Fallujah

Michael Manning is an American deep-sea diver turned documentary filmmaker. He recently went to the Iraqi town of Fallujah. Why?

“For the past two years, Manning has been making a documentary, American Voices, crisscrossing the United States and asking hundreds of Americans if they could explain why, exactly, the U.S. is at war with Iraq”, wrote the Santa Barbara Independent on March 24.

“He was profoundly disheartened, he said, by the lack of facts and accurate information out there. Very few of the people he interviewed could back up their opinions with facts. Even worse, he realized, neither could he. That’s when he decided he had to see what life was like on the receiving end of Operation Enduring Freedom. “As an American citizen,” said Manning, “I felt personally responsible for what happened to the people of Fallujah. We live in a democracy. In our democracy, my government is conducting a military operation over there in my name. To me, it doesn’t get more direct than that.”

His eyewitness account gives credence to the claim that the US occupation is in fact fuelling the insurgency, due primarily to its heavy-handedness and indiscriminate killing.

Text and images ©2024 Antony Loewenstein. All rights reserved.

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