In Philip Haas's fiction feature, the situation in question begins when American troops rough up two Iraqi teens and toss them off a bridge. The official report concludes that they jumped of their own volition. An American journalist, Anna Molyneux (model-chic Connie Nielsen, whose blond locks tend to escape her obligatory headscarf) tracks down the one survivor. Her determination to muckrake ultimately leads to a full-blown battle at an insurgents' encampment.
Haas's pace is headlong, and the chain of relationships proves Byzantine: Anna's young interpreter, for instance, is the son of an out-of-favor diplomat trying to wangle an overseas post through her sometime paramour, intelligence officer Dan Murphy (Damian Lewis, who has a gift for looking at once earnest and crafty). Murphy is forced to shoulder one of those speeches that cries out "core statement": "There are no bad guys and there are no good guys . . . . The truth shifts according to each person you talk to."
