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How could so many smart people in the Bush Administration have made such a screw-up of Iraq? Watch them explain themselves in the highly acclaimed documentary “No End in Sight” … then discuss the controversies with some of the area’s top foreign policy experts.

When: Wednesday September 5, 7:20 PM showing of “No End in Sight”;
Where: Landmark’s Keystone Art Cinema for the movie; then retire to the Indie Lounge for lubrication and argument
Tickets to the movie are $8.50, $6.50 seniors

Questions? Contact john@sipr.org

This is the first of several movies and discussions Provocate is organizing this fall. A powerful film, then discussion with amateurs and experts about what it means … and what we can do about it.

Here’s the New Yorker’s review of the documentary “No end in sight”:

“War Wounds,” by David Denby New Yorker August 6 2007

There isn’t much that’s factually new in “No End in Sight,” Charles Ferguson’s extraordinary documentary about the American occupation of Iraq—at least, not for people who have kept up with the best reporting on the war and have read such books as “Fiasco,” by Thomas E. Ricks, and “The Assassins’ Gate,” by the New Yorker writer George Packer, who appears in the film. Yet we need to hear the story again and again, for no amount of rage and disbelief can turn what the Bush Administration did into someone else’s problem. The occupation is our problem, a dead eagle hanging around our necks. Though the facts in “No End in Sight” are well known, the movie is still a classic.

Modest and attentive and quietly outraged, this collection of interviews, news footage, and narrated history gathers weight and strength and delivers, in chronological order, an overwhelming pattern of folly: In the run-up to the invasion of March, 2003, and then in the early months of the occupation, all the people who actually knew anything about Iraq and the Middle East—anyone who had serious experience in military, intelligence, or reconstruction work—were either ignored or dismissed by the Department of Defense, with White House backing. They were then replaced by ignorant and inexperienced ideologues who refused to hear what the knowledgeable told them. Ferguson establishes the disastrous thinking around such turning points as the decision not to stop the looting that followed the invasion; the de-Baathification of the professional classes of Iraq; and the disbanding of the Iraqi Army, which sent some half a million armed men into the streets. “No End in Sight” is an exposure of the psychopathology of power.

Ferguson earned a Ph.D. in political science from M.I.T., but went into Web design, only to sell his company to Microsoft, in 1996. He is one of the new plutocrats (Andrew Jarecki, of “Capturing the Friedmans,” is another) who unaccountably refused to buy a vineyard in the Napa Valley and instead turned to filmmaking. He paid for the movie himself—it cost two million dollars—and hired some of the best talent he could find: the cinematographer Antonio Rossi, the composer Peter Nashel, and the documentary producer Alex Gibney, who advised him to hold down the rhetoric and build up the interview subjects so that they become real characters. No better counsel has ever been given to a first-time director and writer. Despite the often gruesome subject, this is an exceptionally elegant-looking film, and it provides what can only be called sensuous rewards. It’s necessary for us to see, and feel, how utterly torn up Baghdad and Falluja and other sites in Iraq are. And it’s moving to see the faces and hear the voices of the losers in the policy wars, including former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who makes it clear, in his terse and guarded way, that he and his boss, Colin Powell, got exactly nowhere whenever they offered sane advice; General Jay Garner, the first American proconsul in Iraq, who was replaced by the fatuous L. Paul Bremer, and wishes that he had been able to fight harder against Bremer’s decisions to disband the Iraqi military; and, most painfully, Colonel Paul Hughes, who was in touch with Iraqi officers commanding troops ready to maintain order in Baghdad, only to be shut down, from Washington, by Walter Slocombe, the senior adviser for national security and defense for the Coalition Provisional Authority. The madness continues: Slocombe, for example, still refuses, in an interview, to admit that the disbanding of the Army had anything to do with the insurgency. The bitterest revelation of “No End in Sight” is that the people who got it right are in agony, whereas the people who got it wrong are practically serene. ♦

For more information and reviews, go to the film’s website: www.noendinsightmovie.com.

If this sounds like fun, check out … Some of the other films with Provocate Night at the Movies: Suicide bombers in “Paradise Now” September 13; and the Bollywood epic “Mission Kashmir” October 11. To learn more about Iraq, hear the once embedded journalist Gordon Trowbridge September 19. And catch Lee Hamilton September 26 or September 27. If you want to channel your outrage productively, attend the “Citizens Foreign Policy Summit” on September 22.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 at 5:24 pm and is filed under Events, Democracy, Foreign policy, Iraq, Islam & Muslims, Spies & Intel, Terrorism, Film, War & peace, Empire. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.