"No End in Sight"

Inspired by Andrew Sullivan’s review, I went to see the documentary “No End in Sight” this evening. As Andrew writes…

… it is worth seeing again what Baghdad was the morning after it was liberated: still a viable city, still a place where sane, non-sectarian Iraqis with education and decency could see, if only dimly, a way forward. You see and hear also from the many good people who did their best in this effort across the government and, of course, in the military; and the many Iraqis who were eager at first to join hands and build a new country. Even then, it would have been very, very hard. We’ll never know for sure if it was going to be impossible. But we do know that, with this president and vice-president and defense secretary Rumsfeld, what chance we had was consciously, arrogantly, recklessly, criminally thrown away. The toll in human life, in American honor, in American power, in financial waste, and in the war on terror will be up to historians to measure. But it is immense.


As Andrew says, we’ll never know what might have been; nevertheless, it is very clear that a few key decisions, taken by a few reckless ideologues, ((One of the most critical decisions was Paul Bremer’s disbanding of the Iraqi army. Earlier this month, Bremer published an op-ed piece in the NYT in which he defended the decision. Now Charles Ferguson, producer of “No End in Sight”, has posted a devastating video rebuttal of Bremer’s piece, with specific testimony from many of the principals. It’s clear that Bremer and Slocombe are lying, probably to deflect criticism from Bush and Cheney that they were asleep at the switch.)) during a few months in 2003, virtually guaranteed the disastrous results with which we must now contend. Criminal incompetence doesn’t begin to describe it.
After leaving the cinema, I couldn’t shake the feeling that for many of the Bushies, this whole thing was some kind of ghastly videogame: exciting, but unreal, and ultimately trivial. Rumsfeld’s giggling over his silly jokes. The brand-new graduate from Georgetown, dropped into the Green Zone to take charge(!) of the planning for Baghdad traffic (and whisked away again after a few weeks.) The CPA spokesperson who couldn’t speak Arabic!!! Is this the best that America could do?