No End In Sight

"No End in Sight" is a superb documentary about the Iraq War. I recommend it for a walk down memory lane. The film was made near the end of the Bush Administration, just before the Surge was adopted. It is the story of how inept the post-war planning was and how a handful of people with no military or reconstruction experience dictated the policy. Some old favorites appear. General Garner, who was supposed to have been in charge of reconstruction,is interviewed about when and how he learned that Paul Bremer was taking over. The first on-the-ground footage is of the looting which began soon after we invaded and which we steadfastly refused to stop. In fact, it is clear from the interviews on the ground that our military was ordered by Washington not to interfere with the looting. The only site protected by our troops was the oil ministry as the Museum and the Library with centuries of antique Islamic works were looted and destroyed.

The film walks us through some of the most amazing decisions. As the American team hits the ground to try and begin reconstruction,the Pentagon approves the plan at De-Baathification, which ends up with the Iraqi technocrats and school teachers being fired simply because they had joined the party for a job. Then Paul Bremer single-handedly dissolved the Iraqi army. This is a stunning part of the film. Thousands of Iraqi military were volunteering to assist in restoring order and filling in profiles for their re-instatement. Generals, who were seen as reliable, were organizing their men. These people knew where all the arms caches of the demobilized army were. And they were willing to turn all of it over as long as their men received their paychecks. The Iraqi military met with United Nations' officials to try and get them to mediate with the United States about re-integrating the military so they could guard the frontiers. All of this was in motion and would have changed the direction of the future war. Instead,the army was officially dissolved by decree and the unemployed military joined with militias to start the insurrection.

The United States started to plan for the transition in Germany two years before we won World War II. For Iraq, the United States started six months ahead of the invasion and the multi-volume transition plan developed by the State Department was just thrown in the trashcan. The original estimate by Paul Wolfowitz for the cost of the war was $58 billion and time on the ground for US troops was estimated at 3 months. The film interviews intelligence officers and high-ranking military officers about their total disbelief when they heard this come out of the Pentagon. Even when the insurgency started to gain strength, Rumsfeld was still referring to the militants as "dead-enders" even though the National Intelligence Directorate prepared a massive report detailing the multi-levels of the armed action. To get Dubya to focus on this, they boiled the whole report down to 1 page. The interview with the intelligence officer is priceless,"The President didn't even read it."

This film is a wonderful antidote to the chapter on Iraq in "Decision Points". Even in his memoirs, President Bush admits that dissolving the Iraqi army might have been a bad decision, even though he hails Paul Bremer. In the film,Iraqis express their amazement that Bremer was chosen as the leader of the CPA because the United States had promised an Iraqi government chosen early in the game to stabilize the situation. The expressions on the faces of General Garner, Richard Armitage and others in discussing some of Bremer's decisions show pure surprise and astonishment. Col. Wilkerson shows up again discussing the reaction of General Powell to the whole show as it unravelled. Armitage basically says that the State Department wasn't informed about the dissolving of the Iraqi army until it was done. Garner says he would have loved to debate the point even if he had to lose the bureaucratic debate.

Veteran aid workers for international NGOs express amazement about seeing old students of theirs showing up in Baghdad, saying "how lucky they were given jobs like re-organizing the city's traffic patterns" even though they had no experience. Military officers talk about young Republican sons of big donors being given positions in Iraq as an adventure. Yet, several veteran State Department employees with years of experience in the Middle East and a fluency in Arabic are blackballed by the Pentagon or simply fired from Iraq because they didn't play the game. It was estimated that of the top 75 Americans in the Green Zone only 6 spoke any form of Arabic. All the United Nations personnel were fluent in the language and went out and met with Iraqis in their own homes.

One Marine said he had wanted the Iraqis to know the best of America but "this was not the best". Another Foreign Service Officer said that,"We used to say there were 450 ways to screw Iraq up and only three ways to get it right. Now we went through all 450 ways first."

The film shows endless lines of Iraqis waiting outside the Green Zone to volunteer to help the Americans either as technocrats or as translators but they were told after waiting several days to go home. The film shows how the Iraqis grew embittered about the Americans and after the total collapse of their economy started to align themselves with militants like Sadr and other Islamists.

Of the first $18 billion in aid, only $1 billion was spent and there is some question about where the rest went. Because American troop strength was below necessary requirements, the United States hired 45,000 defense contractors, which were lawless. There is a short film clip taken by a defense contractor as he and his colleagues drove down the highways randomly machine-gunning Iraqis driving in their cars. You get to see the swerving of the cars with wounded or dead drivers as they crashed into other traffic. This was the prelude to the hanging of the bodies of the three defense contractors from the bridge.

Well, at least our solders got all the equipment they needed. Not so. Part of the film traces the days when casualties started to mount up and that officers were demanding armored Humvees and finally confront Rumsfeld in the field about this need. Rumsfeld says that they can't be produced fast enough. One astute soldiers wonders how this could be when auto factories are closing down around America and certainly they could produce them. Nothing is done in the beginning about the IEDs, allowing for thousands of brutal casualties.

Another section of the film deals with the massive detentions by the Americans of any fighting age Iraqis and the effects of this on families' ability to exist economically. The United Nations tried to intervene on this policy of detention but were rebuffed. Even to this day, the United States has not released the number of Iraqis detained by the coalition forces.

What makes this an effective film is that it is not made by anti-war activists. It was made by people who started out wanting America to succeed even if the basic premise of the war was seriously flawed. Watching one blunder after another you are struck by how awesomely incompetent the Bush Administration was and how many thousands of lives were lost and maimed because of them. The film concludes with a breakdown of the war's financial cost--nearly $2 trillion when you factor in the lifetime medical costs to the wounded veterans.

Hopefully, Iraq will limp to a better political system and can recover from the war with a more pluralistic society. As for the Americans, we made Iran the major power in the Gulf region.