My husband and I went to see "No End in Sight," the Charles Ferguson film about what went wrong with the Iraq war. I'm assuming most of you are already familiar with this work. But if you're not, the film takes the viewer through the sequence of key Administration decision-making about the management of Iraq following the end of major combat operations. If you have kept up with your basic Iraq reading, e.g., Woodward: State of Denial, Ricks: Fiasco, Packard: The Assassins' Gate, etc., there won't be much new information. But the visual impact of the film is quite over-powering.
The footage of the violence in Iraq juxtaposed against the words out of the mouths of Rumsfeld, Cheney, etc. is really something.
I was a teenager during the end of the Vietnam war. I still remember the image of the helicopter taking off from the roof of the U.S. Embassy with desperate Vietnamese hanging onto the runners, the plane that crashed on take-off with hundreds of babies evacuated from Vietnamese orphanages and then, of course, the horrifying slaughter in Cambodia.
"No End in Sight" doesn't pack quite the punch of those 34 year-old memories. Nevertheless, the film is quite intense and effective. They end with the central question: How could we have gotten this so wrong? There is absolutely no answer.
My only surprise was how few people were in the audience. Americans really need to see this film. The continued success the Bush Admin. is having manipulating public perception of events on the ground is very disheartening. Yet in a New England urban/college community there were only about 30 viewers.