A Talk with Charles Ferguson on NO END IN SIGHT

This short article on Charles Ferguson originally appeared in the September 2007 issue of Venice Magazine. Ferguson's documentary No End in Sight is nominated for the Best Feature Documentary Academy Award.

Charles Ferguson Searches for the End

Unfortunately, the filmmaker’s debut documentary makes the most convincing of arguments that we’re in Iraq for a very, very long time to come.

By Terry Keefe

It doesn’t matter what side of the political fence you’re on. If you aren’t very angry after watching Charles Ferguson’s Iraq documentary No End in Sight, you don’t have a pulse. A former political science professional, who is currently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Ferguson has chosen for his first film to construct a methodical time and fact line for how the invasion of Iraq turned into the quagmire we’re stuck in today.

Filmmaker Charles Ferguson

It’s a necessary film, and, at first glance, an obvious one. But none of the major news networks have even come close to matching Ferguson’s in-depth look at how the swift U.S. military victory became such a total mess. A major surprise that hit this viewer when screening No End in Sight is that all the basic facts presented are easily recalled from simply watching the news coverage of the past few years, but they’ve rarely been laid out in such a comprehensive dissection in chronological order. Interviews with high-ranking officials such as Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Ambassador Barbara Bodine (in charge of Baghdad during the Spring of 2003), and General Jay Garner (in charge of the occupation of Iraq through May 2003), provide the details for Ferguson’s systematic exhumation of the mistakes that bookended the invasion. Simultaneously, he deftly structures the film around four major errors which he argues helped create the insurgency: 1.) the underestimation of the number of troops needed to restore order post-invasion; 2.) the failure to stop the looting of Baghdad; 3.) the “de-Ba’athification” policy which removed numerous politicians from the government; 4.) The disbanding of the Iraqi military, many of whom joined up in the insurgency. The illogic and general incompetence which led to these big decisions, as well as a host of smaller ones, is mind-boggling and infuriating. One unforgettable moment is when an official recollects that a fresh-out-of-college kid with no experience in traffic control was put in charge of traffic operations in Baghdad. There are horrible little gems like that throughout Ferguson’s film, which is the product of some amazingly meticulous investigative work, the revelations of which frequently surprised the filmmaker himself. Says Ferguson, “Going into the project, I thought I had a pretty good handle on what happened in Iraq. But when I started doing the real research, I realized that I had no idea.”

Ferguson ponied up 2 million dollars of his own cash to make No End in Sight, which went on to win a Special Documentary Jury Prize in 2007 at Sundance. Like many other Americans, Ferguson was somewhat supportive at first of the idea of using force in Iraq, although his opinions quickly changed after the initial invasion. Recalls Ferguson, “Before the war, I was divided. I thought there were good reasons to use force, but I was nervous about the way they were going about it. Not nearly as nervous as I should have been though.”