over the last three years there have been a ton of documentaries about the iraq war. they've almost become their own genre, and as this war drags on i don't expect them to stop coming. but the more i see, the less impact they have. they've all started to blend together in my head.
a handful really do stand out as different from all the rest: the control room, iraq in fragments and now no end in sight (imdb), the film we saw last night.
"no end in sight" is about the mishandling of the war in iraq. it documents those missteps in a very clear narrative structure, using interviews of insiders who tried and failed to salvage the iraq misadventure. if you've followed the iraq war closely, there's little in the film that you won't already know. the power of "no end in sight" is how it takes the stuff you probably already knew and puts them all together.
it's a horrific account, showing errors compounded on errors. the frustrating thing is that all of the mistakes were clearly preventable but-for the refusal of the people in charge to listen. and the compounded mistakes resulted in needless death and human misery. it's a devastating critique of the bush administration's handing of the war. it will be hard to get it out of your head after you see it.
i think that the biggest mistake of all was going to iraq in the first place. even if the people in charge were competent, i think we'd still have a mess there today. the film doesn't address that. so, i suppose, it could be viewed as a defense of the incompetence dodge. but the fact remains that iraq was horribly mismanaged, there are even bush loyalists who acknowledge that these days. regardless whether you think the iraq war ever had a chance of succeeding, "no end in sight" makes the case that a host of early key decisions made the situation a whole lot worse.
