No End In Sight

"No End in Sight" is the most coolheaded of the Iraq war documentaries, the most methodical and the least polemical. Yet it's the one that will leave audiences the most shattered, angry and astounded.

Directed by Charles Ferguson, making his feature debut, the film relies mainly on interviews with people who were either inside the Bush administration or on the ground in Iraq in those crucial early months following the fall of Baghdad. Most of those interviewed are either career diplomats or career military officers, not anti-administration types by any stretch. Some, like Richard Armitage, were in the White House inner circle. Yet they describe an administration of such colossal ineptitude and baseless arrogance as to boggle the mind.

Ferguson doesn't impose an interpretation on the material. Some will come away from the film convinced that invading Iraq was a monumental mistake, while some will think that it might have worked. Some will come away confirmed in the opinion that the United States needs to pull out as soon as possible, while others will find confirmation for the belief that leaving now would be the worst possible course.

Yet "No End in Sight" is likely to unite everyone in the common opinion that the invasion and occupation were mismanaged on an epic scale. It's not just that "mistakes were made," to use the tired passive-voice cliche of feigned contrition, but rather that only mistakes were made. In instance after instance, the administration ignored genuine experts in favor of people with flashy, erroneous notions. They ignored the advice of people on the ground in favor of functionaries in Washington with neither military experience nor familiarity with the Islamic world.

Can We Win The War in Iraq?

Dissecting the U.S. deployment of 133,000 troops on the ground in Iraq, Edward Luttwak of the Center for Strategic and International Studies recently calculated that only 28,000 are actually in the field at any given time.

To put that number in perspective, Luttwak points out that the New York City Police force has 37,000 police officers - yet U.S. coalition forces are being asked to keep control over a nation of 28 million, including the urban hotspots of Baghdad with its 6 million inhabitants, Mosul with 1.7 million, Kirkuk with 800,000 and Fallujah, a Sunni stronghold with a population of 250,000.

That's just 28,000 soldiers to interdict insurgents and jihadists coming over the borders with Syria and Iran, to patrol all the cities, protect all the oil fields, pipelines, banks and utility infrastructure... and to provide cover for the U.S. military bases, airfields and convoys.

It gets worse: the latest plan proposed by the administration cuts U.S. forces to just 104,000 troops, with an increasing share being National Guard and Army Reservists who, rather than playing their usual supporting role, are this time headed for the front line - because when it comes to Iraq, it's pretty much all front line.

To give you some sense of the danger, small arms are so abundant that $10 will buy you, retail from a street vendor, an AK-47 machine gun and all the ammunition you can carry.

Which brings us to the question addressed in this special WWNK feature, can the U.S. win in Iraq?

Corruption in Iraq not discouraged

One after another, the men and women who have stepped forward to report corruption in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted.

Or worse.

For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.