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.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19886680/site/newsweek/Movie's website with preview:
http://www.noendinsightmovie.com/
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