No End in Sight

Yesterday, Charles Ferguson's first feature, No End in Sight, opened in New York and D.C.

Winner of a special jury prize at Sundance, it's a sober look at Bush's criminally negligent occupation of Iraq.

Like Michael Moore's Sicko, it might actually sway a few bad-policy apologists.

Moore avoids knee-jerk claims of "partisanship" by emphasizing the problems of the insured class. Ferguson accomplishes the same by side-stepping the question of whether the war was justified. His focus is on the deadly fiasco that the Bushies inflicted upon the Iraqi people — and on our troops and others stuck in the post-invasion quagmire.

While Moore's films use humor and heart-on-sleeve emotion, Ferguson's approach is more slow-burn. Built around interviews with occupation-management figures and footage that captures the arguably preventable descent into civil war, No End makes a case that's far more Col. Paul Hughes, who details the tragic amateur hour at the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) and its successor, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).

The lack of planning is appalling, and the decision-making is worse. The notion that chickenhawk Republicans are the serious grownups of American politics is pretty well blown away by this film.

An interesting secondary theme permeates the clips that show Rumsfeld, et al. rationalizing away as Baghdad burns. No matter what, they can never accept that people in an invaded, broken, and occupied country have hearts and minds that do anything but love the U.S. In their narratives, no action is ever done by disgruntled citizens. To hear them tell it, every bit of violence is by foreign fighters or existing terrorist organizations — anything other than by people thrown into a maelstrom of desperation by the neo-cons' improvisational imperialism.

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