Beyond the Multiplex

Late in the film you ask Gen. Jay Garner, who was briefly Bremer's predecessor in running occupied Iraq, why all these mistakes were made. He says he doesn't know, that he finds it puzzling. Just to take Bremer's three key decisions, how do you explain them? Anybody who knew anything about Iraq thought they were bad ideas. So where were they coming from?

This really is the core of the whole thing. Those three decisions, and a lot of others, were made by a very small group of people in a very short period of time. They were made by some combination of Bremer, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Feith and Walter Slocombe. Dick Cheney was indirectly involved, but he was not part of the meetings and discussions at which these decisions were made. These decisions were made at a series of meetings in the Pentagon between May 1 and May 9 [of 2003], and it was at one of those meetings on May 9 that Bremer decided to dissolve the army, on Slocombe's recommendation.

This group of people had never been to Iraq. [Actually, Rumsfeld was there in 1983, at the time of his infamous handshake with Saddam Hussein.] None of them spoke Arabic. None of them had serious experience in the Mideast. Only one of them had served in the military at all, and that was Rumsfeld, who was a Navy pilot in the 1950s. They had no postwar reconstruction experience. In a perfect vacuum of information, these guys made these extraordinary, sweeping decisions. Many of the most important decisions were made this way, by less than six people. Arguably less than four. That small group of people, allowed to behave this way by President Bush, basically felt that they knew enough that they did not have to consult with anyone else. When they did talk to other people and were told, "This is a crazy thing," they simply disregarded everything they heard.

One thing that keeps coming up in the film is the lack of Arabic speakers among the Americans who went to Iraq. This just seems like a critical failing and an incredibly dumb mistake to make. I know it's not an easy language for English speakers, but there are Americans who speak it and they can be found.

There are 600,000 Americans who speak Arabic. Not to mention the possibility of hiring people from many other nations. Yes, it's astonishing. Part of the problem, although it's well below the top 10 mistakes on the list, was an overreliance on wealthy, cultivated Iraqi exiles who spoke English.

Ahmad Chalabi, for instance.

For example. Others as well. That gave them a very slanted, limited view of what Iraq was like and Iraqis were like. If you were an Iraqi who hadn't gone to Harvard, didn't have a Ph.D., weren't politically extremely conservative, didn't speak fluent English, and hadn't lived in the United States for 10 years, you were out of the loop. You didn't get to talk to these guys.

You haven't used the word "neoconservative" in describing that small group of men who made the decisions, and I imagine you've got a good reason for that. But clearly those guys are united by a shared ideology and view of the world. Didn't that play a defining role in how they understood the conflict and its aftermath, and every decision they made?

To some extent it clearly did. At the same time, much of what was done was contrary to their own interests, as they themselves would have defined those interests. If you think that it's important to remove Saddam by force and install a democratic regime in Iraq in order to remake the Middle East, then you don't do 10 of the things they did. Like not have anybody who spoke Arabic, and so forth. Many things. So I think that ideology's not a sufficient explanation. I think this has to have something to do with the individual psychologies of the very small number of people who were in control of this.

So if Paul Wolfowitz has a shrink, maybe he can help us figure this out.

Maybe. Certainly with regard to Bremer, and probably also Cheney and Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, you need to ask psychological questions. You also need to ask, how can it be that three, four, five people can impose their psychological predispositions on an entire nation without other places in the system controlling them, disciplining them, limiting them? Yet somehow that happened.

In the film, you bring events up to pretty much the beginning of 2007, with that horrible number of what you think the war has cost so far.

$1.8 trillion.

OK, $1.8 trillion. I have no way of understanding a sum that large. Beyond spending a lot more money, what has happened in the last six or seven months, if anything, to change the picture?

Well, it now seems increasingly likely that domestic political pressure will force at least a drawdown or partial withdrawal by the United States. It's impossible to say exactly what will happen as a result of that. I speak to many different people about this, and their opinions range widely. The center of gravity of their opinions is that the situation will be bad no matter what we do. If we stay it's bad; if we leave it's bad. If we reduce our presence but don't totally leave, it's also bad.

They differ about how bad. The best scenario is pretty much Northern Ireland, a low-grade civil war that lasts 20 or 30 years.

That would be a lot better than what we've got now, wouldn't it?

Well, it's more or less what we've got now. It's more violent than Northern Ireland ever was, but it's kind of in that zone. It's not Congo, it's not Rwanda, it's not Somalia. Many people think that those models are real possibilities.

Well, that's encouraging. Do you have any feeling about what the right thing to do is?

No, I don't. Honestly. I've asked this question of many well-informed people, who are much better attuned to what's going on in Iraq than I am. Some people think we have to effect a partition of the country, as gracefully as possible. Other people think that's very dangerous and can't be done. Baghdad is too integrated and heterogeneous, there's too much intermarriage, it's important to preserve an Iraqi nation-state. Should we withdraw or stay? Should we be forceful toward the Iranians, or conciliatory? How do we handle the Turks? How do we handle the Kurds? How do we deal with oil revenues? It's very complicated, and people say very different things. I don't think anybody knows. In private, people will say, well, let's try something. If it looks like it's working, we'll go with it. If it doesn't work, we'll have to be prepared to change course rapidly.

George Packer, I believe, recently wrote that in his judgment this is now the worst foreign-policy blunder in American history. Is that overstated?

It could well prove to be true. The Vietnam War killed 3 million people, but its geopolitical ramifications were relatively limited. This war has so far killed a quarter of a million, but it could easily kill a million or more. And its geopolitical ramifications could be enormous and long-lasting. It could trigger enduring civil wars and conflict in the Mideast, a nuclear arms race. It could be very bad.

"No End in Sight" opens July 27 at Film Forum in New York and the E Street Cinema in Washington; Aug. 3 in Los Angeles; Aug. 10 in Chicago, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Portland, Ore., San Francisco and Seattle; Aug. 17 in Detroit and St. Louis; Aug. 24 in Boston; Aug. 31 in Indianapolis and Austin, Texas; and Sept. 7 in Durango, Colo., with more cities to follow.

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