The other day I went to see No End in Sight, the documentary on Iraq that has gotten all kinds of critical praise. You have to hand it to independent filmmaker Charles Ferguson. The movie gives you a better idea of life in Baghdad than anything else I’ve seen. The camera angles, the feel of the street, the voices of griefstricken Iraqis–this is bravura moviemaking. The experience of immersion in Baghdad for 100 minutes left me exhausted, harrowed, depressed.
Having said that, I must strongly object to the film’s ideological claim. This is its insistence that the occupation was mishandled, that everything might have gone great if we had just done things right once we took Baghdad. The movie entirely swallows the view of George Packer, the writer who supported the invasion and came to feel misgivings later. In his book The Assassin’s Gate, Packer bravely acknowledged that in supporting the invasion, he had come under strong influences that he later came to question–like neolibcon Paul Berman–but Packer never brought himself to fully condemn this thinking. A good man horrified by the outcome, he was still involved in a kind of self-justification, trying to argue that it had been maybe a good idea. (Given the cultural status of the war thinkers, this sort of self-apologetics is likely to continue for many years to come–note Michael Ignatieff’s vague and abstracted mea culpa in last week’s Times).
"No End in Sight" spends very little time anatomizing the true error here: the decision to invade a country that had not attacked us. It chalks that up to bad "thinking" by Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, and Wolfowitz (as if George Bush has ever had an idea in his life). Almost all the film’s energy is devoted to taking apart the bad tactical decisions in the occupation itself. Why did they disband the military? comes in for prolonged investigation. Why did they de-Baathify the government? Why did they let the museum get looted? Why were there not more Arabic speakers in the occupation administration?
As if war is not by definition chaos, and treasures are not destroyed. As if these things can be controlled. As if we have many Arabic speakers in this country. As if keeping the military intact would have produced peace and harmony. (Who knows?) And so the movie leaves intact the neoconservative idea at the heart of the madness: military intervention or Arab tyranny, so as to democratize the Middle East.
As Robert Westbrook wrote,
The question [Packer’s book raises]… is whether or not an American war to liberate Iraq
from Saddam Hussein could have been waged without being followed by an
occupation that stirred Iraqi resentment and insurgency. Is the
calamity we now face a matter simply of the obvious blindnesses and
incompetence of the Bush administration, as Packer contends? Or is
there an inherent tension–which invites calamity–between national
self-determination and those "humanitarian military interventions" that
go beyond putting an end to extreme human rights disasters and extend
to liberal-democratic state-building? Packer criticizes the American occupation authorities for opting for
control when they should have been more concerned about legitimacy. But
how can an occupying power exercise any control at all over a people
eager for self-determination without threatening its legitimacy? And if
it cannot exercise control, why remain as an occupying power? Indeed,
why embark on a nation-building war in the first place?
That is the issue. This war was unjust from the start. The assertions of "No End in Sight" are dilatory and distracting; they put off the real moral/spiritual/intellectual business that awaits a society that has blundered so terribly.
