Middle-East meltdown

>> No End in Sight documents
America’s fiasco in Iraq

by MALCOLM FRASER

At this point, everyone but the most deluded bumpkin (and Christopher Hitchens) is aware that the Bush administration’s plan for Iraq didn’t work out so well. What’s less clear is how and why things turned out the way they did. First-time director Charles Ferguson attempts to track what went wrong in his documentary No End in Sight.

From the start, the war’s well-known architects dismissed any dissent from their perspective, not only from the media and the public, but from military and government insiders. The film features interviews with an extensive number of officials who were involved in the initial Iraq post-war planning; when they expressed unpopular opinions, they were systematically replaced by Bush loyalists, often people with little to no expertise in Middle Eastern affairs or post-war reconstruction. Ferguson makes determined efforts to find out how this could have happened, but the only administration loyalist he can get on camera is former mid-level advisor Walter Slocombe, who prevaricates, passes the buck and seems confused by difficult questions.

Unsurprisingly for the work of a novice director, the film has cinematic imperfections, notably some obvious musical cues and thematic overreaching, but they pale in comparison to the content. As the damning evidence against the post-war planners piles up along with Iraqi corpses, viewers may find themselves heartbroken, angered or just nauseated; the details of the administration’s incompetence are shocking. Campbell Scott narrates in a tone of barely controlled disbelief, which seems the only appropriate response.

Ferguson’s attempts to cover Iraq’s complicated sectarian politics, and the war’s effect on individual U.S. soldiers, feel incomplete; they each deserve their own entire film. Fundamentally, though, the most disappointing thing about the doc is hardly Ferguson’s fault: we have no credible alternative to the views presented here, because the true decision-makers on the Iraq war are keeping silent. As the uncharacteristically forthright former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage says in the film of his former colleagues, “They will be judged by their own words and actions.” If there’s any justice, Ferguson’s film will be only a small part of that judgment. In the meantime, it’s well worth seeing for anyone interested in the facts behind the Iraq fiasco.

No End in Sight opens this
Friday, Sept. 14

>> Movie Listings