Review: `No End' a damning look at Iraq

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Review: `No End' a damning look at Iraq

By CHRISTY LEMIRE, AP Movie Critic
Wed Aug 8, 4:26 PM ET

Whether you've been following the developments in Iraq over the past four-plus years, blow by devastating blow, or you've chosen to shut them out of your mind because they're just too complex or depressing to bear, watching the documentary "No End in Sight" will leave you floored, agape and enraged anew.

Writer-director-produer Charles Ferguson, a political scientist and software entrepreneur making his first film, presents a clear-eyed, sobering analysis of myriad mistakes the United States has made in Iraq, starting from the original invasion in March 2003.

Ferguson doesn't really get into the philosophical reasons behind the war and he doesn't tell you anything that hasn't already been reported. But the cumulative, comprehensive body of interviews and images is just completely damning — exhaustive and exhausting, painful to watch but necessary.

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And as nearly everyone in the film attests, it was Bremer's fateful decisions that led to the most severe damage. Bremer, an ambassador and friend of President Bush's who had no experience in the Middle East, had never seen combat, spoke no Arabic and knew nothing about postwar reconstruction, promptly broke up Saddam Hussein's Baath party, leaving tens of thousands of government workers jobless. Then he disbanded the Iraqi military, sending hundreds of thousands of angry, armed men into the streets and, eventually, into the insurgency.

What's so astonishing about watching all these bits of history is not merely that they happened, but that they were only the beginning. Seeing Rumsfeld at a news conference, dismissing the proliferation of civilian violence with a flippant, "Stuff happens," as if the sky were falling, may have made for vaguely amusing theater back then, but now it's just incredibly sad.

Rumsfeld wouldn't be interviewed for this movie — neither would Wolfowitz, Bremer, Vice President Dick Cheney or Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. But maybe in time they'll watch it while flipping channels late at night. They might learn something.

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