No End in Sight

Here’s a simple plea to those who voted for Bush/Cheney in ‘04. Match every dollar you donated to their campaign with donations to charities working in Iraq.

After watching No End in Sight I felt like ripping the seats out of the theater. I had tuned out documentaries about Iraq because most of them are just piling on. I only saw this one because of Ebert’s four star review, a friend’s recommendation and a dearth of other interesting movies. It’s similar to Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room in the way it does a postmortem on a complex failure.

Charles Ferguson, the director, is clearly in his element in regards to political science and the structures that make governments work. The documentary is very well edited and he asks the important questions about what happened. I have a feeling Alex Gibney had an important role as executive producer. Gibney’s documentary about Enron, and Ferguson’s documentary about Iraq, both present complex topics in a clear, concise way using information graphics.

While the documentary features key players, and very informed outsiders, it does not manage to get Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Powell, Feith, Bremer, Cheney, or Bush. Perhaps Bob Woodward should have asked these questions. The administration clearly had time for him. The most senior person they have is Walter Slocombe. In a series of dueling interviews he is directly contradicted by Col. Paul Hughes. The detail in Hughes’ answers and the corroboration from other interviews really puts Slocombe’s evasive answers in a poor light. Slocombe even contradicts statements he gave in an interview with Frontline regarding de-Baathification. Still at times I felt not getting the key supporters and implementors of the US Iraq war policy leaves a large hole in truly understanding what went wrong. Richard Armitage frustratingly reminds us that he can’t explain why the Bush administration did what it did, only they can.

Even without that understanding you do get a sense that there were people who had a better plan for dealing with the occupation of Iraq. Those people were removed, or never engaged, for reasons that aren’t clear. The decision to go to war in Iraq was handled by a small cabal inside the government and as long as that group is not discussing it we will not have any clearer insight into what went wrong. That kind of secrecy is anathema to a continuing democratic government in the US.

The movie isn’t without its flaws. While it does a great job avoiding speculation about the Bush administrations motives it does seize on some inaccuracies. In a segment highlighting the administration’s lack of desire to stop looting the documentary briefly exploits the looting of the national archives and museum to drive home the loss. The plundering of the National Museum of Iraq has thankfully not turned out to be as devastating as initially reported. They leave that detail out. The UN mission is cited as a model for how to do things right. Yet they don’t mention that the UN sent Sergio Vieira de Mello after Bush and Rice persuaded him to go. There are no interviews with any of the “pretty people”, as Hughes called them, that worked for Bremer. Yet these people were in charge of fixing the day to day things like traffic.