Yesterday, my husband and I got a double dose of information on Iraq. By the end of the day, we were exhausted with the weight of the depressing material we had seen.
In the afternoon, we saw No End In Sight, a documentary about Iraq by Charles Ferguson. (You can see the movie trailer here.) Even though we were aware of all of the things that had happened on the lead up to the war, there were many details in the film that just made you plain angry. The screw ups by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condeleeza Rice, Paul Bremer, and the rest of the twits, make you want to go somewhere and scream. Here are some of the well documented items in the movie:
>The National Intelligence Reports that were never read by Bush, but he offered his opinion about them.
>There was a plan to reconstitute the Iraqi army ( Over 100,000 Iraqi men were ready to help rebuild Iraq.), but Paul Bremer decided to ignore the work of Jay Garner and others. Bremer disbanded the Iraqi army.
>Rumsfeld's disastrous decisions have cost us thousands of American lives.
>The failure of Rumsfeld to listen to people who were on the ground in Iraq created anarchy.
Etc. Etc. Etc.
Here is an excerpt from a review in The Village Voice:
.....Bracketed by a pair of press-conference quotes from Donald Rumsfeld—the first smugly declaring his pride in the "first war of the 21st century," the second defensively claiming, "I don't do quagmires"—the doc scarcely acknowledges the fraudulent justification and fundamental immorality of the Iraq invasion, though A Pretext for War author James Bamford does show up to say, "I don't know what these [Bush administration officials] were smoking, but it must have been very good." Focusing on the war itself, Ferguson is chiefly interested in compiling a filmed dossier of incompetence—not so much to argue that the war could've been won and won early, but to suggest that the magnitude of arrogant irresponsibility will carry aftershocks as far into the future as the mind can imagine. No end, indeed. The title seems to refer not to the interminable war, but to the irreversible stain on America's reputation. Ferguson's ultimate image of urban Iraq in flames, swarming with well-armed insurgents, is a picture of hell, and not one that's only burning Over There....
Go see No End In Sight and you'll thank me for it.
>> Last night we watched Alive Stories on HBO. James Gandolfini talked to 10 wounded Iraq vets. It was so difficult to go to sleep with the voices and images of those young men and women resonating in my head. The people to blame for these injuries and deaths are none other than Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice/Wolfowitz and the rest of their propaganda preachers.
You can watch the film on HBO from September 9-16 or online. I want to thank HBO, James Gandolfini, and the veterans for helping get this film on TV. I only wish that our elected officials watch it.
