No End In Sight…
Wow, I had debated staying home tonight… at a concert Tuesday, some theater/cabaret on Wednesday, so was debating whether a free screening of an upcoming Iraq War documentary was really something I should be going to see for my third event in a row.
I’m so glad I did.
“No End In Sight” really changed my mind about the war. In other ways, it makes me wonder what happened to journalism. I mean, sure, everything in this film was reported by the mainstream press, but in some ways it seems the press has the same problems as the Bush Administration in that they seem to have very little context for what’s going on, an inability to report the big picture instead of the news of the day, and information that would have made the post-war successful, all of which was discarded.
The incompetence of this administration is nothing new, of course. But as one person says in the movie’s trailer (below), there were two or three ways to get the post-war right, and 500 ways to get it wrong… who knew we were going to try all 500 ways first?
The biggest shift for me is that I no longer think we can leave Iraq, because I put so much more blame for every single aspect of how botched that country is now squarely on America’s shoulders. I think we have a moral obligation to fix it, but I don’t think the problem is radical Islam, or insurgents as much anymore. It’s more a case that we created a perfect biosphere for that stuff to flourish and, over time, we can turn it back.
None of the dots in the movie are new, but when connected, they are compelling. Basically, Bush and his senior administration ignored every shred of intel about how to manage the post-war. For example, in World War II, we spent two years coming up with a plan on how to manage Germany after the war. Not that we’d even won the war or anything yet. In Iraq, the post-war people were tasked with doing it in 60 days.
The problem started with the looting. For days, we let chaos get root in Iraq. We let 7,000 years of history walk away from their libraries and museums. We saw footage of people stealing little vases and TV, and Rumsfeld (who comes across as an even bigger asshole than I ever imagined, and I thought he should be in jail even *before* I saw this movie) says it is like looting here, and blamed TV for repeating the same footage, saying they show the same vase being stolen every hour, but it’s only one vase. Untrue. They were actually knocking over buildings with cranes just to steal the rebar.
Our troops did nothing to stop them because they were ordered not to interfere. So, we let chaos begin while simultaneously taking away their history and relics of their cultural identity. The intelligence community gave them a list of 20 buildings that needed to be protected for this reason, but it was ignored. Only an oil refinery was protected.
One interesting thing was that most of our time, while this was going on, was looking for WMDs and Saddam Hussein. So, as much as the administration made that stuff up, they actually seemed to have convinced themselves it was true, which is as telling as it is sad.
Then, we de-Baathify the country. So, anyone that was in the ruling party under Saddam was immediately out of work for good. Which, would make sense, if he weren’t a murderous tyrannical dictator. Otherwise, a lot of people who were “in” the Baath party were just there to mke a living, not get killed, and provide for their families.
So, on top of chaos, no power, no water, no electricity, no sewage, and being occupied by soldiers, with an 8 p.m. curfew that has extended for years, now every intellectual and business interest in the country is out of a job.
Then, we get rid of Saddam’s Army. So, now, every young male in Iraq (required to serve in the Army) is also not earning a salary. more than half the country now is without basic services, and no one is making money. And, during this time, we do nothing to help this along.
In fact, it’s hard for our poorly-planned post-war team to even get started, because the building they are moving into was looted and all of their time is being spent setting up basic communications, setting up offices, etc. Sadly, MANY of the decision makers on the post-war strategy had never stepped foot in Iraq, didn’t know the culture, history, or anything else. One professor helping with the post-war ran into a student that he had just graduated with a bachelor’s degree. He figured she was volunteering, but her parents were Bush donors, so she was actually in charge of mapping out the traffic patterns for all of Baghdad, which she was completely unqualified to do.
So, basically, we created a perfect set-up for lawlessness, desperation, and then the mosques kicked in to provide them the services and support that we weren’t. As for them being radical fundamentalist, etc., it seems that system was created by *us*, whereas the take I keep hearing is that radical Islam has been plotting for us all along, etc., etc., but I honestly don’t believe that anymore. We created an environment where people lost all hope in a future, and religion is one of the best answers when things are going poorly.
For those reasons, I think we can’t leave Iraq. But not because we have to fight them there or we’d be fighting them here. That is nonsense. I think the people we are fighting there are the people we claimed to be fighting for, but then we abandoned them, abused them, crushed their spirits, treated them poorly, and then seemed surprised when they came after us.
Of course, not hard to realize that if you fire the army, and can’t guard the place where all the guns and ammo are stored around the country, then those people have complete access to load up for battle. So, it isn’t really Osama and everyone else with their deep pockets giving them guns and weaponry to compete with us, it was our own incompetence that provided them with everything they needed.
The important thing about this film is that it is not partisan (although if all the major errors happened in the Bush Administration, it’s hard for it to really be balanced, but who says balance really needs to exist?). A majority of the talking heads in this flick are administration insiders, the people who were there on the ground, making the post-war decisions, or journalists that have been there for years, actual soldiers. It isn’t just a leftist screed about Bush being stupid with smart liberals doing talking points. It shows the people who made the intelligence reports, the people who delivered the intelligence reports, and then the orders coming down that ignored the findings of the reports. Apparently, one 300+-page report was condensed into a one-page summary for Bush (since they knew he wouldn’t read the whole thing). Only… he didn’t even bother to read the summary, just dismissed it as speculation and such in a press conference.
The movie has made the issue even more complex. I think all the talk now that we hear about civil war and such is part of the new campaign to get us geared up to pull out. I don’t know that I can sign on to that anymore.
But, if anything, the blame for this isn’t Al Qaeda. even if they are in control (which I’m not sure about), we did everything we could to flood the line at their booth on career day, by making sure that fighting Satan was the only job left for these people.
Click here to check out the trailer:
