American Sniper in Baghdad

I've seen links to this article several places so I went to have a look.  It reminds me of the reporting done on Iraq in the early years when we got blogs from Iraqis and from American soldiers that showed us the Iraqi (and Afghan) people as Real in a way that our media seldom does.   The Iraqi's interviewed have individual opinions.  Some think the movie is great.  Some don't like it but have seen it multiple times anyway.  Some are philosophical about a man's responsibility to serve his country.

Mohammed says one of the film’s opening scenes, when Kyle spots a woman and child who appear to be preparing to attack US troops during the initial invasion of Iraq, had the entire audience on the edge of their seats.

“When the sniper was hesitating to shoot [the child holding the RPG] everyone was yelling ‘Just shoot him!’” he said.

(...)

 Mohammed, who lived through the events in Baghdad the film depicts, admits that scenes where women and children were killed were hard for him to watch. But all in all he liked the movie.  

“I love watching war movies because especially now they give me the strength to face ISIS,” he said, using one of the acronyms for the Islamic State. When asked if he thought the movie was racist or anti-Arab — a charge made by some critics in the West — he replied, “No, why? The sniper was killing terrorists, the only thing that bothered me was when he said he didn’t know anything about the Quran!”

Iraqi filmmaker Mohamed Al-Daradji:

Daradji hasn’t seen "American Sniper" yet, but he says he isn’t surprised that the movie is being criticized for inaccurately depicting Iraq. 

“There is no American films [about Iraq] — and I saw a lot of them — that have given justice to the Iraqi people and the events that happened in Iraq,” he said. “I sort of understand why not, because when an American filmmaker and an American company make a film they think about it from the American point of view, they don’t care about Iraq, they care about themselves.” 

“That’s why we Iraqi filmmakers have to make films about Iraqi people,” he added.

I think he's right about that.  The difference of perspective can be seen even between movies made about Iraq and Afghanistan in the US.  Critics here don't like American Sniper because it doesn't tell the story that they prefer to have told.  But that's the same reason that so few of anyone liked the "proper" movies about Iraq that held to the liberal anti-war (though who isn't actually anti-war?) point of view.  People want their own stories told, not someone elses.  And yet, even in Baghdad it seems that people find something of their own story in American Sniper, something that relates and inspires even.  Others find objections or racism or simply feel the movie is too violent.  Because people are people, and people are real.  They aren't an undifferentiated group that we can point to in our ignorance and say how we think they all *ought* to feel about anything.