Oscar Cleanup: NO END IN SIGHT review

NO END IN SIGHT

**** out of 4

Unrated

Directed by Charles Ferguson

ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE: Best Documentary Feature

The one name and face that kept floating up at me while watching the sober, Oscar nominated documentary NO END IN SIGHT is that of the one and only Britney Spears.

Yes... THAT Britney Spears.

Because for her AND for President Bush, things started out fine until a catastrophic event that led them into tailspin. After which, they made one bad decision after another until they were completely up-ended by yes-men and "handlers" in an effort to staunch the flow of idiocy and bad press. Somehow things actually get WORSE after that.

Jesus Creeping Shit. If THAT doesn't put politics into perspective, I don't know what will.

The whole tawdry public affair of the current administration and the war in Iraq is played out in NO END IN SIGHT, which is one of this year's five Oscar nominees for Best Documentary Feature. Note that having seen this and Michael Moore's SICKO, represents the first time in my life I have seen more than one of the nominees for that category going into the ceremony in any given year.

This is where the good news ends.

I'm not going into the details of what this movie covers or what it's about, because if you watch the news, then this... Y'know... ISN'T. But what's striking about NO END IN SIGHT is how stark raving calm it is. Not once does the film lapse into editorial invective. It states plainly that our troubles in the Middle East are due to the fact that inexperienced people--Some fresh out of college--with no foreign policy or regional experience tried to orchestrate what was supposed to be a short and violent war, and wound up getting their asses handed to them by the very people they were trying to liberate.

But of course you CAN'T have an epic fuck-up of an occupation of a foreign land without completely and willfully ignoring people who knew how to pull one of these things off right. Guys like generals, U.N. officials and ambassadors. But Charles Ferguson's film never tips its hand towards any partisan or radical proselytizing. When one of the heads of OHRA (Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistsance), General Jay Garner, was asked why advice was ignored and even ONE PAGE SUMMARIES OF BRIEFINGS went unread by the White House, he doesn't even bother to speculate. He just says...

"I don't know."

And that is the level that the entire film is pitched at. NO END IN SIGHT doesn't theorize, but presents facts and evidence at face value and the level of blame just places itself.

One of those hardest hit by his own dumbass decisions in the film is L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer. the man who was named Director of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was forced out of power. This guy had no foreign policy experience and didn't know his ass from his elbow about maintaining a volatile situation in Iraq. His decisions in 2003 led to the following...

-The wrenching of the Hussein's B'Ath party from power, and forbidding them from holding any government positions. For some, this means permanent unemployment.

-The disbanding of Iraqi military and intelligence. This MIGHT make sense in some weird and alternate universe where women use cookie dough to douche themselves... If it weren't for the fact that they let them KEEP THEIR GUNS!

-Keeping a low troop level, so when said unemployed and DEEPLY pissed off--and armed, don't forget ARMED!--former Iraqi soldiers (numbering at about half a million) wanted to raid weapons depots, there was nothing to stop them.

I bet it was with great restraint that filmmaker Ferguson didn't include footage of Bremer winning the Presidential Medal of Freedom a year and a half later.

NO END IN SIGHT consists mainly of archival footage and interviews. But these aren't whack-jobs and fringe assholes. Some of these folks held jobs deep in the Bush administration, believed in what they were doing and loved their country. But they were either fired or jumped ship when they realized with dawning horror that they were going through not a well executed military action, but the high stakes equivalent of drunken frat boys at Tulane attempting brain surgery with toothpicks and scotch tape.

These intelligent and restrained people look as though they'd be better off trying to point out the positive attributes of a shrieky rendition of I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU by a recent immigrant from Vietnam at an AMERICAN IDOL taping than to ponder what Bremer, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and that creepy little child-molester Paul Wolfowitz (all of whom declined to be interviewed for this film) were possibly thinking at those key events before the switch was thrown.

I think history will be kinder to NO END IN SIGHT than we could possibly know. So when our children's children are pawning internal organs for rent money and cat food for themselves, they'll know who to thank. But if you've missed the news and are looking for info apart from righteousness, this is the movie to watch.

But moreso, it can prove to anyone watching that once upon a time, not too long ago that you--Yes, YOU! JOHN Q. FATBODY!--could have done a better job running a war than our elected officials.