Rob Woollard

Agence France Presse

LOS ANGELES: After a wave of films chronicling the lives of soldiers and civilians on the front lines of the war in Iraq, an award-winning documentary released in the United States this week throws the spotlight on the architects of the conflict for the first time. In " No End in Sight," first-time director Charles Ferguson sets out to explore the management of the war in Iraq in the months following the US-led invasion in March 2003.

Ferguson, a former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who made a fortune from the $133-million sale of his Internet start-up to Microsoft in 1996, financed the film himself to the tune of $2 million.

With surgical precision, the 52-year-old political scientist's film, which won a special jury prize at the Sundance Independent Film Festival, paints a damning portrait of the planning of post-invasion Iraq, relying on the testimony of more than 70 key figures who were on the ground at the time.

A string of contentious policy decisions - including the disbanding of the Iraqi Army, the de-Baathification of government and the failure to stop the looting - are explored in painstakingly meticulous detail.

The conclusions are withering. As one review of the documentary put it: "Even well-informed audiences will find their jaws dropping."

Ferguson says he wanted to make the film partially as a response to the way the war in Iraq has been reported by mainstream media.

"As a political scientist with many friends in the foreign policy community, I have been quite disturbed at the quality of media coverage of the Iraq war and occupation," says Ferguson.

The recent resurgence of documentary film is increasingly "filling a space that is left somewhat vacant by the traditional media," he says.

"There have certainly been a number of very good books about Iraq, but not many Americans take the six, eight or 10 hours it takes to read a 400-page book," he says.

"And if you don't do that then you certainly can't get a good overall picture of a complicated issue by watching the news or reading a newspaper. That kind of long-form journalism almost doesn't exist any more," he adds.

Ferguson says that while he was familiar with most of the issues surrounding the management of the war, a lot of the anecdotal evidence gleaned from his interviews was revelatory.
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"There were many things I learned that blew me away," Ferguson says.

"I knew most of the large-scale facts, but when I learned just how crazy and just how stupid much of the administration's behavior was, I found myself quite dumbfounded," he explains, citing Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) chief Paul Bremer's May 2003 decision to disband the Iraqi Army as a prime example.

Critics and analysts have said the decision was instrumental in fueling the Iraqi insurgency, leaving hundreds of thousands of young Iraqis with military experience unemployed and seething with resentment.

"Bremer made this decision on [CPA defense adviser] Walter Slocombe's recommendation, when neither of them had been to Iraq and Bremer had been on the job for only nine days," says Ferguson.

"What do you say when you learn something like that? And there were many, many things like that, dozens of them."

Ferguson also rejects suggestions that much of the criticism directed at the Bush administration's handling of the war in Iraq has been made with the benefit of hindsight.

"Of course you always have an advantage in hindsight, you cannot deny that is true to some extent," Ferguson says.

"But ... the overwhelming majority of expert opinion before these events was arguing in favor of behaving in a very different way to the way the administration behaved."

While Ferguson's film focuses on the decisions taken in the first year of occupation, the director shies away from offering strategies for the future.

He also questions whether the architects of the war - former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz (who both declined to be interviewed for the film) - should be held accountable.

"They are certainly going to be judged very harshly by history, and that's already begun," says Ferguson. "But I hesitate to recommend or propose criminal prosecution for national policy decisions, no matter how disastrous.

"If the decisions were openly made and the American public and Congress knew about them, which they did, I would hesitate to prosecute people for such decisions. But they were horrible decisions."

Asked whether he believed the film had uncovered evidence of impeachable offenses, Ferguson was similarly equivocal.

"Is unbelievable carelessness and stupidity an impeachable offense?" he asks. "I don't know ... I really don't."