Review of No End in Sight (2007) by Jonathan K — 06 Aug 2008

This is the only documentary, to this day, that I sought out and purchased shortly after seeing it. It's a truly sobering, infuriating, and even heart breaking chronicle on the current situation in the Middle East, and while it did help me feel proud to be an American, it did, with razor sharp precession, prove that this country's mistaken actions are the sole reason for all of this.

I'm not a Republican but I'm not distinctly Democrat either. This isn't a moving film because of any political reasons. Really this is the war equivalent to a documentay on how not to run a business, only it's also about current events that are still leeching more and more life from this country, and to this day are getting thousands upon thousands of people killed for ultimately no reason. This isn't an Anti-Bush movie; in fact he gets away from this almost scott free (it's mentioned that he was supposedly not even breifed on much of the planning). It is, however, a direct attack on those in charge of this unsuccessful world operation, and it truly blows my mind to learn how it all came together, and later fell apart.

The fact that Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfawitz and Cheney all 'refused' to be interviewed says quite a bit. Who we do hear from are literally a few dozen people who truly tried to make a difference, and were truly stunned when everything they tried were ignored or marginalized by the ones above them. We have everyone from Iraq-stationed Journalists, to Soldiers who spent years in post-war Iraq, to top Military and Intelligence Directors and Advisors who tried, for years, in vain to try to make a difference. They recall every time they were told, essentially, to shut the hell up and just do what they were told. Some of these people wrote hundreds of pages of important documentation that was ignored and then ridiculed by the US Government, and spent months establishing ways to rebuild the country and were instead told to completely disband such ideas. This isn't a group you can ignore. These are people all directly involved, all with some amazingly impressive backgrounds - they all deserve our full attention.

The most interesting, I felt, were Jay Garner and Paul Hughes, the two men largely in charge of reconstruction, reporting only to Rumsfeld himself. They go over many elaborate and extremely well thought out plans that were cancelled on the spot because it didn't match guesswork in the White House. The biggest and hardest moment is when Paul Hughes talks about how he actually got almost all of the Iraqi military leaders to agree to put the country back together. All they were waiting for was him to say: "Go ahead." He was then denied permission to say so, and without even being breifed, all of the troops that he was going to use as allies, were exiled from the new Democracy, causing what we know now as The Insurgency.

I could go on and on, but really it comes down to this - If you love America, or want to understand how bad the situation in Iraq really is and how it became so, you truly need to see this movie. It's clear minded and relitavely anger free - it takes the standpoint of the person who crosses his arms and calmly tells you words that make your blood boil. Truly amazing.