No End in Sight

Now here’s a term that should make any adult instinctively reach down and cover his billfold: ‘moderate’. You see that label taped onto guys like senators Lugar and Warner because they are beginning to conclude that the earth might be round.

Real moderation, decency and good sense don’t normally win that ‘moderate’ moniker. Look at Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish Nobel author: he acknowledges the genocide against Armenians and immediately becomes a ‘controversial’ figure. ‘Moderation’ in this case would be keeping quiet and pretending nothing had happened. Of course, that wouldn’t work in Germany, but then moderate is as moderate does. Being in the middle of the road doesn’t say nearly as much about an individual as about the highway they happen to be on.

Speaking of taking the ‘moderate’ position, it’s easy to see why the latest film on Iraq, No End in Sight, is having such a vigorous run here. It shows in crushing detail the arrogance and stupidity that have characterized that criminal conspiracy from the beginning. Its targets are venal Republican operatives, and it’s popular in this Democratic town. The reviews laud it as even-handed, ‘no left-wing screed’, as one put it, and it builds a convincing case.

However, walking out one is left with the impression that if the war had just been done right, things would be kind of okay, if not downright hunky-dory. Filmmaker Charles Ferguson explicitly endorses that reaction and agrees that he set aside any questioning of the moral and policy implications of staging an unprovoked attack on false premises. This is not a Michael Moore film, he said in an interview, reminding the reporter that he has a Ph.D. in political science.

Instead, we get a run-down of the operational disasters, by now somewhat familiar although the combined effect is devastating. The wise men in the picture are establishment figures like Richard Armitrage, the guy who outed Valerie Plame and threatened to bomb Pakistan ‘back to the Stone Age’ if they didn’t cooperate with the war on Bin Laden. Now there’s a moderate guy.

It’s conceivable although perhaps optimistic to suppose that the Iraq disaster will get wound down somehow in the next administration. But to the underlying principles of unprovoked invasion and territorial conquest in the pursuit of oil there is truly no end in sight. Such a suggestion in the rarefied circles this film inhabits would be highly immoderate.