Who is Charles Ferguson, the maker of the best film thus far on the Iraq War? He made millions selling his company Vermeer Technologies, the creator of the first visual website development tool FrontPage, to Microsoft. He served as a senior fellow at the political think tank, the Brookings Institute. He holds degrees from Berkeley and MIT, where he has also taught. He was originally a supporter of the invasion of Iraq. And now he has made a sobering, infuriating and honest chronicling of the Bush administration's disastrous handling of the war from the lips of those who served in the administration.
Ferguson doesn't go for theatrics or sentiment with his film. The facts are damning enough. Thirty-five people were interviewed for the film including: General Jay Garner, who ran Iraq reconstruction before L. Paul Bremer replaced him; Ambassador Barbara Bodine, who headed the Baghdad embassy until her differing opinions led to the Bush administration firing her; Richard Armitage, former Deputy Secretary of State; Robert Hutchings, former chairman of the National Intelligence Council; Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff; and Col. Paul Hughes, who worked for both the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).
Ferguson makes a firm case for how the war was poorly conceived by people who had made up their minds on what was "true" before they had any proof. They focused only on findings that supported their case. But these ideas are not new to documentaries on the Iraq war. What makes this film so uniquely powerful is the chronicling of incident after incident where the wrong path was chosen by bureaucrats who ignored or never asked about what was really going on on the ground. Each subsequent mistake only led Iraq closer and closer to total chaos.
First it was the flippant refusal to issue Marshal Law and stop the early looting of government facilities, museums and weapons caches. The next mistakes came at the hands of Bremer, head of the CPA. His call to De-Ba'thitize the country (removing Saddam Hussein's ruling Ba'th Party from all positions in the government) left many Iraqis without jobs and important positions in the country without skilled leaders. A 21-year-old recent college grad was put in charge of traffic in Baghdad. She had no urban planning experience. Additionally, Bremer disbanded the Iraqi army, which left 500,000 men without ways to make a living. These armed men took jobs as insurgents to pay their bills. Over and over again, the problem wasn't that officials making key decisions thought they were right when they were wrong, but that they thought they were righteous when they were wrong.
The saddest element of the film is that there were competent people working on this war, but they were either hamstrung by poor initial planning or were marginalized for not towing the party line. Additionally, there were Iraqis who eagerly wanted to help their country, but they too were marginalized by politicians in Washington D.C. who couldn't see the difference between a terrorist and a teacher, who only joined the Ba'thist party so that they could teach.
What separates this film from episodes of FRONTLINE or 20/20 is Ferguson's ability to interview so many former Bush administration officials who participated in the war. This is the kind of straight reporting that one use to see done by Edward R. Murrow on the major networks. Hearing from interviewees who are now disillusioned is even more haunting, because they aren't just anti-war activists who object to the war on principle. These are people who tried their best to make this war work. The film paints the Iraq War as a disaster due to incompetence, arrogance and corruption. This film is beyond slogans like "Stay the Course" or "Cut and Run." The next U.S. president has a mighty mess to clean up. So before Americans chose their next leader, they owe it to themselves to watch this film and ask themselves whether competence is really the #1 moral issue when selecting a leader.
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks
