No End in Sight

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Intentionally or not, director Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight (Magnolia Pictures, New York) pays subtle homage to historian Barbara Tuchman, evoking about the war in Iraq one of her particularly poignant reflections about World War I. "When every autumn people said it could not last through the winter," she wrote in The Guns of August, "and when every spring there was still no end in sight, only the hope that out of it all some good would accrue to mankind kept men and nations fighting." (1) In the end, Ferguson's film radiates a sense that the main effect of the war in Iraq will be the "disillusion" Tuchman wrote about after World War I. (2) Hope and disillusion, though, are only two of several juxtapositions about Iraq in a cinematographic narrative that is visually compelling, emotionally moving, and intellectually thought provoking, both for what it includes and for what it leaves out. Although clearly skeptical about American presidential motives for the war, No End in Sight does not explicitly affiliate Ferguson with filmmaker Michael Moore and others who claim the American war in Iraq is prima facie unjust. The film accurately depicts the moral and geopolitical ambiguity of the American relationship with Saddam Hussein, tracing his evolution from strange bedfellow vis-a-vis Iran in the 1980s, to third-tier tyrant threatening regional stability in the 1990s, to arch-nemesis of three American presidents (two named Bush) after the 1991 Gulf War. Whether Saddam's actions, both in relation to other countries and to his own people, provided sufficient just cause for the war the U.S. began in March 2003 is a question largely outside the scope of Ferguson's narrative. Although his critique of American realpolitik is evident, he believes it is plausible that the war is essentially about freeing the Iraqi people from dictatorship and creating the conditions of security and stability from which they can build national identity and political community. Ferguson views American policy and American leadership in light of those goals, and this might have led him to create overly black-and-white vignettes that mask the gray areas in a complex set of circumstances. Most of Ferguson's high-level interviewees are people who went to Iraq with special expertise, ostensibly to form the nucleus of the nation-building effort alongside the Iraqis. Their uniformly disillusioning stories tend to be variations on a theme: an expert is brought in too late in the planning; the expert sees what needs to be done: the expert tries to initiate action, but faces obstacles from and is ignored by people higher in rank; the expert leaves or is replaced. Whether physically wounded, psychologically scarred, or (merely) intellectually incredulous at the way the war in Iraq has been directed, the military interviewees--mostly junior in rank--present a picture of patriotism and idealism tinged with disenchantment after doing their utmost with what they had, often at great personal sacrifice. If the film is skewed, it is not entirely the director's fault. The apparent refusal of several key American policy-makers to come before the camera lies at the heart of much of the film's imbalance. Two men on the "dark" side of Ferguson's binary view of Iraq who do appear--one of them American "proconsul" L. Paul Bremer (in segments lifted from news programs--rely almost solely on excuses when asked direct questions concerning their motivations for actions, words, or inactions. Their repeated reference to the confusion of the situation, their own stress levels, and the inadequacy of their own memories make it all too easy to come away from the film truly disheartened. …