No End in Sight review by Jackass Tom
No End in Sight opens in Baghdad 2006 (current day). Rallies are being held condemning those no support American forces. Hatred for our beloved U.S. is growing everyday as Iraqi bodies pile up. A strong infrastructure is no where to be seen and strong leadership is only found in the form of militant extremists who are ready to wage guerilla war on anything doesn’t agree with them. In particular, the Shiites and Sunnis don’t like each other at all and willing to start a civil war to settle things. Without so much as asking, the movie poses the question, “From the time was saw a banner stating “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED”, how did it get to this point?”
In Jan 20th 2003 – Bush signed over Donald Rumsfeld to handle post war Iraq. Rumsfeld had a naïve vision of what Iraq would be like after the war. He used information that was perceived as a skeptical source of information by the press, but the policy runners in the Bush Administration went with them anyway. Future of Iraq project (a document that laid out “what to do” after the war was won), was ignored by the pentagon before the war. Volumes were written on what should be done with Post-war Iraq but all of it was ignored. In WWII, the U.S. had plans for how to occupy Germany 2 years in advance. The Bush administration put together an underfunded group with no power or direction 50 days before occupation.
The message that came from Rumsfeld on down was We are not here to run Iraq, we are here to remove the administration. We are not here to stop looting. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz ignores advice to adequately staff the occupation. When things get bad the appoint Paul Bremer to fix Iraq. He decides to dismantle the Ba’th party and the Iraqi military which mad things in Iraq even worse. Now the insurgents have a great military presense. The effort put into finding a powerless Saddam Husein created an even greater bitter resentment towards U.S. troops when just about every former serving soldier was held up in his own house and arrested in order to get information.
No End in Sight pulls in the viewer from the get go with a long cast of men who were making decisions, carrying out decisions, or having their input discarded by the people running the occupation. All the interviews are well run; questions are pushed on the interviewees relentlessly. Interviews are strategically juxtaposed over each other in order to show disorder, lack of communication, stories that don’t overlap or credit each other, etc. The editing of the interviews creates a timeline and an almost endless laundry list of things that went wrong.
This movie isn’t uplifting or positive in anyway. It’s downright scary. Articles on CNN.com about car bombings now seem as routine as a socialite being arrested. Living in the states can detach you from what is going on in the Middle East, but this movie sums up what happened without the Michael Moore tongue-in-cheek jokes and sensationalism. After seeing No End in Sight I was immediately a little bit sick about what our country has done and a little bit scared about what the potential consequences could be. It isn’t as if we are blind to the atrocities that go on their every day but I think until you actually see it happen in front you, it’s easy to brush it aside and say “that’s how it is there.” Unfortunately it didn’t have to be “the way it is there.”
No End in Sight probably isn’t an eye opener as much as it is a painful helping of how and why the U.S. screwed up another country. Its hard to recommend this movie for pure entertainment, but it is a strong message that deserves to be heard. Rest assured it is filled with not just people who witnessed what went on in Iraq but also the people who were privy to the decision making back home. See it in the theatres if you have a chance.
8 out of 10 Jackasses blog comments powered by Disqus
