March 12, 2007
"You're not going to enjoy it," director Charles Ferguson said to a small crowd at a private screening last week in downtown Washington. "It's not a light comedy."
He's right -- which doesn't mean you shouldn't see it.
The film contrasts what was said and what was done leading up to, and during, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, pitting the Bush administration against those "commanders on the ground" and painting the first war of the 21st century as a comedy of errors.
Is it boring? No. Maddening? Yes.
One of the first voices heard in the film is that of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who tells President Bush in 2006 that "the contributions you've made will be recorded by history." Little did they know.
And that's only the first of a series of come-back-to-bite-you comments highlighted during the two-hour film. A parade of recognizable images crosses the screen: an Iraqi woman holding a sign that says "Thank You USA," large groups of Islamic men answering the call to prayer in poetic unison and, of course, plenty of guns.
But the real strength of "No End in Sight" lies in its cast of characters, which reads like a diplomatic and military fantasy football team. There's Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell; diplomat and occupation authority appointee Barbara Bodine; former coalition adviser Walter Slocombe; Gen. Jay Garner, the first director of the post-invasion Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for Iraq; and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.
The failures they outline in the film are frustrating to the point of being comical. Particularly absurd is that the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance had no phone lists (which didn't matter, since there were no phones) and had to approach people in the street, asking if they knew where Iraqi government officials lived.
"Not the best way to start an occupation," says Bodine, who was ORHA's coordinator for central Iraq until shortly after the invasion.
The audience learns from Bodine and her colleagues that the Bush administration thought post-war Iraq would be "pro-America" and "easily stabilized"; that the original plan was to leave Iraq by August 2003, just five months after the invasion; and that most U.S. assumptions were based on the views of Ahmed Chalabi, the country's former deputy prime minister, described by one journalist in the film as "a superb con artist."
The movie does have some holes, however.
Ferguson said he set out to "make a film about politics and policy but not a political film." Yet he concedes that there were "large things missing from the film" -- such as how the administration viewed its decisions leading up to the war (an oversight he regrets) and whether it was a good idea to invade Iraq in the first place (an omission he doesn't).
The documentary won the special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival in January "in recognition of the film as timely work that clearly illuminates the misguided policy decisions that have led to the catastrophic quagmire of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq," according to the Sundance Web site.
But viewers will have to decide whether what Ferguson left out justifies dismissal of the film as an anti-war screed -- or whether it stands up as something akin to Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11."
The film covers the span of time between the joyful cries of Iraqi children chanting "Yes, Yes, Bush!" and the dissolution of nearly 100,000 Iraqi army troops left with no place to go and no plan.
"This doesn't look good," Wilkerson says in the film, referring to the occupation.
Watching "No End in Sight" just one seat away from this reporter recently, the colonel remained stone-faced throughout while the screen's images were reflected in his glasses.
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