As the war in Iraq collapses into its fifth year, the floodgates have opened to a series of increasingly problematic fictional (Redacted, In the Valley of Elah) and nonfictional (Iraq in Fragments, The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends) investigations into what happened, how it happened, and why it happened. Thankfully, Charles Ferguson’s documentary No End in Sight successfully answers all these questions, emerging as the definitive portrait of the region and the endless wars that have been waged there, arguably manufactured more for political and financial profit than out of moral imperatives.
Beginning with a brief (and extremely invaluable) overview of Iraq since 1980, Ferguson focuses primarily on the American buildup to war after 9/11 and how the Americans subsequently lost the war after successfully winning the battle back in March and April of 2003. Ferguson digs deep into the reconstruction efforts and the occupation years 2003-2005 to vividly illuminate how American government policy successfully and methodically undermined the Iraqi and American people with a series of bungled decisions of truly biblical proportions.
Ferguson, who has a Ph.D. in political science from MIT and served years as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute in Washington, brings a comprehensive understanding of the mechanics of conflict which infuses the film with a thoroughness of purpose that is aesthetically and intellectually mesmerizing.
What’s especially illuminating about the film is Ferguson’s unusually balanced analysis of his subject (unusual for an agitprop doc, anyway), and his clear-eyed, fair-minded approach, bolstered by interviews with former ambassador to Baghdad Barbara Bodine and U.S. reconstruction coordinators Jay Garner and Paul Hughes of ORHA, makes the underlying dishonesty of the U.S. regime’s version of events all the more obvious.
Ferguson’s interviewees describe in minute detail how their expertise and their sincere desire to restore order to and efficiently rebuild Iraq were continually undermined by the decisions made by their immediate superiors in Baghdad (Jerry Bremer, especially) and Washington (Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bush, Cheney, Rice).
Ground workers and reporters within Iraq and “experts” within the American intelligence machine provide a detailed first-hand account of subjects as varied as the looting of Baghdad, sectarian violence, improvised explosive devices, the UN bombing, the disbanding of the Iraqi army, neighbourhood militias... the list is tragically endless. Especially disturbing are the home movies made by American militia blithely documenting their random, wanton destruction of any semblance of civilization—as subtle a depiction of the ordinary brutality of war as I’ve ever seen.
No End in Sight is magnificent filmmaking. I have yet to see a political documentary that so effortlessly takes on a subject as weighty and complex as the Iraqi war and which distills all the pertinent elements in such a balanced, thorough, and honest manner without ever resorting to partisanship, grandstanding, or fraudulent imagery. This is imperative viewing for anyone remotely interested in the future of civilization.
Watch No End in Sight online at www.911docs.net/iraq/no_end_in_sight.php
