No End In Sight — 2007
The Banality of Imperial War Criminals
Joe Giambrone
“Not only will America go to your country and kill all your people, but what’s worse I think is they’ll come back twenty years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.”
— Frankie Boyle
This film may have been the one that inspired Frankie’s rant.
As the next team of warmongers gears up to lie the world into an illegal assault on Iran, this film takes on added significance. It’s angering on so many levels from the monsters in suits, to the reign of terror, to the Nazi-level war crimes, to the willful blindness of both participants and filmmakers.
Some Background
America’s invasion of Iraq was exactly comparable to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland, from a legal standpoint. No American ever had the legal right to step one foot on Iraqi soil. Iraq was a sovereign country, a principle that World War Two was fought to establish, costing upwards of 70 million lives.
America thinks it’s above the law and has led the assault on any restraints to its exercise of force, Iraq being a most glaring example.
No End In Sight says not one word about any of that. Far from it. They accept the US regime’s main argument that Saddam was a bad guy, and so somehow it was okay to invade his country. It was not.
They knew it was not. That’s why they concocted phony “Weapons of Mass Destruction” lies to try and deceive the United Nations into granting Security Council approval for the attack — and their obvious lies failed. That made the entire war a breach of the UN Charter and the “Supreme International Crime,” Crimes Against the Peace. Every subsequent action was the direct fault of those who initiated the war, every atrocity, every evil, every consequence, every kidnapping, every maiming, every rape, every murder. These people are monsters towering well above and beyond the Saddams or Qaddafis of the world.
By their own logic, as they are immoral and gleefully evil, other nations now have a right to invade America and install a new regime. That’s not the way international law works. It’s the way imperial war propaganda works, however.
Spinning the Indefensible
Now onto the fiasco depicted in the film. We have a cast of self-styled do-gooders participating in a major war crime, desiring to stabilize the country and rebuild it (after their own military destroyed it). They are prevented from doing so by a series of seemingly incomprehensible bad decisions from Rumsfeld, Cheney, Paul Bremer and their gaggle of incompetent lackeys.
1. Upon the fall of Saddam, no law is enforced, allowing complete chaos and looting all over the country.
2. The Iraqi army is disbanded leaving hundreds of thousands of armed, trained men, with no income and nothing to do.
3. The Americans refuse to even speak with Iraqis as their stormtroopers raid and kill and torture their family members.
I’m of the mind that all of this was intentional, and that the PLAN A was never to win the peace in Iraq. Wars are so difficult to launch, they wanted Iraq to descend into region-wide chaos engulfing Syria (done) and Iran (still very much on the agenda).
General Wesley Clark divulged the Bush Junta’s plans, which were to attack “seven nations in five years,” barely a week after they allowed the 9/11 attacks to succeed. That’s another story, and America has yet to recover a modicum of self-respect and demand justice.
What No End in Sight captured was a small part of this large imperial agenda for a “new American Century” of aggression and the seizing of vital resources, particularly oil and gas.
While the film talks about Paul Bremer’s presumed incompetence, it fails to mention his 100 Orders slicing up Iraq’s economy like Darth Vader seizing a new star system. Of course, pillaging other countries is glaringly illegal, but we’ve already established the blinders worn by the filmmakers.
These types of key omissions are why I don’t ever trust US documentarians when it comes to foreign policy. They revert to the juvenile “mistakes were made” mindset. They’re not “mistakes” when you do them on purpose: those are crimes, capital crimes punishable by death. They violate every Treaty the country has signed — and which the US helped create in the first place — including the Geneva Conventions and the UN Charter.
The most evil criminals wear suits and they get away with it. One of the reasons they get away with it is because of biased journalism that spins away their crimes so that the public is dissuaded from thinking of US rulers as criminals on par with the worst war criminals one can name. In the end it’s an assault on reality as well as morality.
