Beyond the Multiplex

You have obviously tried to avoid making a directly political film. It's certainly not an antiwar film in any general sense. I understand that, going back to March 2003 or whenever, you were not necessarily opposed to the war.

That is correct. I was very favorably inclined, in a general way, to the idea of using military force to remove Saddam. Partly for reasons of regional stability -- geopolitical, WMD-related reasons -- and partly for humanitarian reasons. Now, reasonable people can disagree about whether it was wise or just or necessary or important to use force to remove Saddam, but there's a perfectly reasonable case that it should have been done at some point. Which is of course quite different from saying that I was in favor of what the Bush administration actually did. The film is, I guess, about the disjuncture between those two things.

[Pause.] Well, it's actually not about the first thing. I consciously made a film that wasn't about the question of whether it was right or wrong to use military force to remove Saddam. I tried to make a film about what actually happened.

This story reminds me of Greek tragedy in a way. A certain number of things have to go wrong in a certain order before we end up with Oedipus killing his father and sleeping with his mother, in fulfillment of a dire prophecy. This is a story about everything going wrong all the time. I guess it's more like Murphy's Law in action on a grand, fatalistic scale.

I certainly agree with that last statement. I think they made so many horrendous mistakes that they kind of overdetermined the result. Any three of those mistakes might have doomed the occupation. The fact that they made 500, you know, or 1,000 -- certainly by early 2004 it was already over, actually.

Right, that's certainly the case you make. I think for many Americans, the episode in Fallujah early in 2004, when those four contractors were killed, dragged through the streets, and hung from the bridge, was a turning point. But you think it was already too late by then.

It probably was. Even after the first half-dozen fundamental errors -- not enough troops, allowing the looting, [coalition administrator L. Paul] Bremer's three early decisions, the early handling of the political decision, the mishandling of the U.N., not guarding the weapons -- even at that point, in July or August of 2003, if they had realized then, "Oh God, we've really blown it," you can conceive of how they could have recouped the situation. But after six months of having a half-million Iraqi military men on the streets with no income, it was too late.

My translator when I was in Baghdad had been an emergency-room doctor. He worked through the war. When the Americans invaded, he was making seven dollars a day. The country was in ruins. There was 40 to 50 percent unemployment, and then you take the entire army and throw it into the streets, give each soldier a $50 severance payment, and let that stew for six months. What do you expect?

Let's talk about Bremer. It's too bad that you couldn't get him on camera. He plays a very important role in the whole fiasco.

We tried hard. Really hard.

You spend a lot of time developing the consequences of the three decisions that Bremer made just as he was arriving there in May 2003, a few weeks after the occupation began. Run through those for us.

He made these decisions essentially simultaneously. One was to institute a formal American occupation and to delay for what turned out to be a long period -- over a year -- sovereignty for the Iraqi nation. The second was his de-Baathification order, which purged the Iraqi government of most of its senior administrators and technocrats, including many who were not affiliated with Saddam. By most accounts, that crippled the economy and administration of the country. The third, and by far the most important, was disbanding the entire Iraqi military and intelligence services.

Right. So that we wound up with however many thousands of men on the street.

The lowest estimate is 450,000. Somewhere between 450,000 and 650,000.

Out of work, financially destitute and psychologically...

Infuriated.

You make the case in the film that a large percentage of the Iraqi military was prepared to come back to work and do what armies are supposed to do after they surrender -- take orders from the new boss in town, and do their jobs.

Yep. The exact fraction of the army that could have been used in that way and how quickly they could have been called can be debated. But there's no question that at least half the army, and possibly the overwhelming majority, could have been recalled and used pretty quickly. In fact, 137,000 soldiers had already signed registration statements, giving a lot of information to the American occupiers and stating their willingness to return to duty.

That shocked me. I mean, you're the expert. But just to take that number, if you've got 137,000 Iraqi troops in somewhat good shape, who speak the language and know the country, and they're prepared to follow orders from American commanders on the ground, and you assign them to police the streets and secure public buildings and restore some semblance of public order -- well, it strikes me that you've got a vastly different situation, almost right away.

Sure, of course. A completely different situation.

Maybe this was not what you intended, but this film seems like a strong defense of the foreign-policy and intelligence communities, and to a significant extent the military leadership. You argue that most of those professionals made correct or at least reasonable predictions and prognostications, and that what happened wasn't their fault. Is that fair?

Hmm. I think it's largely fair. I don't think any of them was perfect. The intelligence community did get roughly correct its assessment that Iraq was a troubled place and that occupying it would be difficult, there would be tensions and so on. But they got the WMD thing wrong. They got it wrong under intense political pressure from the White House, no question. But they still got it wrong. They also didn't know much about Iraq, and knew virtually none of the things you needed to know to run an effective occupation. You would want to know the names, addresses and telephone numbers of the top, say, 2,000 administrators in the country so you could make the place run. Well, they didn't. When the occupiers got to Baghdad, they didn't have telephones and they didn't have interpreters. They had no idea how to get in touch with anyone. No idea.

The military understood that more troops were required, but did they make that case forcefully to the president? No. Something very different would have happened if all four of the joint chiefs had stood up in public or gone to the president. I don't think they could have stopped the war, but could they have gotten another 50,000 troops? Yes, I think so.

All these groups had significant flaws that contributed to the problems, but it's nonetheless correct that on balance what happened in Iraq is a vindication of the general proposition that you should pay attention to the professional opinion of people who spend their lives looking at a certain class of questions. If you totally ignore them, you do so at your peril.

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