My wife and went out to the movies last night. No End in Sight (web site) (trailer) is a powerful, scary film, and a surprisingly good way to spend an evening. The director, Charlie Ferguson, does not seem to approach his subject from either a liberal or conservative perspective. He’s not out to prove a point. Rather, he investigates the current state affairs in Iraq — which appears to be a disaster for hundreds of thousands of our troops and vets, and millions of Iraqis — to find out what went wrong and why.
As Ferguson interviews high-ranking army officials, regular grunts, Iraqis, and top Pentagon authorities, I found my jaw dropping again and again. It’s outrageous that Bush and a few of his top guys could shut out the good advice, research, and opinions of so many experts in order to run Iraq their own way, but as Ferguson piles up the evidence, the truth is irrefutable. Worth the $15 bucks a person for a ticket and some popcorn. At the Kendall.
This is no Michael Moore screed where evidence is hand picked and heavily weighted towards one side. Ferguson was a liberal hawk who, like many other members of the Brookings Institute and many of our own Senators felt, wrongly in my view, that it was the responsibility of the American nation in the Wilsonian tradition to spread democracy even if by the sword. What Ferguson then shows is how essentially from the very start the neo-conservatives felt that their ideas developed in think tanks and universities (sadly my own among others) could translate into effective action on the ground. And as history has shown this was not the case.