Search - No End in Sight on DVD

Demonstrates The Utter Incompetence Of The Bush Administrati

Chris Luallen | Nashville, Tennessee | 09/06/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The most striking aspect of this documentary is that the people giving interviews are not your typical anti-war activists. To the contrary, they are people like Colonel Paul Hughes, a strategic planner for the Coalition Provisional Authority, and Barbara Bodine, ambassador in charge of Baghdad. They were the ones "on the ground" attempting to create a successful democracy in Iraq. But their efforts were stymied by arrogant and clueless higher ranking Bush officials such as Donald Rumsfield, Paul Wolfowitz and Paul Bremer.

The stories they tell of the Bush adminstration's extreme incompetence are mind boggling. For instance, how Bush officials chose to completely disband the Iraqi military. This left huge numbers of Iraqi men, with military experience and access to weapons, out on the street and with a strong desire to seek revenge against those who had taken away their jobs and livelihood. This problem was further compounded by the huge stashes of Iraqi military weapons that Bush officials foolishy left unguarded. Thus the Iraqi insurgents were able to achieve a level of weaponry and man power that to this day fuels the ongoing civil war. Part of the problem is that the military experts, like Colin Powell, were being ignored. While "chickenhawks" with no substantial military experience, such as Rumsfield, Wolfowitz and Cheney, were making all the decisions.

A strong argument can be made that the Iraq War was always doomed to turn into a Sunni versus Sh'ia civil war quagmire. But this movie isn't really aimed at those who opposed the war from the beginning. Instead it seems more directed at moderates and conservatives who initially supported the war but are beginning to question the results, especially those military families who have lost loved ones in what appears to be a hopeless cause.

It's hard for me to imagine that anyone - conservative or liberal, Democrat or Republican - could come away from this film and not feel angry and disillusioned at how the Bush administration has conducted the war. Highly recommended!"

How do you define "quagmire"?

Nathan Andersen | Florida | 10/05/2007

(4 out of 5 stars)

"While, as another reviewer has suggested, this latest documentary on Iraq does nothing to push forward the medium of documentary in its aesthetics or its style, it doesn't need to in order to achieve its aims: to present a clear picture of how the situation in Iraq went from difficult to nearly impossible in the few years following President Bush's declaration of victory. What makes the film refreshing is that it makes its case in a non-partisan way, since what we really need as a country is to come together and face our mistakes rather than point fingers of blame at each other for our failure to begin the difficult process of recovery from these mistakes. The film, while very critical of decisions made by the current administration, is not making a case against Republicans per se or against the military, and does not even take a stand on whether we should have gone into Iraq in the first place except to mention what is now obvious to most Americans, that the repeated rationale given for going into Iraq that Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with al Qaeda was bogus.

What the film does present, in a clear and convincing manner, is a brief account of the devastating history of the war and occupation that emphasizes moments where administrative decisions were made in a top-down fashion that went directly against the advice of military and intelligence and other leadership on the ground in Iraq. The film shows that these decisions progressively turned an initially complex situation with at least a number of Iraqis who were supportive of the U.S. ouster of Saddam into a nearly impossible quagmire - the failure to protect infrastructure and property and cultural legacies against looting, the inability and unwillingness to protect citizens against violence, the removal from office without immediate replacements of civil servants who had previously worked under Saddam resulting in the loss of essential services, most crucially the total disbanding of the army and police resulting in massive unemployment of trained military personnel who had access to weapons that were not being adequately protected. It is no wonder that many of these became initially disgruntled and ultimately joined opposition forces. Numerous interviews with high ranking officials whose pleas for reason and common sense were ignored repeatedly by leadership in and appointed by the Bush administration make clear that even if the war in Iraq shouldn't have happened in the first place, it definitely didn't need to turn out as bad as it has.

The scariest part of the documentary is the way it depicts the administration's refusal to accept and report the obvious facts about an increasingly dangerous situation on the ground. In a telling scene, Donald Rumsfeld suggests to a group of reporters that reports of difficulties (such as looting and insurgency) are wildly exaggerated by the media, and that he even had to look up a few words in the dictionary to understand what the media was claiming, words like "insurgency," and, some one in the audience asked "quagmire"? No, Rumsfeld insisted, "I don't do quagmires." The evidence presented by the film strongly suggests otherwise. Rumsfeld and friends do quagmires quite effectively. By depicting the quagmire as clearly as it does, the film "No End in Sight" at least offers hope of an end to wildly inaccurate depictions and predictions of the current mess from which we and future generations will have to extricate ourselves."