With Vietnam, the Iraq War, so many American films about war are almost always from the American point of view. You almost never have a Middle Eastern character by name with a story.

Nair is criticizing the narrative default of mainstream U.S. war cinema: even when conflicts are fought on foreign soil, stories are framed through American protagonists and moral dilemmas, while local people are reduced to background, threat, or symbol. By pointing out that Middle Eastern characters are rarely given names and personal arcs, she highlights how representation works at the level of basic storytelling—who is individualized, who is granted interiority, and whose suffering is legible. The remark also implies an ethical and political consequence: when audiences repeatedly encounter wars only through an American lens, empathy and historical understanding become lopsided, reinforcing stereotypes and erasing the lived realities of those most directly affected.