David Sarasohn: A biting look at Iraq missteps
Very early in “No End in Sight,” the recent documentary on where we are in Iraq and how we got there, there’s one of those cinematic moments that capture the message of the whole movie.
It’s the credits.
Because in the long list of the people involved in most movies, from key grip to best boy to personal assistant to the associate producer, you don’t usually see a listing for “Iraq Chief Personal Bodyguard” and “Iraq Security Detail.”
You don’t even see those credits for a Michael Moore movie.
So before you’ve seen even the first interview or the first explosion, “No End in Sight” conveys the howling chaos that is today’s Iraq, the product of our Iraq policy.
Like much of the rest of the movie, it’s not exactly a surprise. Americans already know – despite the tourist-sounding claims of politicians stopping by Iraq for an afternoon – that no reasonable visitor would walk through the country without wearing something like a tank.
The movie’s comments from people like Donald Rumsfeld also are well-known. So it’s not a surprise to see the secretary of defense, as uncontrolled looting broke out all over Baghdad, grinningly dismiss criticism of how things were going as “Henny Penny, the sky is falling.”
Admittedly, that was before the roof fell in.
Viewers may even remember Rumsfeld’s next comment, when he chuckled that TV stations were running the same shots of the same guy stealing the same vase over and over again, and wondered humorously how many vases there could be in Iraq, anyway?
The answer was: a lot fewer than there used to be.
There were also a lot fewer Iraqi buildings, functioning offices, and working water and utility systems than there used to be.
None of this may be a surprise. But it’s a reminder – as the Bush administration promises a new plan for September, and tests out its explanation that things were going just fine until Sunni militias blew up the Golden Dome mosque in 2006 – of just how miserably conceived and managed this expedition was from the beginning.
Along with the administration’s greatest hits from 2003 and 2004, “No End in Sight” introduces viewers to some voices that aren’t so familiar.
Barbara Bodine was a recently retired career State Department officer who’d spent most of 25 years in the Middle East, including a stint as ambassador to Yemen. Soon after Baghdad fell, she was brought back as U.S. regional supervisor for central Iraq, and discovered just how little had gone into preparing for the postwar period.
The office space she was given had no phone lists.
Then again, it had no working phones, either.
“It was completely unstructured,” she recalls. “There were no plans. Literally, there were no plans.”
What the office did have was a clear view of – and no power to do anything about – the looting that was taking apart the basic structure of Iraq.
“I think that was probably the day we lost Iraqis,” she says. “That’s when it became clear that the liberation had nothing to do with average Iraqis.”
The movie doesn’t break much new ground on the disastrous decisions made in the early days after the invasion, when policy was being set by people in Washington with no experience in the Middle East or postwar reconstruction. What it points out is how many people, at that time, were trying to explain that this wasn’t the way to do it.
“When we started the reconstruction, we knew there were 500 ways to do it wrong, and maybe two or three ways to do it right,” says Bodine. “What we didn’t know was that we would go through all 500.”
People kept trying to explain to the administration what was needed to do it right. People like Robert Perito, who had served in both the State Department and the Justice Department, devising postconflict law enforcement structures in Albania, Croatia and Macedonia that showed how many people would be needed for interim court and patrol operations.
In “No End in Sight,” Perito sums up the response his advice on Iraq got:
“Maybe for the next war.”
At least for that one, we can get the bodyguards and security details set up early.