No End in Sight

I went for new sneakers and got myself a whole new perspective on the Iraq war.

It was one of those shopping Saturdays that pulled me into an adjacent movie theater. I had heard good things about the new documentary "No End In Sight."

Good things indeed. It offers the best viewpoint on this nutty conflict we have gotten sucked into it. This is not a Michael Moore production designed to ilicit more laughs than well-rounded opinions. The writer and director, Charles Ferguson, is intelligent and even-handed. His talking heads are not a bunch of lunatics who are ultimately staged and scripted by Michael Moore. They are honest-to-goodness government officials with nary an ax to grind. Some of the names were recognizable even to me from reports on CNN.

It's a story we need to all grasp. This is a mess from 8 days to Sunday. While I am certainly not a rah-rah "everything we do as a country is right" kind of guy, I do trust our leaders, whoever they may be, to try and do the right thing. I have certainly grown more and more moderate in my political stances. When you see "No End in Sight," you will come to the very definitive conclusion that we are essentially leaderless at this historical juncture.

While we went into Iraq on that March day in 2003 with the best of intentions, no one in our government made any preparations for the day after. When we occupied Germany at the end of WWII, there was extensive plans for how we could go about dealing with that country five years down the road. The US Government spent two years developing those contingency plans. In the case of Iraq, similar blueprints were never drawn. Indeed, even the sketchiest plans weren't hatched until one month before we went into Iraq. We were woefully unprepared. And, given that the goofy trinity of power (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld) had about as much military experience as you can get from playing a game of Stratego, we were doomed from the start.

And, everything we have done since has always been essentially one more wrong execution of the right idea. We enacted the totally wrong approach with regard to looting and now the entire country is filled with those psycho insurgents who all have the picture of some unsuspecting US soldier in their crosshairs. The director spends some time conversing with a few Marines. They are not the John Wayne jarhead types. They are intelligent, caring individuals. And they are grossly disillusioned with regard to how inept our military strategists have become. Even though he pulled Rumsfeld from the game last year, Bush is now digging in quicksand in a war that will never ever be won. It's now eternally the wrong place and the wrong time for us. The only question left for discussion comes from the photo shown above.

Where's Shemp?

Dinner last night: Crispy Spicy Beef at the Cheesecake Factory.