I haven't seen Charles Ferguson's new documentary, No End in Sight, and, unlike rightwing naysayers dating back to the Catholic Legion of Decency, I'd never judge a film without seeing it.
But if the trailers I have seen are any clue, and since I take A.O. Scott's review in yesterday's The New York Times as an accurate description, then let's just say that when I do go to see it, I won't be able to stop myself from arriving at the theatre with an attitude.
Because, as tristero over Hullaballoo quite rightly points out:
It is ominous to note the congealing of conventional wisdom around the "great idea, incompetent execution" meme (this review is hardly the only place it has appeared recently).
That seems to be what reviewer Scott has done, but, given who was interviewed, it seems that's what the film-maker has done as well. I'm not saying we shouldn't listen to these men and women. We most definitely should. Some of them, like Colonel Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, have already gifted us with vital information and a buzzword for the crew that took us to war on a boatload of lies: the "cabal." But the story of these insiders can only take us so far.
Some of us on the left have been bellyachin' about the "incompetence" theme for years now. We put up with it as a tool used in the 2006 campaign to help overturn the Republican majority. But, even then, we warned that if candidates and other critics chose to say only that the war/occupation had been and was being handled "incompetently," it would lead a lot of Americans to believe that the biggest issue was that the guys and gals who took us into Iraq were just bad planners and that they had merely made "mistakes."
Indeed, we tried to point out, amid a barrage of shushing, it would help foster the belief that the Iraq Attack was a mere conceptual "mistake" - compounded by operational mistakes - rather than the outcome of a well-plotted, if poorly planned affair that high muckety-mucks and advisers of the Cheney-Bush Administration dreamed about long before the Cheney-Bush Administration even existed.
We who gave that warning have yet to be proved wrong. On the contrary. Obviously, the bloody occupation of Iraq has been handled incompetently, recklessly so. About that, who can doubt? The litany of foolhardiness and utter stupidity need not be recounted yet again. However, letting this true-as-far-as-it-goes critique to slide into place unchallenged as the dominant rationale of "what went wrong" will do as much to damage current and future generations' understanding of the Iraq attack as has the widely believed stab-in-the-back, we-could-have-won-if-only myth regarding Vietnam.
As I said, I don't judge films before I see them. But if, as seems to be the case, "incompetence" and "mistake" are No End in Sight's main themes, the film contributes to a distortion, a pre-emptive strike at history.