Stuff Happens

Like a dictator's statue in a grandiose plaza, the Iraq War can be seen and hated from various angles. Some filmmakers have loathed it through the eyes of US soldiers (in Gunner Palace and Occupation: Dreamland), others from the viewpoint of Iraqi civilians (My Country, My Country and Iraq in Fragments). These documentarians observe the war from ground level. Charles Ferguson, who wrote, produced and directed the invaluable No End in Sight, hates the war from a novel perspective. He looks at it from the top, or as close to it as he can get.

At telling moments in No End in Sight, an inserted title will dryly explain that Ferguson failed to secure an interview with this or that subject: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Paul Bremer. But here are some of the people who did talk to him: Gen. Jay Garner, who ostensibly ran Iraq for a few weeks in 2003 as director of the short-lived Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA); Ambassador Barbara Bodine, in charge of Baghdad for ORHA; Col. Paul Hughes, director of strategic policy for the occupation (2003); Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell; and Robert Hutchings, chairman of the National Intelligence Council (2003-05).

Ferguson relies on other sorts of witnesses as well (journalists, academics, soldiers, Iraqi officials) and a dense compilation of archival footage that ranges in effect from absurdity (Rumsfeld's news conferences) to horror. But it's the well-credentialed informants who establish the character of No End in Sight, by means of their privileged knowledge of the war and their shared experience of having been overruled by the Cheney-Rumsfeld inner circle. These are the people who weren't listened to. By adopting their perspective, Ferguson unquestionably gives a slanted, partial view of the war--but one that is indispensable and peculiarly damning.

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