Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

No End in Sight

UCLA law grad and former Army officer Phil Carter, who served in Iraq, reports:

I attended a screening of the new Iraq documentary "No End in Sight" in Los Angeles which was co-sponsored by the Center for American Progress and USC's Center for Public Diplomacy. (The movie is reviewed today in the New York Times.) Bottom line up front: go see this movie. It presents the history of the Iraq war in clear, sober, and vivid footage, and makes a compelling argument that we are past the point of "winnability" (whatever that means) today in Iraq. ...

Dr. Ferguson clearly makes an artistic judgment to focus roughly 2/3 of his film on the run-up to the war and its early aftermath in 2003. This reflects his political judgment, as explained afterwards during Q&A, that the events and decisions during that timeframe set the stage for what would come. His movie barely covers the 2004 assaults on Fallujah and the Abu Ghraib scandal, and omits mention of the 2005 elections, the Maliki government, and the 2006 Samarra mosque bombing. I'm not so sure that I agree with this; I think the window of opportunity in Iraq stretched into 2004, and that it really didn't slam shut until the disastrous response to the sectarian violence incited by the February 2006 bombing of the Al-Askari mosque in Samarra. But the movie does a good job of explaining the early sins of the occupation, and arguing that these put us on the wrong path from the start.