Fascination, tension, bewilderment. Watching Clint Eastwood’s latest box-office hit, the audience experiences an emotional roller coaster ride. American Sniper, a biographical war film based on the life of US Navy Seal Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) – the deadliest sniper in American Military history with 160 reported kills during the Iraq War – has caused heated debate across the world. Eastwood’s adaptation of Kyle’s autobiography fails to draw a dividing line between reality and fiction, between the perceived and actual threat posed to Americans by the Arab world, between Iraq and Afghanistan.

The core of the movie focuses on Kyle’s four tours of duty in Iraq, and his struggle to return to normality after having faced the hazards of war. His wife Taya, played by Sienna Miller, has doubts about his profession at first and firmly states that she would never date a navy seal. However, she is quickly persuaded when Kyle tells her he would lay down his life for America because, after all, it’s the greatest country in the world. After witnessing a report of the bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi by Al-Qaeda Kyle signs up for the army. Shortly after, the 9/11 attacks take place. At worst, the sequence of events creates a feeling of hatred among the audience towards the terrorists Kyle fights. At best, they induce a sense of understanding for the actions of the Americans in Iraq.

Leaving the cinema, I was overcome by a feeling of unease. I could not put into words what had bothered me about American Sniper – it was just another undemanding action movie, wasn’t it? Opinions differed among my group of friends. A good soul, trying to convince me that my discomfort was misplaced, provided the impetus: “Would you not be upset if your country were attacked like that?” Then it dawned to me. There is no connection whatsoever between 9/11 and Iraq. Absolutely none. Yet, to the inattentive observer, the plot implies that there is. Confusing the fact that Iraq endured a US-invasion due to false accusations that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, with the Afghanistan war that aimed to dismantle Al-Qaeda following the attacks on the World Trade Centre, is nothing short of propaganda. 

American Sniper hence creates a notion of good against evil, liberty against terrorism, progress against regression. Yet the hazardous consequences of the Iraq War – including the emergence of ISIL – raise the question of who the real terrorists are. Throwing the whole ‘Arab World’ into one nasty pot of wickedness has led to a tripling of threats against Muslim and Arab Americans since the film’s release; tweets such as “American Sniper makes me wanna go shoot some fuckin Arabs” are not helping the case. By idealising a man who claimed to ‘not give a flying fuck’ about the Iraqi people, American Sniper presents a glorification of an unjustified war.

Some have argued that American Sniper is not a documentary but a biography that shows Kyle’s subjective worldview. Contesting that the film is promoting hypocritical American values, Bradley Cooper declared that ‘American Sniper is not about politics’. Yet, as Matt Taibbi remarks in Rolling Stone, a “one-note fairy tale set in the middle of the insane moral morass that is the Iraq occupation” will inevitably be political. 

Let us take this argument a little further: let’s assume that the Iraqi film industry produced a box-office hit and called it Jihadi Sniper. Sammy Sheik, who played the top terrorist Kyle hunts down, could be the main character (although we know little about his verbal abilities as he does not say a word, we do know that he is much hotter than Bradley Cooper in the film). How would the American public react to this? Surely not by idealising poor Sammy, who does not like the people that are invading his country. At the end of the film his psychiatrist would suggest: “Do you ever think that you may have seen or done things that you wish you hadn’t?” Like Kyle, he would respond: “I was just protecting my guys - they were trying to kill our soldiers, and I’m willing to meet my creator and ask for every shot that I took.”