Fear and frustration are the emotions which dominate in this movie, a sincere effort to depict the situation is Iraq now, told with restraint and utterly convincingly. There is an air of calm dignity in the telling. The muted colours of the desert landscape are echoed in the muted voices of the protagonists as they try to live normal lives against a background of random gunfire. The kaleidoscope is the ever shifting relationships between all the people involved, The Iraqis are divided along tribal, religious, social lines, not knowing whom to trust, who has power, who will betray whom, and to whom: To them the Americans at least present a recognisable target; for the Americans it is not so easy to identify who, if anyone, to trust.
But also among the Americans the rivalries and objectives are at war with one another: the military who want simple targets to blow up and the diplomats striving for a negotiated solution in the face of chaos. In the midst of this is an American journalist Anna (Connie Nielsen) who is trying to find the truth about the murder of an Iraqi boy and assassination of her best contact, and Anna's lover Dan Murphy (Damian Lewis), an intelligence officer whose job, in the face of corruption among the Iraqis and opposition from the military, is to rebuild some semblance of infrastructure with a water filtration plant and a hospital. He is expected by the military to betray the very people he is counting on to get his work done and in the mounting tension between all these groups in which Anna seems to be kidnapped and Dan goes to her rescue the one-time lovers find themselves on opposite sides of a confrontation in which there are, as Dan explained to his junior in the office, no bad guys, no good guys nor shades of grey either, but the truth shifts according to each person you're talking to. His rebuke to his ignorantly opinionated junior is the one attempt to make any philosophical sense of the Situation: "There is no Truth, it's lost in the 4th dimension of time and just when you think you understand it, it's past": a little discourse which for me defines the meaning of the film.
The country with its heat, dust, road blocks and queues at petrol pumps, grieving women, children in the street playing with guns amid the ruins, night-time raids and shoot-outs are all photographed by Anna's assistant Zaid an Iraqi Christian, and as Anna becomes more embroiled with the Situation she feels closer to Zaid and alienated from Dan.
So Anna and Dan foil each other's best intentions with tragic outcome.
The really good die and hope with them, the not-so-good live to fight another day, and Dan is left contemplating the wreckage of his baby incubators which never made it to the hospital which never got built.