http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/27/AR2007072700139.html?hpid=topnews'No End in Sight,' A Direct Hit on Iraq War Makers
By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 27, 2007; Page C04
The script of Charles Ferguson's "No End in Sight" would certainly be in the hands of prosecutors in the event of impeachment hearings. The documentary is a furious, if quietly stated, indictment of the president and all his men in re the debacle that our adventure in Iraq has turned into. Ferguson builds a compelling case of bad judgment, error, stubbornness, arrogance, all of it adding up to a mess with no end in sight.
It's also, most impressively, an evocation of that horror. Astutely edited by Chad Beck and Cindy Lee, it assembles a depressing cascade of imagery from the war: the tanks pulling through the dusty, ancient towns; the young Americans scooting through the ruins in their Terminator shades; optics-festooned plastic rifles, looking for targets as the children and women flee; the detonation of a roadside bomb with its surreal combination of speed and energy; and, of course, the talking heads, who talk, then talk some more, then talk still more, that is, if they'll talk at all. (Wolfowitz, Bremer and Rumsfeld wouldn't; all are represented in archival footage.)
What we're left with, thankfully, is no psych-ward collection of nut-case radicals so unhinged by Bush's temerity that they dilate their nostrils and spray saliva and throb in their veins and arteries like creatures from another planet. No word of impeachment is broached, no partisan politics are referred to, and the usual subjects or frequent critics are nowhere in sight.
Instead, Ferguson, a Brookings scholar and software entrepreneur, has rounded up some unusual suspects. Mostly mid-level bureaucrats who served in the occupation and watched in horror as the chaos doubled and redoubled and nearly everyone became infected with nihilism and dread, they form an effective set of witnesses because they don't seem instinctively anti-Bush. Their attitude isn't the unearned moral superiority of people who never risked anything, but more a kind of melancholy of what is but what didn't have to be. To be sure, some of the complaints are common to all bureaucracies, military-diplomatic or plastic manufacturing or newspaper publishing: My supervisors didn't pay any attention to me; they made policy based on unrealistic wishful thinking; they wouldn't admit mistakes; they blundered ahead, going from bad to worse. Of this group, the diplomat Barbara Bodine and an early on-the-ground executive, retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, seem by far the most impressive and the least partisan. They are also, in some ways, the saddest. One of them -- I name no names -- seems a little self-dramatizing.
http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/316/index.htmlNOW
No End in Sight
Did America's mistakes create the Iraqi insurgency?
Nearly four years after President Bush declared an end to combat in Iraq, the country is still fraught with daily casualties, costly commitments, and an ongoing debate on how to end the violence. How did it come to this?
This week, NOW's David Brancaccio speaks with two very different, but unforgettable men who allege that U.S. bungling in Iraq created and fueled the deadly insurgency. Paul Hughes, a retired Army colonel, was part of the transition team after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He says key decisions were made that ignored the realities of Iraq. Omar Fekeiki was a Washington Post reporter and translator who risked his life to help U.S. journalists.
Both Hughes and Fekeiki are featured in a new Sundance prize-winning documentary, "No End in Sight," which exposes what it calls "a chain of critical errors, denial, and incompetence that has galvanized a violent quagmire." Fekeiki's identity was hidden in the documentary for his protection, but he chose to appear unmasked on NOW for the first time.
http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/316.htmlTranscript - April 20, 2007
BRANCACCIO: Welcome to NOW.
If you are like me, you have already consumed an enormous amount of news from Iraq; but once in a while something comes along that connects dots and makes you really understand. That was the prevailing reaction of those who got to see a documentary about Iraq that won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival. The doc doesn't focus on the decision to go to war in Iraq. Instead, it dissects policy decisions by senior Bush administration officials who bet the future of Iraq and, it can be argued, bet the future of America's foreign relations on a flawed assumption: the expectation that it would be a relative cakewalk for the us once Saddam Hussein was toppled from power.
Mistakes were made, as the saying goes, and they are discussed in shocking detail in the documentary film, "No End in Sight." It's a cavalcade of hard-working and smart diplomats, on- the-ground military leaders and Iraqis who feel frustrated by the lack of resources and dismayed by orders they were being handed from Washington.
Among that group was Paul Hughes, a U.S. army colonel who was the head of policy in Baghdad under Jay Garner during America's first occupation team. Hughes stayed on when Paul Bremer took over and formed the coalition provisional authority. Back then, Hughes was aghast to hear a Bush official predict that in just a few months 80 percent of the us troops in Iraq would be able to go home.
HUGHES: I heard him say that in a room full of people and I turned to my colleague and said "this guy doesn't know what he's talking about... it's physically impossible."
BRANCACCIO: As part of the PBS strand of coverage this week called "America at a Crossroads" I sat down to talk with Colonel Hughes.
BRANCACCIO: Colonel Hughes, welcome.
HUGHES: Good to be here.
BRANCACCIO: We see you in the film expressing this profound skepticism that the US would be able to get its troops in and out of Iraq so quickly after the invasion. That's very easy to see now, but were you worried about being undermanned after the invasion?
HUGHES: We had done studies of our involvement in the Balkans, and we recognized that we needed many more soldiers on the ground—in the post-conflict phase—than what was being allocated to us.
The people who managed the Department of Defense didn't place much stock in military advice. And hence, things that were stated by senior officials—military officials with 35-plus years of active duty in the defense of this country, when they say, "We're gonna need a lot more soldiers than you're anticipating—" they dismissed it, because he's the old guy. He doesn't get it.
BRANCACCIO: For instance, the national security directive that puts the—management of post-invasion Iraq into the hands of the Defense Department, as opposed to say, the State Department.
HUGHES: National Security Directive 24, which established the post-war planning office within the Secretary of Defense's office. Completely took the Department of State out of the picture.
BRANCACCIO: And it's fair to say the Department of State had done some research into the challenges of—of—a post-war Iraq.
HUGHES: Yes, they had. Absolutely, for the previous year and a half to two years, they'd been conducting a project called "The Future of Iraq Studies."
And so, when I was assigned to the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, or what we called ORHA, under Jay Garner in the Pentagon—I tried to bring in people from the Department of State.
We did get the—the director of that study tasked over to us. He remained for four days, and then Secretary Rumsfeld told Jay that he had to fire him, send him back-
BRANCACCIO: But, also, nobody, America, certainly not Iraq wanted to have happen what happened soon after the invasion, which was, because of a—apparently a power vacuum, the destructive looting that sweeps the country. You also had not enough—US troops—available to—for instance, safeguard ammunition dumps.
HUGHES: People were getting in all over the place, stealing things, because we didn't have enough soldiers there for it.
BRANCACCIO: This affects this whole thing with improvised exploded devices that—would crop up later.
HUGHES: Absolutely. Absolutely. The IEDs began with—artillery shells that were being wired together—singularly—being detonated. And they have now progressed, as you would expect an opponent in war to do.
BRANCACCIO: So, soon after this—watershed moment for Iraq, when Saddam was toppled, the military is defeated, is this other unplanned watershed moment, the looting and the destruction, and the film makes the argument that this is—this is seed of doubt that starts to creep into the Iraqi psyche. The idea that, "Why aren't the Americans protecting us?"
RUMSFELD: The images you are seeing on TV you are seeing over and over and over. And it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase
BODINE: I think that was probably the day we lost the Iraqis
RUMSFELD: And you think, my goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?
BRANCACCIO: And then, as things evolve in Baghdad, a series of key decisions that it is argued in the film, have radically altered prospects for Iraq in their wake. Number one, big decision, stop the early formation of an Iraqi government. Was that—did you worry about that decision?
HUGHES: Absolutely, because, at that particular point in time, we had raised the bar of expectation for the Iraqi people. They were thinking, "Hey, we're gonna be able to participate in a government." This is something they had never been able to do. They didn't know exactly how to do it, but they were anticipating a new day. And then, suddenly, it stops. And—they're questioning the Americans, like, "Don't you really know what you're doing here?"
BRANCACCIO: Big decision number two, get rid of—the members of the Ba'th party from positions of responsibility in the Iraqi bureaucracy. Makes some sense, gotta get rid of the Nazis after World War II from the German government.
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