Culture » July 24, 2007

Iraq: Mismanagement or Mass Murder?

No End in Sight explores how we got into Iraq and what screw-ups have made the situation spiral out of control

By Michael Atkinson

A scene of the Iraq war from No End in Sight, directed by Charles Ferguson.

Take a step back and scan the media horizon for what it is, and something surprising arises from the vast, swampy trashland of corporate baloney and thought-control—the protest documentary. As in, hundreds of them, in theaters, on DVD and on TV. On-the-shoulder non-fiction films about the Bush administration and the Iraq war have proliferated like dandelions on a landfill. (You could count the feature docs about the Vietnam War made during the conflict itself on two hands.) We are witness to the most concentrated explosion of anti-war, anti-elite cultural action ever created.

But so what? The tsunami of movies has made little difference in the end. What the Bush Administration has conscientiously proven in its two terms is that if a cabal of mercenary schemers wants to twist the system to manufacture at least a temporary monarchal society, in which citizens have no input or voice, it can. The movies, coming week after week for years, enabled by digital technology in production as well as distribution, can only raise so much of a rumpus in the country’s tired, under-informed and often infantile forebrain.

Such will surely be the case, at no large fault of its own, for Charles Ferguson’s No End in Sight, which at least has a special Jury Prize from the 2007 Sundance film festival on its resume. A supremely glossy, logical, high-end doc that takes task with the spectrum of the Bush administration’s actions from 9/11 to late 2006, Ferguson’s film is intelligence-report methodical, providing a primer on how we got into Iraq and what screw-ups have made the situation spiral out of control. If you attend to news like we all should (but far too few actually do), this material should be already familiar: the alien-agenda that sought to create a link between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein (and, arriving at none, settled for unsubstantiated declarations and full-speed-ahead war making anyway); the Rumsfeld-Cheney-Wolfowitz prevarications as to the war’s rationales; the ongoing sunny spin on the country’s collapse into anarchy (Rumsfeld’s “Henny Penny, the sky is falling” comment is recycled a few times).

The body of Ferguson’s film is concerned with the catastrophic minutiae of “postwar” reconstruction and security, or lack thereof, and this is where the film steps completely into an inoffensive “centrist” borderland so comfortably occupied at present by most of the mainstream media. Granted, Ferguson’s focus on individual acts and decisions is admirably thorough—Cheney & Co. are never far from being held accountable (unlike Bush, whom Ferguson presumes is a complete stooge), from the ridiculous lack of reconstructive planning and the inadequate employment of troops, to Paul Bremer’s policy decisions that essentially created an angry, jobless and bloodthirsty insurgent army out of the standing Iraqi military, and therein helped turn a beleaguered country on the edge of decimation into a killing field. In fact, Ferguson has little work to do here—the press conferences of Rumsfeld alone could be edited together into the most damning, ludicrous portrait of duplicitous American power ever assembled. But the film depends also on fresh talking-heads interviews, specifically with the likes of ex-ORHA director Jay Garner, Col. Paul Hughes, ex-Ambassador Barbara Bodine, ex-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, and ex-Coalition Provisional Authority senior advisor Walter Slocombe, who provide a minute-by-minute recounting of what went so terribly wrong on the ground.

The defiant moral gravity of Bodine and Hughes, in particular, is hypnotic (whereas Slocombe, defending his and Bremer’s death-dealing mismanagement, cannot stop lying). But already we’re far afield. The question in the American media in 1971 wasn’t, “why did we invade Indochina, and who’s going to be held responsible for the millions of civilian deaths?” but instead, “how did the conflict go wrong, away from our noble ideals, and why shouldn’t we pull out before it gets worse?” Today, we’re hearing the identical refrain: we tried to do good, but now it’s a quagmire, the Bushian chant of “victory” has become hollow nonsense, let’s think about how it went wrong and how we can disentangle ourselves from its grasp. This may be a way we can all live with ourselves, but it’s also an evil perversion of reality.

Indeed, Ferguson is characterized in his press packets as an ex-wonk who “initially supported the invasion”—chilly words, once you doff the Rummy-realpolitik rose-colored shades. The film proceeds as if the war had an opportunity to be a righteous action, and might’ve resulted—by accident?—in a better life for the Iraqi people. But the first bombings of 2003, and the subsequent invasion, killed, conservatively, more than 10,000 Iraqi civilians in just a few months (the actual body count may well be five times as high). The numbers of injuries, disablements, destroyed homes and refugees just in the spring and summer of 2003 alone were enormous, long before Bremer and his team stepped into the fray (though exact figures, due to the supervisory amorality that Ferguson details so attentively, are impossible to find). By any human standard, it was wrong, it was fueled by lies and disregard for innocent life, and is tantamount to mass murder, period.

Copious blood and fire footage notwithstanding, Ferguson’s outrage seems reserved for pencil-pusher hubris and misguided administrative technique. For a gloss over the fundamental homicidal point of state aggression, and a focus instead on “how things are going,” we have Fox News.

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• Reader Comments

  It�s not too difficult to come up with reasons we should not have embarked on this ill fated, windmill-tilting plan. (I use the term �plan� loosely.)

  � Too little hard intelligence
  � Too much international opposition
  � Too few troops
  � Too much unchecked arrogance
  
  Repairing it is far more challenging.
  
  The mass of detail coming out �post combat� shows just how narrow a view the administration planners held. Ten years of professional military planning was trashed. Many senior officers� warnings were ignored. Post combat planning was not so much an after thought as a play-it-by-ear approach. State thought CENTCOM was covering it � until just before the invasion, CENTCOM had been told State was working on it. People with Middle East experience were shunned in favor of those who would just do what told.  Goodbye Garner, hello, Bremer.

  If this was, as many think, a first step in a plan to dominate the oil rich region � it makes Napoleon�s Russian adventure look like pure genius. The motives for going in matter little to those in the thick of it today. It is a given that it is a mess.  But it is our mess.

  Congressional debate has centered on when to leave, but how this is accomplished is more important than when. Just walking away en mass would leave civilians in the midst of a battle between warlords, gangsters, religious fanatics and neighbors who covet the area.  To pull our troops out gradually before Iraqis are capable of establishing and maintaining order would put those still posted there at increasing risk. There has been little rational debate about alternatives.
  
  So far presidential candidates have played mostly to the voters by pushing the extremes � leave by(?), or stay indefinitely. What matters most are those people who cannot leave.

  Equally bleak is the pathetic condition of security in the US � porous borders, dangerous imports (contaminated food, only 1 pct inspected, faulty tires) counterfeit products (prescription drugs to Microsoft Office). Placing cheaper consumer goods ahead of employment, health and safety may be good for CEOs, but it�s tough on posterity.

  �The Gang That Couldn�t Shoot Straight� was comical � But �The Gang That Couldn�t Think Straight� is a tragedy.

  Posted by whattheheck on Jul 25, 2007 at 9:12 AM

  I saw “No End in Sight” last week at a free showing at a local theater that included a discussion after. It was hosted by our local progressive talk radio host who announced the viewing on his show prior. As he described the audience, it was the usual suspects, meaning the anti-war crowd that has been against the Iraq War since before the war started (myself included).

  It was immediately decided that this film was nothing but one part of the government criticizing another for mistakes made. This was not an anti-war film, but an anti-war plan film.

  I was impressed with some of the footage from Iraq, yet I don’t recall hardly one Iraqi even being interviewed. Yes, there were a few, but it shows how much disregard we’ve shown towards the people of the country we attacked. But again, this was a movie about the mistakes made rather than whether the war should have been fought at all.

  The movie covers most of the mistakes in chronological order up until “the surge” which probably was instituted after the completion of the movie. I personally noted that every mistake was actually conventional wisdom when the decision was made.

  Whattheheck....I should remind you that the idea you put forth is now the conventional wisdom we are hearing constantly, that we can’t leave Iraq because “all hell will break loose.” This is the current Washington and media talk. But why should I believe this new conventional wisdom when all the other cases were wrong? This film quite clearly showed how every time those talking heads on TV and our leaders in Washington predicted that this or that would happen or work, they were wrong. With conventional wisdom’s track record of near total failure, again why buy it now?

  The most accurate predictions about Iraq came from the anti-war crowd. We were the ones saying that the WMD thing was a lie. We were the ones that said Iraq was about oil...it is. We knew that Iraq’s oil would not pay for this war. We laughed or some were simply disgusted on Bush’s “mission accomplished.” We knew there was no post-Iraq plan. Some of us had faint hope that elections might actually save the country, but deep inside knew they wouldn’t. We saw the Halliburton’s etc. getting the war profiteering contracts and knew that there would be untold billions just flushed down toilets. And many of us suspected that the Iraq War would probably unleash religious and ethnic violence. All this flew in the face of conventional wisdom.

  It is time to finally listen to the “unconventional wisdom” that is spoken from the Dennis Kuciniches of the left and Ron Pauls of the right. Time to get out now, it’s been long past due.

  Posted by Jon B on Jul 26, 2007 at 1:12 AM

  Jon B,

  I’m not much of a believer in conventional wisdom or polls. Polls are meaningless unless you know the way in which the questions were posed and are the primary source for what we call conventional wisdom.

  I believed we had too few troops before entering because I knew Bush Sr. and Clinton had cut the military in order to attain better looking economic numbers. So did many military leaders.

  Everything is related � we’ve sold out our manufacturing capacity and can’t supply our own miliitary. We’ve avoided any general national sacrifice or even inconvenience in “fighting” the war on terror. We’ve played games with Homeland Security, and allowed greed to override common sense in protecting our food supply and immigration. We talk about energy independence without seriously confronting the problem. We’ve lost trust in our leadership and lost any sense of unity.

  However…

  We have hard evidence what happened after we left Viet Nam. There is ample reason to think people who bomb and maim indiscriminately in a land with a history of tribal, sect or family retribution as the norm will impose a great price on those left behind.

  We�ve seen how Saddam�s thugs handled any opposition and been told in no uncertain terms what the radical Islamists plan for anyone not deemed one of them.

  To say that conventional wisdom was wrong in the past and so it is wrong on this issue reminds me of the Mark Twain comment, �Once a cat jumps on a hot stove he will not do it again. He will not jump on a cold one either.�

  We bought it � we own it. To leave the people at the mercy of these savages would be an even worse legacy. It�s time to admit our errors and ask for international cooperation. Not to do so just continues down the same arrogant path taken by this administration.

  Posted by whattheheck on Jul 26, 2007 at 6:25 AM

  There you go, plenty of distortions.

  The people of Viet Nam were the same or the same thing is going to happen, this is fantasy. The two situations have little comparison. Whatever “hard evidence” you have from that war doesn’t apply to Iraq.

  I didn’t say that conventional wisdom WILL be wrong again. Let me explain again. It has consistently been wrong so far as to Iraq, and this is due to the fact those giving us the conventional wisdom obviously don’t have wisdom. So why believe them again? If someone constantly can’t add two and two, I will expect them to continue to get a wrong answer until the prove they can come up with four. The Twain/cat thing is stupid. I know dogs that are on invisible fences, will get shocks yet will continue to test the fence. But both the cat and dog examples are irrelevant because the Iraq War is about people who incidentally believe themselves to be superior to animals.

  The fact is that armchair quarterbacking means nothing. You can’t prove that having more troops would have made a difference. Since there were any number of military experts with varying advised troop levels and notwithstanding whether we had the troops to even follow the advice. And since you claim that previous presidents cut the military (highly debatable) then apparently you don’t believe we had the military to wage the Iraq War in the first place and you should have opposed the war at the beginning based on that reason.

  Savages? All people are savages. Our country has an entire history of savagery. Native American genocide, slavery, civil war and since WWII no country has started or participated in more wars than the US.

  Finally, we didn’t “buy it.” I didn’t and plenty of others didn’t either. We don’t “own it” either. This is some type of consumerist theory applied to war. We have gone into any number of countries and helped screw them up then left without ownership. What we are really doing is theft. Just because we decide that oil is our national security (The Carter Doctrine) we believe it is our right to make sure we get it from other countries no matter what it takes, that is just plain theft. We decide that we will continue to have our way of living, the suburban oil culture, and that the oil regions then must supply us. Instead of solving this cultural problem, we steal.

  Since FDR we’ve been in bed with the House of Saud, we don’t give a rats buttocks about that regime because of the oil. We loved Saddam as long as he played the oil game with us. We kissed the behind of the Shah of Iran despite how he treated his subjects (secret police) because of the oil. Now (if you are aware of it) we are caressing the leaders of some fairly ruthless regimes in some of the former Soviet republics in the Caspian Sea region, you guessed it, OIL. But we don’t say it’s oil. No, it’s in the name of the War on Terror. Whenever you see that term, rename it War for Oil and look deeply into why we are stuffing our military bases into those countries or surrounding them with bases.

  Incidentally, we’ve ASKED for international support for Iraq, we don’t have it. Our coalition of the willing is down to a few, the coalition of the paid off. The UN at one point WAS in Iraq, we couldn’t protect their building. We will get international help when we divvy up Iraq’s oil production among the major powers like Russia, China, Europe, not until then. The “benchmark” of Iraqi’s sharing oil is conditioned on corporations producing that oil, not on Iraqi’s having a state-run company such as in most Middle East countries, Saudi Arabia, etc.

  Why is that? Because at our rate of oil consumption the Middle East must INCREASE production by 40% by 2020 to satisfy America’s needs. That’s going to take a lot of production investment, more than even the Saud’s can accomplish on their own within their own country. It’s all about the oil, until you get that, you don’t understand Iraq.

  Posted by Jon B on Jul 26, 2007 at 1:59 PM

  WtHeck..."we�ve sold out our manufacturing capacity and can�t supply our own military.”

  This is poppycock. We are BY FAR the biggest producer of arms in the world. No one makes AND sells more than us. No country in the world comes close to the share of GNP to defense spending as we do. And almost all of it is produced in the USA. Are you forgetting the military industrial complex? The MIC which really should be the MICAC (military industrial congressional academic complex) is a huge part of our economics. When you have Congress earmarking the Abrams tank production in all 50 states, we’ve no way “sold out” manufacturing. What we’ve sold out is the taxpayers.

  The US arms industry licked their chops for the Iraq War and Congress and Bush has been quite forthcoming with the funds. What you miss is that Bush and his swindlers promised a quick war, not what was inevitable, a long breaking of equipment. Much of the problem of providing arms for Iraq is really a distribution of funds. Others are just plain poor planning. Body armor or armored Humvees were not planned for in a quick war or one that came to include roadside bombs. We’ve had plenty of bullets, right?

  Our defense budget includes stupid allocations such as Star Wars space based bondoogles. We have bases all over the world essentially doing nothing but vacationing, bases in something like 70, 80 countries, and most have swimming pools.  We still maintain an essentially useless nuclear weapon arsenal (can you realistically expect us to ever use them?) far beyond what we ever would need. In fact, now we are building new ones.

  You need to do your research. No country in the world has ever produced (and continues to do so) the amounts of arms and defense spending the USA has. More than HALF of all arms EXPORTING is from the US, that is a ton of manufacturing capacity that you claim we’ve sold out.

  Posted by Jon B on Jul 26, 2007 at 2:38 PM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

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