On DVD: No End in Sight
No End In Sight is about the squandering of a nation. It is about power and what happens when four men work outside of the spheres of power. It is about what it takes for a nation to rise up and strike against the military. It is about good people desperately trying to do the right thing, and being stymied or, worse, ignored at every turn. It is about the descent in to civil war called Iraq.
The film, while clearly born of outrage against the workings of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bremer and Bush, tries to be level-headed and focus on the people who were there at the start of the Iraq war and tries to examine, using their testimony as evidence, just what went terribly, terribly wrong and how we got to the state of the "surge" phase in early 2007. Nearly all of those interviewed from the U.S. government are Republican. It's a damning portrait of arrogance, naivety, and ineptitude, but the film states that the biggest tragedy is the destruction of the world of the Iraqi people, at their own hands, forced in to that situation by an ineptly planned invasion.
Much has been said about one of the film's major arguments: that the disbanding of the Iraqi army, putting half a million armed men out on the street with no way of making a living, ultimately powered the Iraqi insurgency, and there's great truth (and evidence) in that. Bereft of a way to feed their families (and, often, their extended families) these men went to work for those who would pay them: Sadr and the other radical militia leaders, Iranian insurgent leaders, and other Islamic insurgent groups, including al-Qaeda.
What was most illuminating for me, however, was where I think the insurgency and the squandering of Iraq truly began: the looting of Iraq shortly after the arrival of the American troops. While the American military was told to not interfere, the Iraqi people looted their capital, destroying the infrastructure, making it impossible for the few Americans brought over to rebuild the country from having anything at all to work with. It wasn't just TVs and clothing and paintings that were looted. It was rebar, power generator equipment, an entire national infrastructure. As one Iraqi said on camera "Our national heritage is gone. 7,000 years of history is gone." Imagine — and I know it's tough, but imagine — that looters broke in to the our nation's historical and artistic archives and destroyed the only copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the military stood outside the doors of the buildings and watched it all happen without interference. On those days, the Iraqi people saw that a) there weren't enough American soldiers to stop the looting, to maintain law and order and that b) the American plan did not include their protection or best interests in any way. In a handful of days the American presence in Iraq went from liberators to occupying oppressors, and the lawlessness of looting gave birth to the armed militias and the beginnings of the Sunni vs. Shiite civil war.
No End in Sight is an excellent and clear and demanding documentary. I think that in twenty or thirty years when people want to know how terribly wrong things went in Iraq and, more importantly now, why they went wrong, this film will be their first and best resource.
