Movie Review - No End in Sight

Documentary "No End in Sight" exposes the lack of planning and downright ridiculous screw-ups of the top engineers of the Iraq war. It was a pretty interesting movie that I learned some things from that I didn't think about before. Like the fact that American soldiers were told to ignore the chaotic lootings that ensued immediately after the toppling of Saddam's government. This wasn't just petty stealing of "vases" as Rumsfeld purported in a press conference. This included breaking off of whole chunks of concrete from major buildings. The most heart-wrenching of it all was the destruction of the museum and the library, and in the documentary a man poignantly weeps that his country no longer has a heritage. Those artifacts and books were records of thousands of years of civilization. US troops did nothing to protect things of value to the Iraqi people, while the oil facilities were the most heavily guarded in all the country.

This was big mistake number 1. Big mistake number 2 was the blacklisting of all those civil officials who worked under Sadaam's regime. But a lot of these people were simply bureaucrats who had no ideological alliances with Sadaam. They became jobless, and humiliated. Big mistake number 3 was to disband the Iraqi army, hundreds of thousands of individuals who literally went to the US army and volunteered to fight with them, but no, they were disbanded, and became unemployed. These breadwinners trained with military skills, frustrated and down-trodden, and the only organizations willing to take them in were insurgent groups.

And so the movie is a great almost exhaustive look at all the mistakes made in the managing of the war. But conspicuously absent from the documentary was a discussion about the biggest mistake of the war, one that trumped the three I summarized above. And that is the war itself. A critic quoted on rotten-tomatoes puts it perfectly: "A documentary that rues the fact that the US was not able to impose its will on the Iraqi people, but never questions the right to do so."

I also found myself towards the end of the film hoping to see some sort of discussion about "okay, we fucked up. Now what? Where do we go from here?" But this issue never surfaced.

Indeed, I did feel a bit uncomfortable by the film's contribution and partaking in Orientalism. Orientalism facilitates the idea that Arabs are irrational and can't govern themselves. According to the Orientalist psyche, it is the duty and responsibility of the West, because the West is rational and scientifically advanced, to impose its will on Oriental peoples. The film then is Orientalist in that it looks at where and how we went wrong and failed in this Orientalist project, not so much lamenting the oppressive actions we took against Iraqi people, but lamenting that we, the West, could fail, and not questioning the "civilizing mission" itself. And that's the problematic thorn in the side of this otherwise good and informative documentary.