This harrowing documentary about the situation in Iraq is intensely emotional at times. It’s hard but essential viewing.
By Elise Nakhnikian
While struggling to keep Baghdad from descending into chaos, Barbara Bodine and her colleagues in Iraq used to joke that there were 500 ways to do this thing wrong, and only two or three ways to get it right. “What we didn’t understand,” she adds wryly, “was that we were going to go through all 500.”
Bodine, the first American administrator to run central Iraq after the occupation, is one of several key staff members who tell their stories in No End in Sight, a harrowing documentary about the situation in Iraq. If you’ve been keeping up with the news, No End in Sight probably won’t tell you anything you don’t already know, but the immediacy of the documentary format breathes new life into old facts and quotes, and attaches personalities to the names of the players. Here is a piece of our recent history — the story of how we got into this ungodly mess, condensed into just more than an hour and a half. Intensely emotional at times, it’s hard but essential viewing.
First-time director Charles Ferguson, a political scientist by training, paid for his movie with a bit of the fortune he made designing software for the Web during the dot-com boom. He decided to make the movie, he told The New York Times, after his friend George Packer, one of the journalists interviewed in No End in Sight, told him things in Iraq were much worse than the administration was letting on. An early supporter of the invasion, Ferguson decided to research that claim. What he learned came as a shock. “I had no idea how incompetently the occupation was being planned, and with what degree of ideological rigidity and arrogance and callousness and stupidity,” he said.
To get at the truth, No End in Sight intersperses documentary footage of quotes from smug officials in Washington (“Stuff happens,” shrugs a ghoulishly jolly Donald Rumsfeld) and footage from the ground in Iraq with unobtrusively artfully shot interviews with people like Bodine; General Jay Garner, the first American administrator of Baghdad; Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state under Colin Powell; Col. Paul Hughes, a military commander also posted to Iraq just after the occupation; and several soldiers who served in Iraq. Their accounts are generally measured, but their frustration and sadness is palpable, and at times a burst of anger breaks through. It’s a stark contrast to the smug arrogance of the clips of President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, whose jaunty self-assurance feels painfully inappropriate.
The list of mistakes and missed opportunities is oppressively long. To name just a few, there was Washington’s naive overreliance on the unreliable Ahmed Chalabi before the invasion; the president’s refusal to read even the executive summaries of any of the reports prepared by experts in the area; and the administration’s habit of keeping all discussions about the country’s future between a handful of Washington insiders, never consulting with anyone on the ground in Iraq. There was the order from the Pentagon not to try to stop the looting that spread like a virus in the weeks immediately following the fall of Baghdad that eventually stripped bare everything from munitions dumps to museums — including ancient treasures dating back to the earliest recorded years of human civilization — and set the tone for the lawlessness and lack of a functioning infrastructure that was to follow.
There was the decision to stop the formation of an interim Iraqi government early on, the “de-Ba’athification” order that further decimated the country’s infrastructure, driving away tens of thousands of soldiers, middle managers, and other key people and creating an enormous unemployment problem overnight. (Chris Albritton of TIME magazine estimates that about half the workers in Iraq became unemployed as a result.) There was the decision to give nearly all the reconstruction jobs to U.S. contractors rather than Iraqis, despite the desperate need for jobs and the inefficiency and high cost of most of the foreign contracts. There was the lack of preparation — the Allies, we are told, took two years to plan the occupation of Germany during World War II, while the Bush administration spent 60 days planning the occupation of Iraq. And so on, and on, and on.
Meanwhile, the horror on the ground grew steadily worse. Car bombs, kidnappings, rapes, revenge killings, and common criminal acts are now inescapable facts of everyday life. Basic services like electricity and clean water are in short supply. The American overseers sequestered in their safe houses can’t keep track of what’s happening, let alone control it. And so many different people have stepped into the void to claim pockets of power that it’s hard to know whether the person arresting you even has the authority to do so — or whether he’ll know how to tell an insurgent from an ally even if he’s legit. “They sometimes arrested the wrong person,” Packer says of the American soldiers. “They sometimes even killed the wrong person.”
Asked at one point to speculate about the vice president and the secretary of defense, Richard Armitage refuses. He can speak for himself, he says, but only they can say just what they knew and when they knew it. Ultimately, he adds, they’ll all be judged for what they said and did.
So they will — and so will we all, to some degree. For me, No End in Sight is a stark reminder that all Americans bear some responsibility for the hell that has been unleashed in our name.
This film is not rated.