is completely normal in the American psyche to reinforce the dehumanisation of Iraqis and Arabs as we approach the twenty-second anniversary of the invasion.

Dubbed ‘the most authentic Iraq War film yet’, Warfare opens with American soldiers storming into an Iraqi house, taking over all the rooms, and the Iraqi family who live there are banished into a room somewhere. Nothing is more important than the job the American occupation soldiers are bestowed with — as Bush declared in his invasion speech on live television for the entire world in 2003, they were there to liberate and defend the world.

The credits proclaim that the events of Warfare depict "the memories of those who lived it", that is, the Americans, not the Iraqis. It was Ray Mendoza’s directorial debut, who took part in the US campaign in the city of Ramadi, and where apparently each part of the campaign is based on conversations with Mendoza and his former team in Iraq.

Mendoza has been a military advisor to box office hits from Jurassic World to Civil War, where he actually met Alex Garland and was asked to create Warfare.

Garland describes the film as adopting a “neutral position”; however, of the 135-minute film set in the west of Iraq, Iraqis might appear in maybe twenty minutes of the movie.

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Of the Iraqis that are shown on screen, they are either working subserviently for the Americans as translators-turned-cannon-fodder, or mostly terrorists who, of course, are voiceless, but occasionally shout anti-American slogans mechanically through mosque speakers.

Our entire view of them as watchers is through the gaze of the occupiers, through the window of an Iraqi home the Americans have occupied, from which the soldiers are aiming a sniper from onto an Iraqi street.

The final credits roll out side by side photographs of the actors alongside their real counterparts, paying homage to them and their supposed sacrifices.

Hollywood and cultural imperialism

Cultural imperialism is instrumental to upholding the US war machine and we find that between 1911 and 2017, more than 800 films received support from the Department of Defence, spanning some of the century’s most ‘iconic’ films such as Transformers, the Hulk and Iron Man where producers are forced to “civilianize the military”.

There have even been instances where US cultural ministries actively use anti-imperialist cinema to subvert the lens into a colonial gaze. Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (1966) is one of the most famous films in militant cinema, depicting the almost decade-long Algerian battle against the barbaric French colonial yoke. The film is an artistic masterpiece in showing anti-colonial guerrilla tactics used by Algerians.

However, it is astonishing to see the power of cinema and art as instrumental tools for political education, both against, as well as in service of empire.

It has been screened and acclaimed both by those in solidarity with liberation struggles around the world by drawing inspirations to movements such as the Black Panthers and the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

However, more interestingly, it was also screened in 2003 by the Pentagon to US soldiers prior to the imperialist invasion of Iraq, to “better understand the Arab population". A flyer advertising the screening asked “How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas?”

The US military’s interest in such a provocation lay in pinning down the failures of French colonialism and how to avoid its mistakes in America’s war endeavours.

It exemplified explicitly how cultural artefacts – even anti-imperialist ones – can be appropriated by imperial forces for ideological training. It reflects profoundly that wars, invasions and occupations are not only fought through weapons, but with narratives, reinforcing frameworks of Othering in service of empire-building and managing perceptions of interventionist legitimacy on a global scale.

Similarly, Ben Affleck’s Argo (2012), which tells the story of a CIA operation to rescue Americans from Iran in the wake of the 1979 Iranian revolution, was critically acclaimed the world over, and won several accolades, such as the Oscar for Best Picture.

Such a movie also imagines history through a colonial gaze, celebrating American personnel, whilst conveniently omitting historical contexts, such the 1953 CIA-backed coup that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, installing US puppet state in the region which exploited Iran’s rich resources in favour of imperialist geopolitical interests, thus leading to the 1979 revolution.

Similarly, Warfare entirely excludes the Iraqi voice from the frame; an American’s limb dangles with no reason other than it is a fight of civilisation against barbarism, and thus the millions of Iraqis murdered by the very occupation forces on screen is justified.

We are not told of the murderous times of economic sanctions imposed against Iraqis, of the years of Western sponsor of the former Saddam regime which it eventually toppled, to American instigating wars with Iran and Kuwait, nor about the lies of weapons of mass destruction the world was fed which has no basis in reality whatsoever.

Such omissions are not accidental; they are explicitly structural and intended.

Cinema, with its unparalleled reach and emotional power, has become one of the most potent weapons of the US imperial arsenal. The film Warfare (2025) is a direct consequence of transnational empire-building through the power of affecting the conscience through asking the subject to do nothing other than watch. Such films reinforce any and all justifications of empire: the United States does not invade; it liberates.

The gaze is explicitly a colonial one, shot through the eyes of the occupier; the American soldier bleeds and defends, whilst the Iraqi destroys and dies off-screen.

Such depictions do not just entertain: they engrain political consciousness and outlook; they cultivate a collective memory of imperial violence that centres American suffering and sacrifice, whilst invisibilising traumas by Iraqis, Afghans, Palestinians, and others under colonial subjugation. The righteous camera is somehow pointed through an American sniper in service of peace and liberation, and away from victims under the rubble, in prisons, torture chambers and mass graves.

Rida Jawad is an Iraqi writer. His research interests focus on examining political economy and role of imperialism in the Arab region, as well as exploring anti-colonial resistance movements in the wider regions of Asia and Africa, be that through art, literature, film, law, or militancy. 

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