Review
of "No End in Sight" from Newsweek
July
30, 2007
Lucidly,
and without partisan rhetoric, Charles Ferguson's
not-to-be-missed documentary, "No
End in Sight," lays out the disastrous missteps
of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The magnitude
of the errors perpetrated by the Bush administration-ignorance,
incompetence, arrogance, bad or nonexistent planning,
cronyism and naiveté-can make you weep
with anger. We hear about jobs in Iraq handed
to the sons of Bush campaign donors, of the
young woman put in charge of managing traffic
in chaotic Baghdad despite never having studied
traffic control or Arabic.
Thirty-five
people are interviewed in the film, including
Jay Garner, who briefly ran the reconstruction
before being replaced by L. Paul Bremer; Ambassador
Barbara Bodine, who was placed in charge of
Baghdad (in an office that didn't even have
phones); former deputy secretary of State Richard
Armitage; a clearly bitter Robert Hutchings,
chairman of the National Intelligence Council,
who believes President Bush did not read the
one-page summation of an intel report on the
worsening situation that his committee submitted
to the White House, and Colin Powell's former
chief of staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson. One
of the most eloquent is Col. Paul Hughes, who
watched as Bremer carried out what the film
posits as the most fatal of all the bad decisions:
disbanding the Iraqi Army, which sent tens
of thousands of unemployed, humiliated men
into the arms of the insurgency.
Though Ferguson is a former senior fellow at
the Brookings Institution (and a political-science
professor at MIT), "No End in Sight" doesn't
enter the debate over the rights and wrongs
of the invasion. The director has said he initially
supported the war. This movie, his first, never
raises its voice, yet it is bursting with the
barely contained rage of the men and women
whose expertise and best intentions were betrayed
at every turn. This powerhouse of a movie should
be required viewing for every member of Congress.
The executive branch is likely to avert its
eyes.
-David Ansen
© 2007
Newsweek, Inc. |
