Wednesday, September 19, 2007

no end in sight


I went and saw No End In Sight, a documentary directed by Charles Ferguson at Athens Cine. It won an award for a documentary at Sundance and

They shot over 200 hours of footage to tell the story from Fall 2003 when we started occupying Baghdad. We planned the occupation of Germany for 2 years before executing anything. We planned the Iraq occupation for 58 days.

The movie surprised me because many of the insiders seemed to be confused along the way... Richard Armitage, former Secretary of State was talking about when the US decided to disband the Iraq army saying "I think this decision came as a surprise to most of us." and then "I thought we had just created a problem. We had a lot of out of work [Iraqi] soldiers.

Overall, it provided a lot of insight into what we did, what we didn't do, but it was missing what we could have done. I left with a sense of hopelessness and felt ashamed to be an American.

Here are some reviews:
Roger Ebert
Entertainment Weekly
Nobody has managed to poke any real holes in Ferguson's work, perhaps because its most damning moments come directly from the mouths of one former Bush official after another, explaining with long-overdue sobriety what went wrong and how

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