Over the years, 3 of my "cranky" movie reviews have been responsible for more traffic on my blog than anything else I've written. My review of the Wilberforce biopic generated 47 comments and the one of "Little Miss Sunshine" generated 43. Plus, tons of visits.
I have stirred things up again with my blast at Charles Ferguson's "No End in Sight," which generates about 50 visits a day--largely I am sure out of my controversial summary on rottentomatoes.com: "A documentary that rues the fact that the US was not able to impose its will on the Iraqi people, but never questions the right to do so." I was pleased to discover that somebody else has the same take on the flick. In today's Counterpunch, there's an article titled "Screwing Up in Iraq," in which Saul Landau and Farrah Hassen write: A new documentary reflects that efficient management school of empire. In his documentary "No End in Sight," Charles Ferguson argues the "if only it had been managed correctly" line. In a form that has come to typify modern documentaries -- power point presentations on video -- Ferguson assembles a convincing array of participants in the Iraq war and occupation to make a case that Bush and company grossly mismanaged the war and post-war reconstruction effort. "There were 500 ways to do it [the reconstruction] wrong and two or three ways to do it right," said Ambassador (Yemen 1997-2001) Barbara Bodine, who worked in Baghdad at the onset of the U.S. occupation. "What we didn't understand is that we were going to go through all 500." Following the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, U.S. forces discovered a paucity of Arabic-speaking personnel, inadequate phone service and no plan for winning Iraqi hearts and minds -- outside Baghdad's fortified Green Zone. Ferguson's talking critical heads range from former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage (2001-2005), Colin Powell's Chief of Staff Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (2002-2005) and former National Intelligence Council Chairman Robert Hutchings (2003-2005) to Iraq's Deputy Ambassador to the UN Faisal al-Istrabadi and Lieutenant Seth Moulton (U.S. Marines). Most complain about Bush's mistakes: the military did nothing to stop looting after the initial conquest of Iraq; Bush dismantled Iraq's Ba'ath Party and the government bureaucracy it ran; Bush ordered the dissolution of the 400,000 man army and didn't immediately establish a viable interim Iraqi government. Had these errors not occurred, the film's commentators imply, Washington might have dethroned the dirty dictator and brought democracy to Iraq. They blame Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and their gang of neo-con intellectuals-cum-policy makers led by Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith. These ignorant policy wonks dispatched J. Paul Bremer with a "privatization uber alles" mission. Bremer pretended to consult with knowledgeable people on the ground, but according to General Jay Garner, Colonel Paul Hughes and other initial supporters of Bush's invasion (Ferguson claims Ambassador Bodine opposed Bush's war), he paid no attention. His agenda mocked Iraqi reality. The film doesn't address why Bush went to war, how he misled and lied to the public; nor do the film's critics confront the evolution of Bush's stated reasons for going to war. They also don't deal with his perpetually moving goalposts: dismantling the threatening WMD and destroying Iraq's links to Al Qaeda, to toppling -- and later executing -- Hussein and bringing democracy, to making the U.S. secure, to not being able to tolerate the consequences of withdrawal. The well-filmed talking heads share screen time with clips of Bush and Rumsfeld assuring decisive victory and success in Baghdad. But the filmmaker doesn't ask the on-camera experts why they would have conceived that a rich, spoiled brat -- remember how The Great Gatsby's Jay and Daisy Buchanan "smashed up things and creatures and let other people clean up the mess" -- would miraculously change character as "a war time President" and become a model of American efficiency. As if anyone runs wars efficiently! Ferguson's failure to confront this issue makes the film's underlying premise problematic.
