NO END IN SIGHT : THE AMERICAN OCCUPATION OF IRAQThe first film of its kind to chronicle the reasons behind Iraq’s descent into guerilla war, warlord rule, criminality and anarchy, NO END IN SIGHT is a jaw-dropping, insider’s tale of wholesale incompetence, recklessness and venality. Based on over 200 hours of footage, the film provides a candid retelling of the events following the fall of Baghdad in 2003 by high ranking officials such as former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Ambassador Barbara Bodine (in charge of Baghdad during the Spring of 2003), Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, and General Jay Garner (in charge of the occupation of Iraq through May 2003) as well as Iraqi civilians, American soldiers, and prominent analysts. NO END IN SIGHT examines the manner in which the principal errors of U.S. policy – the use of insufficient troop levels, allowing the looting of Baghdad, the purging of professionals from the Iraqi government, and the disbanding of the Iraqi military – largely created the insurgency and chaos that engulf Iraq today. How did a group of men with little or no military experience, knowledge of the Arab world or personal experience in Iraq come to make such flagrantly debilitating decisions? NO END IN SIGHT dissects the people, issues and facts behind the Bush Administration’s decisions and their consequences on the ground to provide a powerful look into how arrogance and ignorance turned a military victory into a seemingly endless and deepening nightmare of a war.
“I think this decision to disband the Army came as a surprise to most of us…”
Q: What was your reaction?
“I thought we had just created a problem. We had a lot of out of work
{Iraqi} soldiers.”
– our interview with Richard Armitage, former Deputy Secretary of State
NO END SIGHT alternates between U.S. policy decisions and Iraqi consequences, systematically dissecting the Bush Administration’s decisions. The consequences of those decisions now include 3,000 American deaths and 20,000 American wounded, Iraq on the brink of civil war, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths, the strengthening of Iran, the weakening of the U.S. military, and economic costs of over $2 trillion. It marks the first time Americans will be allowed inside the White House, Pentagon, and Baghdad’s Green Zone to understand for themselves what has become the disintegration of Iraq.
http://www.noendinsightmovie.com/ article | posted July 27, 2007 (web only)
The Making of No End in Sight Akiva Gottlieb
Plenty of documentary filmmakers have captured the follies of the Iraq war. But none have had quite the same background and access as Charles Ferguson. An MIT-trained political scientist, Brookings Institution senior fellow and successful software entrepreneur, Ferguson offers up something rarer than common dissent. His recently released and well-reviewed documentary chronicles the Bush Administration's policy decisions following the fall of Baghdad in 2003.
Bucking current conventional wisdom that considers the occupation doomed to fail from the get-go, No End in Sight contends that with better planning, the whole fiasco might have gone smoothly. Was a sectarian civil war truly inevitable? According to the film's bemused collection of talking heads--including Assassins' Gate author George Packer, Ambassador Barbara Bodine and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage--the "post-war" reconstruction of Iraq was bungled every step of the way by an arrogant, shortsighted network of professional incompetents. From the film's perspective, were it not for initially insufficient troop levels, unchecked looting in Baghdad, de-Ba'athification and the disbanding of the Iraqi military, we theoretically could have seen a stable Iraq in 2007.
Ferguson will let others debate whether or not the invasion was morally justified--this film's subject is institutional mismanagement, plain and simple. Though it eschews the partisan passion of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, No End In Sight dissects the lies and blunders of Donald Rumsfeld and L. Paul Bremer, among others, with a systematic precision that proves amply damning. Chalk it up to Ferguson's policy-wonk pedigree. He certainly looks more like an accountant than an auteur, and he subjects the architects of this disaster to a well-warranted audit. On the eve of his film's July 27 release in New York City--preceding a national rollout by Magnolia Pictures--Ferguson sat down with Akiva Gottlieb to discuss his crucial investigation of an unnecessary catastrophe.
Continued @
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070813/gottlieb
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