Beyond the Multiplex

The director of the chilling "No End in Sight" explains how the Iraq occupation went horribly wrong. Plus: The American who made the world notice Darfur.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Sudan, Beyond the Multiplex, Iraq War, Darfur, Salon Conversations

July 26, 2007 |

If everybody in this polarized country could be convinced to sit down tonight and watch the documentaries "No End in Sight" and "The Devil Came on Horseback," we might pull our troops out of Iraq next week and send them to Darfur the week after that.

But then, like every other idea relating to the collective dream-state known as American politics, that is no doubt wishful thinking. I watched those two films through my own distorted lens, and you'll see them through yours. What unites them is a passionate commitment to craft that signals, in turn, a belief in something so old-fashioned it seems Platonic: the idea of film as a medium for transcending subjectivity and opinion and grasping for truth.

Neither of these films is predicated on political ideology; I couldn't tell you whether the people who made them were Republicans or Democrats, and it doesn't much matter. Taken together they serve as an indictment of U.S. foreign policy that's more damning than the collected works of Noam Chomsky. In "No End in Sight," Charles Ferguson's magisterial history of the American occupation of Iraq over the past four years, it appears that all the crucial policy decisions affecting Iraq's future, the entire Middle East and by extension the world were made by a tiny, closeted group of ideologues with no expertise in the country, the region, Arab culture, military affairs or much of anything else.

We were too busy fucking up Iraq to save the people of Darfur, apparently. As Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern's horrifying "The Devil Came on Horseback" makes clear, the State Department under Colin Powell investigated reports that government-sponsored Arab militias were carrying out a campaign of genocide against black Africans in that Sudanese province, decided they were true -- and did absolutely nothing. Being the world's sole superpower comes with responsibilities, and evidently that means spreading outrageous lies about the wars we start, while sweeping under the carpet the ones we refuse to stop. How can any American still wonder why our country is perceived as a force of immorality, chaos and disorder?

These two movies, especially considered together, make for a dire and depressing spectacle, but they're worth interrupting your regular summer programming for. For those that have already seen them, and the many more who will, they'll be among the year's most memorable events. Regular readers, I've received your passionate responses to my questions about why you don't go out to the movies more often, and we'll get back to that, I promise. I don't have time or space this week to discuss the enjoyable French costume drama "Molière," so let's give it a shout right here. It's a shameless Francophone entry in the "Shakespeare in Love" genre, played with wit, style, opulence and foppish cynicism by a terrific cast. You may need a bit of its meringue-coated literary history before the week is out.

"No End in Sight": Murphy's Law as geopolitics; or, the questions we'd ask Wolfowitz's shrink
From the first frames of Charles Ferguson's "No End in Sight," replaying some of the oddest and twitchiest podium performances of Donald Rumsfeld during those heady days of spring 2003, you may feel the crushing weight of an almost Sophoclean impending doom. That was when that famous statue of Saddam came crashing down, when at least a few Iraqis really did greet American troops with kisses and flowers, when studly George W. Bush flew onto that aircraft carrier, with the world seemingly on its knees before his codpiece, to declare "Mission Accomplished."

Even at that point, says Ferguson, the war was already a gruesome failure. American troops arrived in Baghdad with insufficient numbers, no communications technology, very few translators, and almost no understanding of what they were supposed to do when the "major conflict" stopped. You may have blocked all this from your memory, but it will come flooding back: Looting spread through the city, devastating the national museum of antiquities, the national archives and almost every other public building. By the time American administrators made any serious effort to get the place up and running, Iraq's infrastructure had been destroyed, its army and most of its government bureaucracy were officially unemployed, and all the weapons, machinery and anything else of value were gone.

Ferguson is a political scientist and one-time technology pioneer (he sold his former company, Vermeer Technologies, to Microsoft in 1996, for $133 million) whose approach to the Iraq occupation is resolutely analytical and nonideological. He was not an opponent of the war, at least going into it. That may reduce his credibility in some quarters, but his foreign-policy credentials helped gain him access to a remarkable number of diplomatic, military and intelligence insiders, including several who provided background information but declined to appear on camera.

Ferguson's high-level interviewees include former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage; Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Colin Powell at the State Department; Gen. Jay Garner, the first coalition administrator of occupied Iraq; Col. Paul Hughes, who directed strategic policy for the U.S. occupation during its early stages; Barbara Bodine, who was ambassador in charge of Baghdad under the occupation; and Robert Hutchings, former chairman of the National Intelligence Council. That's not to mention numerous affiliated experts and sources, from Time reporter Chris Allbritton to Atlantic Monthly editor James Fallows, former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst Marc Garlasco, Harvard scholars Linda Bilmes and Samantha Power, and several American officers and soldiers who served on the ground.

Next page: Dick Armitage grades the war