New Iraqi film counters Farenheit 911

Saddam's Mass Graves, a documentary making the rounds in the heartland of America, makes a compelling case for Bush, even though the film offers not a single image of Bush. "I wanted to keep the message absolutely free of politics," says director-producer Rosebiani, a soft-spoken native of Iraq's Kurdistan. And this he does religiously -- even cutting tempting footage of gushing families in northern Iraq who have named their new baby sons "Bush." Rosebiani's film lacks the entertainment value of Moore's political partisanship and venomous vitriol in Farenheit 911, and the quiet director is a bit shy when he suggests that Moore's film was engineered to appeal to the "dumb and dumber" set. But those who have watched Moore's Fahrenheit 911 might conclude the corpulent director was from another planet when his film portrayed Saddam Hussein's Iraq as a modern-day Shangri-la with children dancing in the streets. Rosebiani reveals, to say the least, a different Iraq. Following a simple formula of "just show it," Rosebiani has Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds recount in their own words how their brothers, husbands, children and friends were dragged from their homes in the middle of the night, beaten and starved at holding camps, and finally shot -- their bodies pushed into mass graves. The carnage under Saddam's regime was of horrific proportions, leaving an estimated 300,000 civilians dead. In the so-called "Anfal" ethnic cleansing of 1988 alone some 4000 villages were wiped from the face of the earth. Paramount is the conclusion that Saddam Hussein could have only been stopped by direct military intervention. Saddam's Mass Graves debuted recently at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, where, as Rosebiani recounted to NewsMax, "I had some tough customers there to see the film -- they were solidly against the U.S.'s intervention in Iraq. They told me that this was no longer their opinion after seeing the film." (Source: Dave Eberhart, "The Democrats Won't See This Film in Boston," NewsMax.com Tuesday, July 27, 2004)