Beyond the Multiplex

These people represent a wide range of opinions and analyses, and many of Ferguson's insiders remain team players and (in many cases) loyal Republicans. All of them seem motivated by a combination of disgust and amazement at how badly things have gone since the fall of Baghdad and by a genuine desire to help make sense of it all. Only one interviewee, a former Defense Department advisor named Walter Slocombe, even attempts to pretend that the occupation hasn't been a disaster, with nothing but bad news ahead. Slocombe belonged to the small group of Pentagon insiders who made almost all the major decisions about Iraq and was the only one willing to appear on camera. (Shockingly, Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Dick Cheney all resisted Ferguson's overtures.)

You don't have to sympathize with these people as individuals, or with their hard-headed, realpolitik, we're-the-grownups approach to policy, to be profoundly shocked by the story of arrogance, piss-poor planning and all-around incompetence that unfolds in "No End in Sight." It's one thing for those of us who opposed the whole damn thing from the get-go to waggle our fingers and say we told them so. It's quite another to see people who presumably thought the general idea was OK (as Ferguson did), and who were entrusted with various details of the project, speak wistfully about their massive failure, whose ripple effects will go on screwing up the world far into the lives of our children and grandchildren.

Ferguson met me in his large and empty New York apartment, in a West Village luxury high-rise overlooking the Hudson River. (He spends much of his time at another house in Berkeley, Calif., where he lectures at the UC-Berkeley journalism school.) His living room is at least as large as my entire apartment, and it contains a grand piano he does not know how to play. He speaks quietly, thoughtfully and precisely, but almost never laughs or displays emotion. Despite the ruthless rationality of his policy dissection in "No End in Sight," he says the ultimate explanation for the botched occupation of Iraq may lie in that murkiest of realms, individual human psychology.

You're a newcomer to making films. What made you think you wanted to make one, and make this one in particular?

I've been obsessed with movies since I was a little kid. I love movies of all kinds, trash as well as high culture. I wanted to make films for a long time, and I came to a point in my life, about three years ago, when I no longer had an excuse not to do it. I had time and I had financial security. I had finished a book I was working on ["The Broadband Problem: Anatomy of a Market Failure and a Policy Dilemma," published in 2004]. I started thinking about making a movie, and then our president gave us the Iraq war. It just seemed obvious and important.

I thought of it fairly early on, and friends of mine dissuaded me, saying that it was a difficult first film to make and that many people would be making it. After a year of waiting, nobody was making it.

Well, that's true. There have been numerous other films about the Iraq war, but they've been very granular and subjective. More about what happened to individuals on the ground, whether they were American soldiers or Iraqi civilians. Nobody's tried to take this global, policy-oriented perspective.

Exactly.

I assume your foreign-policy expertise literally made this film possible. I mean, if I called up Larry Wilkerson or Dick Armitage and said I wanted to interview them about the Iraq war and their role in planning and executing it, they might tell me to go jump in the lake.

I don't know what they would say to others, but they didn't say that to me. Larry Wilkerson has spoken out a fair bit; he's been quoted in the press. But I believe that we have the only lengthy interview that Richard Armitage has done about the Iraq war, which is a bit of a surprise. But it's true.

Yeah, he's very cagey and very loyal. He never directly criticizes his former boss [Powell] or the president. But at the same time, he does seem to want to express grave reservations about what happened. People will kind of have to see it, but to me he looks like he's radiating disapproval when he talks about the White House and the political decision making that went down.

I think we used four minutes of him in the film, but the interview was an hour and a half long. We're going to put that up on the Web site at some point. There are places where he's very cagey and doesn't quite say what he thinks, and there are other places where he's remarkably candid. When I asked him to assign a grade to the war, the planning and all the foreign-policy making that went into it, he said, well, you have to distinguish between the military campaign itself and the subsequent occupation. He said he would give the military campaign an A and the occupation a C-minus. For somebody who was the deputy secretary of state during the relevant period, that's a striking statement.

Sure. He's about as much of a trusted Republican policy insider as you can find in the world. He worked for Reagan and both Bushes. If I'm not mistaken, he worked for George W. Bush's election campaign.

Absolutely. Yes.

Did you meet other insiders, people at or near his level, who weren't willing to go on the record?

Yes, quite a number of them. Particularly career military officers who are still serving. But also people in the State Department and elsewhere. One person in the intelligence community, quite senior, who was working for a high-level policy person during the planning of the war and the occupation period and then went back to their intelligence job. We had quite a long conversation, just as this person was heading back to Iraq for a yearlong period, and what they had to say was quite disturbing. I also spoke to a high-level military officer who was working for high-level civilians during the occupation.

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