No End In Sight
dir. Charles Ferguson
2007

"Needless to say, the Germans couldn't give a damn about the Boers; it's the diamonds and gold of South Africa that interest them."
"They lack our altruism."
"Quite."
-Lord Kitchener & Maj. Thomas, Breaker Morant

"How many fingers, Winston?"
"Four. I suppose there are four. I would see five if I could. I'm trying to see five."
"Which do you wish: to persuade me that you see five, or really to see them?"
"Really to see them!"
- O'Brian and Winston, 1984

"There aren't evil guys and innocent guys. It's just... It's just... It's just a bunch of guys. "
- Steve Arlo, The Zero Effect

Politics is a game played on a field bounded on one side by reality and on the other by the perception of reality. A skillful politician maneuvers between these goalposts. An unskilled politician will find himself soon enough washed up on either shore.

It's not exactly news that Iraq is fucked, perhaps beyond repair. It's not exactly news that we've been reduced to a grim catalog of "least worst" options. It's not exactly news that, whatever happens next, it's going to be expensive, painful and most likely unproductive.

Iraq has become the albatross around our collective necks, a pervasive, unyielding reality that simply defies all our attempts to spin it away. Each of us feels it. It chokes off the air. It expand to fill any and all empty space in the national dialogue. It preoccupies us. It inhabits our dreams and our waking perception, unrelenting, like the ghost of Banquo.

No one will go into this movie without preconception. No one will come out with those preconceptions intact.

In the bogus "red vs. blue" demagoguery that passes for "serious" public discussion, we have been polarized into two equally naive, equally simplistic, equally idiotic, equally toxic, equally criminal, equally cruel, equally evil points of view.

On the one hand, there are those who believe that we've corrected the mistakes of the past and we have a "new strategy" that's "just starting to work."

On the other hand, there are those who maintain that the US is the problem in Iraq and the sooner we get out of there, the sooner those people will be able to pick themselves up, dust themselves off and enjoy their freedom.

The increasingly bitter bickering between these camps has rendered Iraq into a hazy smear of generalized bad news. A bomb here, a kidnapping there, one cleric is killed or arrested, another pops up in his place. The fog of war has metastasized into a thick gumbo of denial.

No End In Sight brings the picture back into sharp focus.

Make no mistake, this is no Michael Moore polemic. There is no gotcha journalism, no camera crews bursting into anyone's office, no cheap shots, no gags, no cherry-picked points. There are no protesters, no pundits, no armchair generals, no crocodile tears, no rallies, no marches, no mention at all, as a matter of fact, of US domestic politics.

Nor is it a call to action, a la An Inconvenient Truth. It offers no simple formula for success, prescribes no remedies for what is now almost certainly an irremediable mess.

Instead, Ferguson allows the actual implementers of the Iraq policy tell the story of how post-war mismanagement ruined one nation and is about to ruin another, to the benefit of our enemies. It will stand as epitaph to this administration, and likely the next: a grim warning to future generations that war is not a toy and best be planned by people of reason and understanding, not just belief and resolve.

The theme is one of wishful thinking (or no thinking), general incompetence, cronyism, "my way or the highway"-ism and denial. It's not just that there was no postwar planning; what postwar planning there was was systematically marginalized, ignored or downright sabotaged.

At the most fundamental level, the people responsible for making decisions in Iraq steadfastly, proudly, without remorse or reconsideration refuse to accept reality. They believe that they create reality by willing it into place.

Why de-Ba'athification? The movie never states it, but the answer seems clear even from the cheap seats: if you believe that party loyalty is the beginning and the end of competence, naturally you're going to rid yourself of other political parties.

Why put 24 year-old recent college graduates in charge of urban planning for a decimated city of six million? Why, because they believe in freedom, and that's all that matters! They'll just will the water to clean itself.

Again and again and again we see the shroud of belief pulled over the rotting corpses of knowledge and ability. Faith may replenish the soul, that remains to be seen, but it is certainly no substitute for actual understanding. And we are still operating in Iraq on faith, if there is any other word for believing that 20,000 extra troops can will us up a new reality to play with.

It is impossible to understate the impact of this late-found clarity. It is impossible to come away from this film without feeling deep sympathy for the Iraqi people, whom we've thrown under the wheels of history time and again. It is impossible to come away from this film without feeling outrage on behalf of the soldiers who are so callously used to prop up the criminal negligence of our national leadership. It is impossible to come away from this film with any idea that there is a quick solution to the overwhelmingly disastrous situation we've created atop the world's richest oil field.

And it is impossible to come away from this film without seeing that we have a lot of work left to do. Iraq will not just be a problem for the next president, but for at least the next five presidents.

Four stars. Secretary Jason sez, he's listening to the generals.