Mick LaSalle reviews 'No End in Sight,' an Iraq war documentary

SFGate

"No End in Sight" is the most coolheaded of the Iraq war documentaries, the most methodical and the least polemical. Yet it's the one that will leave audiences the most shattered, angry and astounded.

Directed by Charles Ferguson, making his feature debut, the film relies mainly on interviews with people who were either inside the Bush administration or on the ground in Iraq in those crucial early months following the fall of Baghdad. Most of those interviewed are either career diplomats or career military officers, not anti-administration types by any stretch. Some, like Richard Armitage, were in the White House inner circle. Yet they describe an administration of such colossal ineptitude and baseless arrogance as to boggle the mind.

Ferguson doesn't impose an interpretation on the material. Some will come away from the film convinced that invading Iraq was a monumental mistake, while some will think that it might have worked. Some will come away confirmed in the opinion that the United States needs to pull out as soon as possible, while others will find confirmation for the belief that leaving now would be the worst possible course.

Yet "No End in Sight" is likely to unite everyone in the common opinion that the invasion and occupation were mismanaged on an epic scale. It's not just that "mistakes were made," to use the tired passive-voice cliche of feigned contrition, but rather that only mistakes were made. In instance after instance, the administration ignored genuine experts in favor of people with flashy, erroneous notions. They ignored the advice of people on the ground in favor of functionaries in Washington with neither military experience nor familiarity with the Islamic world.

Some of the material covered in the film is familiar. Despite the counsel of Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, who said that hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to occupy Iraq, Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld went in with only 160,000 troops, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz insisted that the occupation would require fewer troops than that. Following the fall of Baghdad, the first sign of something amiss in the administration's planning was the large-scale looting that engulfed the country.

Diplomatic service people talk about how their efforts to restore civil administration in Iraq were compromised by the looting. There were no computers, no desks, no chairs, no telephones. Despite this, people from the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance - such as Gen. Jay Garner and Col. Paul Hughes, who figure prominently here - believed they could make a go of it, until their plans were undermined with the appointment of Paul Bremer as virtual Iraq czar in May 2003........