No End in Sight
Rated: NR
Runtime: 1 hour, 42 minutes
Directed by: Charles Ferguson
Horror movies tend not to have much effect on me. Throw as much gore as you want at me and I may be shocked, but not sickened. Jump out as much as you want and I'll be scared for about five seconds before just being tense. But a film like No End in Sight terrifies and sickens me to my core. I was raised to trust and to love America and I don't think those teachings were wrong. We're not perfect; no country is (well, maybe the Netherlands) but we're not The Great Satan either. But I see a film like this and I feel so ashamed that I want to throw up. It's not my fault but I still feel guilty. And I'm terrified that a few people, people who weren't even as much evil as they were completely incompetent, were given so much power and used that power to destroy an innocent country. Saddam Hussein was no innocent, but the Iraqi people weren't Saddam Hussein. They weren't even Al-Qaeda.
I knew all about the failings of post-war Iraq. I'd read George Packer's (one of the film's talking heads) excellent book The Assassin's Gate about the lead-up to the war (going much further back than No End in Sight and into the formation of neo-conservative philosophy and how that shaped the architects of the Iraq War) all the way through 2005 so I knew the score. But No End in Sight tries to condense the major events of Packer's book and other books about the Iraq War and does so with almost absolute clarity and to have it all hit you in such a concise and direct fashion is almost too much to bear. If you want to learn how things went so wrong from 2003 to 2007, you can find out in 1 hour and 42 minutes. But it is just an overview. To go down any rabbit-hole, the cost of our soldier's lives, limbs, and sanity or the corporate grift, or the expansion of terrorism, or the constant stream of lies fed to the American people, and the film goes off the rails. But writer/director/producer Charles Fergueson trusts his audience to figure out the repercussions of these actions. If we know that it takes five months for two soldiers using Iraqi contractors to build a border fort for only $200,000 while it takes over a year and $1.2 million dollars for U.S. contractor Parsons to have the same kind of fort unfinished, then we know that this is only a glimpse of the corruption and the black hole of where American tax-dollars go.
The film's only drawback is it can only find one wrong-doer to speak on camera. I would love to see The Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol or anyone from a conservative think tank try to defend these actions. Just watching former Senior Advisor for the Coalition Provisional Authority Walter Slocombe try to defend the indefensible and lie his way clean of any culpability only adds weight to the film's argument about how everything all went so wrong. It would also provide a key insight to the neo-conservative mindset that took those lessons about loving America to such a delusional extreme that they honestly believed that the mere presence of the United States would be enough to compensate for hardly any post-war planning.
And the most terrifying aspect of it all is that no apology for the actions of a few can ever make up for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives lost. And they won't differentiate you and me from Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. And they won't give a shit about our "noble" intentions. We're all Americans and we're all to blame for their pain and suffering. And we sit and we wait for the group of men out of thousands who decide to take innocent American lives to make up for the smallest fraction of the innocent Iraqi lives lost in this meaningless war.
That's what keeps me up at night.
Words by
Matt Goldberg
1.21.08