Roger Ebert is making his Oscar night predictions, and it comes as little surprise that he selected No End in Sight, a film that examines the political miscalculations and consequences of the Iraq war, to take the Best Documentary award. [The whole film is available on Google Video]. Although the title is pessimistic and seems polemical, the film searches for answers instead of forcing them down our throats, beginning with a few basic questions: How did the war in Iraq get to how it is today? Who effectively “lost” the war? And who could have “won” it?

From there, a historical narrative develops, ultimately arriving at the expected conclusion that most of the mess can be attributed to the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz cadre (plus L. Paul Bremer and a handful of others). No surprises there, but assigning blame isn’t the only point of the film — at least not in the tradition of Robert Greenwald or Michael Moore. Holding leaders responsible for their failings is more of a means to an end in No End in Sight, en route to discovering why things went so horribly wrong and considering what could have been.

No End in Sight is Charles Ferguson’s directorial debut, and he uses it to tie many of the loose fragments of the Iraq war into a comprehensible historical narrative. Ferguson founded an internet software company and wrote several books on computer technology and the internet while lecturing at MIT and Berkeley. Several books have been published that essentially do the same work as No End in Sight, but no other film has yet attempted to adapt the war to a workable narrative. (Iraq in Fragments, another popular Iraq film from 2006, depicts the war in a different style altogether.)

There are would-be heroes – the people that wanted to, and potentially could have kept Iraq from becoming the mess that it is today – and from them we learn of the three worst post-invasion decisions: 1) sending insufficient troops, 2) allowing looting to take place, and 3) disbanding the Iraqi army. The latter proved to be the most destructive decision, as it created a situation in which more than 100,000 soldiers were simultaneously laid-off, angry, and – worst of all – armed. This is the simple explanation of how the insurgency arose.

In the end, we sympathize with the good guys (General Jay Garner, Ambassador Barbara Bodine, Col. Paul Hughes, several journalists, and even Richard Armitage), even though they were not openly critical of Bremer and the Bush administration when they had the opportunity to effect change. And Ferguson largely gives them a pass, unlike Errol Morris’s treatment of Robert McNamara in Fog of War, for example. With near perfect hindsight, they point out the failings of their superiors – all of which are completely believable – while maintaining that they had been right all along. It’s a minor complaint that I’m willing to live with because, as Ferguson is anxious to point out, the war’s architects all refused to be interviewed for the film, and we have no choice but to make due with a one-sided story. It’s a film that ought to win the Oscar, if not for its narrative then for the astonishing war footage that we are blind to most of the time.

Images by Magnolia Pictures via noendinsightmovie.com