No End in Sight

NO END IN SIGHT

This documentary is the most thorough, clear-minded analysis of failed U.S. policy put to film yet. It rightfully lays the causes for Iraq's degeneration into anarchy and guerilla war at the feet of those charged with running our country. None of the revelations in this film are hysterical; indeed, the sense of measured frustration from all interviewees is intensified by narrator Campbell Scott's soft delivery of a litany of outrageous missteps. A range of insightful insiders, analysts, soldiers, civilians, and journalists come together under Charles Ferguson's direction in a devastating portrait of expert advice brushed aside because it's not in keeping with official policies based on mindsets so far from reality as to be laughable -- if the consequences weren't so deadly to the Iraqi people and American soldiers and so debilitating to the international standing of the U.S. One misstep of note in the film is Paul Bremer's woeful installation in Iraq as Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Bremer, at the behest of Cheney and Rumsfeld, issued several sweeping proclamations (such as de-Ba'athification of the government and the dissolution of the Iraqi Army) that undercut and ignored the careful planning and essential knowledge and analyses of those who, despite being understaffed and ill-equipped, had been setting the stage to integrate the Iraqi people themselves, civilian or soldier, into the reclamation of the country before its accelerating devolution into insurgency and lawlessness could take hold. The contrapuntal voices of informed journalists and authors; the matter-of-fact personal experiences of outraged innocent Iraqis; and the angry, sometimes broken words of members of the military on the ground deepen the view of a willfully mishandled situation that has deteriorated into a morass where resentment and vengeance breed.

Before and after the film, everyone's invited to indulge in our Humanist Tea House

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