No End In Sight

No End In Sight (Director: Charles Ferguson, USA, 2007): First-time dir­ector Charles Ferguson decided to make this film at a time when a number of books were being pub­lished about the Bush administration’s dis­astrous hand­ling of the Iraq war. In fact, Ferguson has known George Packer, author of prob­ably the defin­itive work (so far) on the war, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, for fif­teen years. This helped to explain why there was a famili­arity about many of the people I saw on the screen. What Ferguson has made is essen­tially an even more hard-hitting ver­sion of Packer’s book.

Ignoring the ques­tion of whether the war itself was jus­ti­fied was a wise choice. By focus­sing strictly on how the war and occu­pa­tion were planned (or per­haps more accur­ately, not planned), Ferguson’s film appeals to both the doves and the hawks, all of whom must agree after seeing the film that the Iraq war is now a full-blown debacle. In inter­views about the film, Ferguson has gravely but con­fid­ently stated that he believes the US will have a sig­ni­ficant mil­itary pres­ence in Iraq for the next 20 to 30 years. His film quietly and soberly puts all the pieces together, building emo­tional power as it goes. He speaks with the people who were first on the ground in Iraq after the inva­sion, and we hear how ill-prepared they were. Then the hasty estab­lish­ment of the Coalition Provisional Authority turned the country into, for all intents and pur­poses, a new dic­tat­or­ship with L. Paul Bremer wielding incred­ible power and chan­ging policy decisions with little con­sulta­tion. The three most damning policies he pur­sued were the failure to pro­ceed quickly with an Iraqi-led gov­ern­ment, the de-Baathification of the civil ser­vice, and the dis­sol­u­tion of the Iraqi Army. Along with the failure of American troops to stop looting and estab­lish law and order quickly after the inva­sion, Ferguson and his group of inter­viewees feel these bad decisions at the begin­ning of the war were sig­ni­ficant in leading to the cur­rent chaos.

This is a sobering and neces­sary film. And yet it would have been great to hear even a few sug­ges­tions for how to make things right. How can we learn from these mis­takes and lessen the damage that’s already been done? Unfortunately, that film has yet to be made.

The film is in lim­ited release right now in the US, expanding over the next few weeks. There is no release date yet for Toronto.

Trailer
Official site for the film

(9/10)

Tagged as: Documentaries, iraq, Theatrical Release