It looks like I won't get a chance to see this until sometime next week, but it sure does look good:
That is all.
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No End In Sight
27 Jul 2007 04:03 pm
Comments (14)
Did I say aids? I meant emboldens.
Aids the enemy? Oh, I don't think it'll help George Bush at all, do you?
I don't think it'll help George Bush at all, do you?
It might embolden him. Everything else seems to.
I'm going to see this at 10pm in NYC at the Film Forum. I'd only heard about it earlier this week, but I got tickets immediately after reading some of the reviews.
I wish this kind of thing would be run on television. The people likely to go see it probably aren't the people that need to see it, unfortunately.
Looks good? Maybe. But that trailer looked pretty incompetence dodgy to me.
RE: No End In Sight
Or, you go to war with the SecDef you have.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was interviewed by Bob Woodward on July 6 and 7, 2006. They discussed Lieutenant General Jay Garner (Ret), former US Army Assistant Vice Chief of Staff. Garner began Iraq reconstruction efforts in March 2003 with plans aiming for Iraqis to hold elections within 90 days and for the U.S. to quickly pull troops out of the cities to a desert base. He was replaced in his role by Paul Bremer, the Managing Director of Kissinger and Associates, on May 11th, 2003.
SEC. RUMSFELD: Garner had that [handover] model, too.
MR. WOODWARD: Pardon?
SEC. RUMSFELD: Jay Garner --
MR. WOODWARD: Yes, yes --
SEC. RUMSFELD: -- had that model, too.
MR. WOODWARD: Yes, exactly. Exactly. He was let's set up an interim governing council, let's, you know -- I mean, he briefed the president on we're going to use 200,000 to 300,000 Iraqi troops for border patrol and security and so forth.
SEC. RUMSFELD: Is that right? Well, I don't know that.
MR. WOODWARD: And --
SEC. RUMSFELD: Do you want me every time you say something that I don't know to tell you?
MR. WOODWARD: Absolutely.
SEC. RUMSFELD: Okay. I don't know that.
MR. WOODWARD: My question really is -- what did you envision in the spring of '03 happening? Because, of course, Bremer comes in with a very different model.
SEC. RUMSFELD: He did? I was more in the Jay Garner mode. And Jerry Bremer, of course, is a presidential envoy and, as such, he reported to the president and to Condi at the NSC staff.
http://www.defenselink.mil/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=3744
But that trailer looked pretty incompetence dodgy to me.
As opposed to what? It's a documentary of what exactly went wrong and why. I can appreciate wanting to highlight the flawed rationales for doing Iraq at all, as distinct from doing it badly, as much as anybody, but it's in fact hard to separate the neocon bullet points from the inevitability that they be poorly-executed.
Incompetence dodge means "this could've worked if it had been done right." The counter-argument says "this couldn't have worked regardless of how well it was done." The reality is "this couldn't have worked because it could only have been done incompetently by us." To say "we were incompetent" is not a dodge in this light; it's confronting the inevitable. The limitations of a republic like the United States, its leaders subject to public approval, being able to successfully topple a foreign government (especially an Arab authoritarian one) and rebuild it in a few years, are systemic. Incompetence is the guaranteed result for such a venture.
I would bleed to think that a movie like this would move the feckless Democrats to do something.
Imagine a world where the Republicans initiate a terrible war to Democratic passivity and where Republicans finally hoot it to oblivion while Democrats impassivity breaks the bank. Got that. Now open your eyes.
The Dems will do something. They'll stay in Iraq because they lost China and they lost Vietnam and they want never to lose again. Hillary sounds more like Patton every day. None of us can change history but the future is ours to grasp, and there's all that oil and water! (Rummy never mentioned oil alone, it was always oil & water in Iraq. for Israel?)
There are interviews w/ the film maker and people in the film, as well as clips online at http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/316/index.html.
They're from NOW, the PBS show.
Okay, I saw it last night. While there isn't any startling new information or imagery, it was really well done. While some people might believe it takes a rather consistent 'incompetence dodge' angle, I don't think that's correct because it is absolutely impossible to make a documentary about the war without government incompetence being front and center. Given the magnitude of some of the mistakes, its hard to disagree with some of the people interviewed that if different decisions had been made early on things at least would have been less catastrophic for Iraqis. I don't think that is a dodge, that it justifies the basic premise of democracy-by-the-sword, or that it means things would have gone swimmingly if McCain had been in charge from the get-go; its just self-evident that multiple large-scale blunders destroyed any chance the US had right from the beginning, and Iraqis suffered horribly from these mistakes.
The most shocking part to me was the interviews with Walter Slocombe, who was actually interviewed twice and it is horrifying to watch. He smirks and giggles constantly, cannot answer questions because he doesn't know the answers, and still insists firing 500,000 armed soldiers was the right thing to do. This guy had immense power over the civilian authority in Iraq and he refused to even go there, insisting he could do his job better in the US. Not only are you left wondering how this guy could get a job like that, its baffling that anyone would give him a job doing anything.
I think this movie could be a lot more effective outside of the choir than Moore's, and my test was my girlfriend. Like a lot of non-political people, she is instinctively mistrustful of Moore (which has more to do with his style than anything Bill O'Reilly says about him) for whatever reason, and she has had difficultly following the history and happenings of the war, who is who, etc... And while she found Fog of War confusing, she found No End In Sight to be clear, informative, and depressing. The filmmakers do an incredible job laying everything out and flushing out the various organizations and actors and events.
I definitely recommend this movie, and I particularly recommend taking a friend or relative that is on the fence or ambivalent about the war, especially ones that would refuse to ever see a Michael Moore movie.
A note on the "incompetence dodge" idea- please don't big assume that anyone who calls attention to the disastrous effects of post-invasion blundering is inherently defending the initial invasion. It's perfectly reasonable (and, I think, correct) to argue that invading Iraq was a really bad idea, AND that post-invasion blundering has made things much worse than they would have been otherwise.
The total failure to come up with a remotely sensible plan for the post-Saddam era, and the amateur-hour nature of the occupation itself, represent a level of leadership incompetence that just might be unprecedented in American history. Making the relevant information about that incompetence widely known is a good thing, and doesn't necessarily involve "dodging" anything.
From the reviews and the trailer, this movie seems identical to the documentary PBS's Frontline did about the war. Anyone know whether and how it is different?
It seems a touch more pointed, but same issues, same people interviewed, same argument ... what does the film add?
Comments closed August 10, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
Releasing this movie now aids the enemy.
Posted by Bill | July 27, 2007 5:00 PM