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No End In Sight

No End In Sight is a 2007 American documentary film that compiles interviews with figures that reveal the follow ups and to the 2003 Invasion of Iraq and the factors causing the subsequent insurgency along with archival footage of the federal American politicians.

Directed and written by Charles Ferguson.
The American Occupation of Iraq - The Inside Story From the Ultimate Insiders(taglines)

George H.W. Bush

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  • [Archival footage] There is another way for the bloodshed to stop... and that is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people... to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator.... to step aside...

Donald Rumsfeld

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  • [Archival footage] The great respect that I have for you Mister President... in this little understood, unfamiliar... war. The first war of the 21st century. It is not well known, it is not well understood, it's complex for people to comprehend. I know, with certainty, to come to the contributions you've made, will be recorded in history.
  • [Archival footage] I picked up a newspaper today... and I couldn't believe it. I read eight headlines... that talked about... "Chaos!" "Violence!" "Unrest!" and it just was Henny Penny, the sky is falling!
  • [Archival footage] Think what's happened in our cities when we've had riots and problems... and looting. Stuff happens!
  • [Archival footage] ...said one was guerrilla war, another was insurgency. Another was unconventional war. [Man calls out; "quagmires?"'] Pardon me? No, that's someone else's business, quagmires. I don't do quagmires.

Condoleeza Rice

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Mullah

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[Speaking at a rally of prayer]
  • We severely condemn criminal action of U.S. forces. We mourn the catastrophe by the hands of evil forces. We demand the execution of Wahabi unbelievers who have the support of the Americans. They have been arrested and admitted their guilt before all who saw them. We demand their execution.

Iraqi men

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  • They executed them for being Sunni. We have been living together until this. This is an Iranian wave against us! An Iranian wave! We are Muslims! How is this possible?! They say they are the Mahdi Army. Is this what the Mahdi Army does? Look at what he's become. [Referring to the corpses in coffins] Look at what he's become! Open the sack! Let them see his face!
  • [Passionately gesticulating in the street, repeatedly] No Saddam...!
  • The museum was never protected. It is a property of our nation, and the treasure of 7,000 years of civilization. Why do they allow it? Iraq's National Library and National Archives... containing thousands of ancient manuscripts... were burnt down.
  • All what was written was keeping in this library. Now we have no national heritage.
  • Three days ago... me and the doctor Jabar Khalil... chairman of the State Board of Antiquities, went to the headquarter of the marine in the Hotel Palestine. We waited there for about four hours... til we met a colonel there. And at that day, he promised that he would send armored cars... to protect what's left from the museum. Three days ago, 'til now nobody came.

Narrator

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  • On May 1, 2003, President George W. Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq and said, "In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed." Four years later, after over 3,000 American deaths and over 20,000 American wounded, Iraq has disintegrated into chaos. Millions of Iraqis have lost access to drinking water, sewage treatment and electricity since the invasion. Baghdad, a city of six million, has been under an 8 p.m. curfew since March of 2006. Over three million Iraqis have fled to neighboring countries. Estimates of the civilian death toll range as high as 600,000. Iraq's two major Muslim groups - the Shiite majority and Sunni minority - are increasingly at war. A month after September 11th, the United States entered Afghanistan in search of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. But even before the Afghan war, several senior administration officials were looking at another target - one that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.
  • The Iran - Iraq war ends in stalemate in 1988. In 1990, Saddam invades Kuwait. A US lead coalition expelled him... in a war masterminded by Dick Cheney, then Secretary of Defense... Paul Wolfowitz, then Under Secretary of Defense for Policy... and Colin Powell, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The first President Bush urges the Iraqi's to stage a coup against Saddam.
  • Yet when Iraq's southern Shiite's rise up the administration allows Saddam to repress them
  • The 1991 armistice requires Iraq to disarm. but Saddam refuses to comply. As a results Iraq's economy crumbles under a UN embargo instituted in 1993 and continued by the Clinton administration Saddam's favored elite remain wealthy but ordinary Iraqis are plunged into extreme poverty and many turned fundamentalist Islam. In 1993, when George Bush senior visits Kuwait... Saddam attempts to assassinate him. Seven years later, his son is elected president of the US.
  • George W. Bush's foreign policy inner circle - Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz - set the administration on course for war with Iraq. Condoleezza Rice sided with them. Colin Powell and Richard Armitage - the only senior officials with combat experience - expressed concerns privately, but supported the administration in public.
  • During World War Two, the United States started planning the occupation of Germany two years in advance. But the Bush administration didn't created the organization that would manage the occupation of Iraq until 60 days before the invasion. ORHA, the organization for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance reported directly to defense Secretary Rumsfeld.
  • In formulating its views on post-Saddam Iraq, the administration relied heavily on a man named Ahmed Chalabi. Since 1992, Chalabi had been president of the Iraqi National Congress, or INC. Widely viewed with suspicion, Chalabi had been convicted in Jordan of a huge bank fraud. The intelligence community found his information unreliable, or even fraudulent.
  • The Iraq National Museum in Baghdad... number one on ORHA's list... contained some of the worlds most important artefacts... of early human civilization.
  • Chalabi asserted that post-war Iraq would be pro-American and easily stabilized, particularly if Chalabi himself was in charge.
  • The State Department's "Future of Iraq" project - a 13-volume study on post-war Iraq - was ignored by The Pentagon.
  • In the months leading up to the invasion, a debate over troop levels required in Iraq had been privately brewing between the military leadership and Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, believed that a force of under 100,000 troops would be sufficient for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. A month before the invasion, the fight over troop levels became public, as the chief of staff of the Army, Eric Shinseki, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, ignoring pressure from Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.
  • Even more remarkable that the decision that the decision to disband the army is how that this decision was made... secretly... over a single week, by a few men in Washington, D.C. who had never been to Iraq. They did not consult with the military commanders in Iraq, not with the joint Chiefs of staff, ORHA, the State Department, the CIA, the National Security Council, or even, apparently the president of the United States. Walter Slocombe and Paul Hughes were reinterviewed in order to reconstruct the events leading to the dissolution of the army.
  • The Iraq National Museum in Baghdad, number one on ORHA's list, contained some of the world's most important artifacts of early human civilisation. The museum was never protected.

Samantha Powers

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  • When you see the same architects of those policies... on the one hand, talking about getting right what they had gotten wrong, back in 1991, you know... finishing the job. I was tempting to say, well... maybe they've learned.
  • The '80s really summed up, in a very foretelling document from 1987, it said, uh; "Human rights and chemical weapons use aside..." uh, comma, [glances upwards in a tic of humorous observance] "...our interests run roughly parallel to those of Iraq.
  • A number of the most generals came to the Channal Hotel, the UN headquarters and they were very explicit of the consequences of letting this order stand and of marginalizing this incredibly powerful segment of society would be an insurgency. A Lebanese diplomat named Hassan Salami turned to his colleagues as the generals walked away after one of their meetings and said; "I see bullets in their eyes" [Repeats Salami quote for dramatic emphasis].

Faisal Al-Istrabadi

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Barbara Bodine

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  • We were starting from zero. I mean, if there are no desks, no chairs and no typwriters left... Where do we go and meet the Iraqis to start working? There was no structure left. Physical structure or bureaucratic structure. We had no phone list, we had no phones for a while, so I guess having no phone list was not really that important. We had no information, we had no place to go... we did not know who to contact. Not the best way to... Not the best way to start an occupation.
  • When we were first starting the reconstruction, there were 500 ways to do it wrong and two or three ways to do it right. What we didn't understand is that we were going to go through all 500.
  • We're talking people coming in with industrial cranes and walking off with parts of a power plant.
  • We had done... a list of twenty sites that we thought needed to be protected. Um, historical, cultural, artistic, religious. And we provided that, and it really made no difference, whatsoever. [Titlecard: The oil ministry was the only building protected by the U.S. ministry. None of the sites on ORHA's list was protected]

Chris Albritton

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  • It was such a confusing, loud, noisy, scary, hopeless place, and it was all put together. I'd see kids with ski caps on that said FBI on it and others would be giving me the big thumbs up. And you'd have other young men who probably fedayeen in civilian clothes giving me very hard stares... and... and... you know, always trying to size me up and always covering up the license plate of the car.

Gerald Burke

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  • Baghdad gets 10 bombings, 10 to 15 bombings a day and it's maybe 50 KIA. But I suspect that's drastically under-reported. We're probably only capturing a third of what's actually happening.

Omar Fekeiki

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  • The north and the west parts are controlled by the insurgents.
  • I've seen people welcoming the Coalition troops, because we thought everything was planned, everything was prepared.
  • I just... was waiting for the war to happen because it was the... the only ray of hope I had to look for... And when it happened, I was... excited, that things would move slowly... but... towards better circumstances.
  • From here we can't change anything, because it's out of control now. I don't have future plans for being in Iraq. I don't see the bit of light at the end of the tunnel yet.

Nir Rosen

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  • There is a belief that the Americans actually encourage the looting or wanted to happen, the destruction of our country. How could they let this happen? Whether you're Sunni or Shia, you're outrage about the looting.

Marc Galasco

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  • At best, I think, they were liars. And at worst, they were provocateurs. If it's an NCI source, it was always looked at very, very skeptically by the analysts. But that wasn't the case with the policymakers.
  • I'm standing there watching these insurgents pull out rockets and mortars and bombs from these weapons caches that the Iraqis had stashed everywhere. And you go to the British or to the U.S., whoever's there, with your little GPS receiver and say; "Hey, guys. We found like 18,000 million tons of bombs", and there are a bunch of Iraqis there with AK-47s taking it away. Probably not the best idea. Here's where it's located. And they say to you, we just don't have enough people to cover it. And it just - I couldn't believe it. It wasn't the right answer. Go there and take care of it, for your security, for the civilians' security - for everybody. It's just a bad idea.

Seth Moulton

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  • I joined the Marine because I always thought it as a really important job... and didn't feel I'll be content with myself going through life knowing that other people had fought for my freedom.
  • I mean, you had huge ammunition dumps that weren't guarded until several weeks, if not a couple of months, after major combat actions ended.
  • This is not just people stealing from grocery stores. I mean, this was people chipping concrete, walls into little pieces so they can take the rebar out.
  • We could certainly have stopped the looting if that was our assigned task.
  • Are you telling me that's the best America can do?... No, don't tell me that... That makes me angry. Don't tell the Marines who fought for a month in Najaf that. Don't tell the Marines who are still fighting every day in Fallujah that that's the best America can do. That Moqtada al-Sadr, a terrorist leader is now a rising political figure. That makes me angry.

David Yancey

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  • I joined the army to ah... support my country...and ah... thought it was a good thang to do, ya know...

Hugo Gonzalez

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  • It was... an honor... to go there and help my fellow soldiers... to do... what they telled us to go and do there maybe... take out a... dictator... out of the... power... to reestablish the democracy. To be in the bucket, if anything happens, you gonna get it.

Dick Cheney

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  • His regime aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda.

Paul Bremer

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  • General Garner and I are pledged to working very closely together.

Sérgio Vieira de Mello

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  • I'm listening. I'm listening to political leaders. [De Mello later perishes in the Canal Hotel bombing on August 19, 2003]

George Tenet

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  • We continue to watch Iraq's involvement in terrorist activities.

Colin Powell

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  • What I want to bring to your attention today is the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network.

James Bamford

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  • Iraq has drones. And they're going to take these drones, and they're going to put them on these ships, and they're going to arm the drones with chemical and biological weapons, and they're going to fly these drones off the ships and attack the East Coast of the United States. You know, this is absolute fantasyland. These people were, I don't know what they were smoking, but it must have been very good.

George Packer

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  • If you want to date the beginning of the disaster of post-war Iraq, it would be January 20, 2003, when Bush signed, without - as far as I can tell - any real discussion within the White House or the administration, National Security Presidential Directive No. 24, which gave control of post-war Iraq to the Pentagon. That document essentially made Donald Rumsfeld the main actor on post-war Iraq. And so, the plan was, essentially, we'll stay for three or four months. We will install a government made up of exiles and led by Ahmed Chalabi. And then, in August or September of 2003, we will begin a drastic reduction of troops.
  • The Iraqis were... waiting to see what was this was going to bring them. The presence of the Americans had not been rejected yet, by the Iraqis.
  • Hard to imagine." Anyone who had any experience in the interventions of the '90s knew that the opposite was true. You need X numbers of soldiers per 1,000 citizens, simply to provide a modicum of security. But Paul Wolfowitz couldn't imagine it.

Joost Hiltermann

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  • This war was conceived by a very small group of people inside the Bush administration. They had an entirely naive vision of what Iraq was and what Iraqis would do once the regime fell.

Paul Hughes

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  • Larry DiRita addressed us in one forum and said, by the end of August of 2003, we will have all but 25,000 to 30,000 troops out of Iraq. I heard him say that in a room full of people. And I turned to my colleagues and I said, "This guy doesn't know what he's talking about. It's physically impossible."
  • I wasn't in my office but two hours. A young M.P. comes to see me, and he goes, "Colonel Hughes, I've got some Iraqi officers that want to meet with you." And I was thinking to myself, "Holy cow. What do I tell these guys?" So I finally came downstairs and met with them in the rotunda of the Republican Palace. Colonel Meijan says, "Colonel Paul, what happened?" And I said to him, "I don't know what happened. I have no idea how this came about." And he said, "All these soldiers. They now have no recourse. They have no money coming to them. What are they supposed to do?"
  • These guys all knew where those munitions were. They knew how to get to those weapons and how to use them. And you've just sent them away and said they don't exist? Common sense tells me you don't do that.
  • Just imagine the room/the suite we're that we're sitting in, and all that you have is just concreted walls, everything is gone.
  • Within the group itself, we probably had... five... who spoke any amount of Arabic.
  • There are nights when I don't sleep very well.

Barry Posen

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  • There was an awful lot of thinking at State Department. There were board-feet of volumes on how we should do this. And almost none of this was integrated into the Pentagon's thinking.

Lawrence Wikerson

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  • The secretary's frustration, along with my own, grew as we watched our careful planning, our detailed planning, essentially discarded, and the people who had been involved in it essentially discarded, so that more loyal, in line with the Republican Party's views, and so forth, people could be appointed to key positions in Iraq.
  • I can't hold my peace any longer.

Jay Garner

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  • John Abizaid and Dave McKiernan were constantly telling me, "How about hurrying up? Let's get the army back. Let's get their army back."
  • I had put people out on the street walking around asking: "Do you know anybody in medicine... ministry of Health...Interior...Education...?"

David McKiernan

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  • There is a large number of former Iraqi soldiers that are unemployed now. That is a huge concern, not only from a security standpoint, but from an economic standpoint. They're not earning an income right now.

Paul Wolfowitz

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  • It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces in his army. Hard to imagine.

Eric Shinseki

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  • We're talking about post hostilities, control over a piece of geography that's fairly significant, with the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems. And so, it takes significant ground force presence.

Paul Eaton

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  • Did General Shinseki get it right? He was asked for his best military opinion. And his experience exceeds mine. He commanded our forces in Bosnia. He did it for a year-plus. He knows what he's talking about.

Richard Armitage

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  • Secretary Powell and, to the same extent, myself, we argued for more and more troops. And we made some difference. But ultimately, it didn't seem that we made enough of a difference.

Ali Fadhil

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  • People who die, are lucky, but people living, are dead while they are alive.
  • This is what it is. This is how we live it. This is how we see it. This is how we smell it and feel it. It's not a situation that you can say, "Let's try this. It will help. Let's try this, it will help." No, it's not.

Aida Ussayran

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  • We have so many kinds of militias, you have the Mahdi militia, you have the Badr militia, you have many militias in this country, and they are all very democratic in arresting people and killing them.
  • When I say goodbye to my husband, I think I'm not coming back.

Amazia Baram

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  • If Iraq disintegrates and becomes an arena of civil war, much of it will become like little Afghanistan, it's where terrorists from all over the world will find refuge.

Yarislov Troflimov

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  • If Iraq goes back to some sort of Islamo-fascist regime like we had in under the Taliban in Afghanistan, then we are back to September the 10th, 2001, except, a much larger scale, and you know, with billions of dollars of oil money in their disposal

Dialogue

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Paul: [Referring to the day of September 11 attacks] On September 11, 2001 was a very clear, bright beautiful day. I had just gotten back from The Pentagon barbershop walked by my office and glanced up on the television screen, and... there was... one of the twin-towers burning. We never heard the plane coming in at least I didn't. Suddenly, the whole world turned upside down. I saw that fire-ball... and... I tell you... I saw that.. and I said to my self I'm going to die today. That plane had come directly under our section of the offices. The Army budget office. where 38 Army employees where killed was directley beneath us. and the Navy's new command center, was two floors beneath us everybody was killed in those two sections. This was something Osama Bin Laden had orchestrated... because he was the only terrorist I could think of... who could have coordinated this kind of activity.
Interviewer: So you had this thought think immediately?
Paul: Immediately. Immediately.
Marc: When the plane hit the Pentagon, I was in the building and then... I guess, the next big thing that sort of happened, was we... we immediately got tasked... to see if we could draw any relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda. I went right away... to the counter terrorism... group... to their chief Iraqi analyst. And the two of us sat down over the a few days... and looked at... all the historical reporting that we could go through.
Interview: In which you conclude?
Marc: Well, we concluded that there was no relation.
Interviewer: Did anybody warn you that disbanding the army in this way would, and was, fueling major growth of the insurgency.
Walter: Certainly not in those terms.
Interviewer: Nobody said that to you?
Walter: No. I also don't believe it's true... but nobody said it, nobody said...
Interviewer: You don't believe it's true?
Walter: No, I don't believe that it's true.
Paul: These guys called themselves; The Independent Military Gathering. The Independent Military Gathering had a 100,000 on the 9th of May
Interviewer: And they already a 100,000 signatures?
Paul: Yeah, this was a nation wide effort. They brought me... I wanted the printouts, all the discs and they gave them to me, and I took them back with me to ORHA. I said; "Here we go", and I told Walt and his crew, I've got these things waiting for you.
Walter: Hughes believed that he had an opening to the Iraqi officers, who would have been prepared to re-constitute the units
Interviewer: He already had obtained registration statements from 137,000
Walter: No he hadn't. He hadn't done that. He may have, he may have wri- gotten- may have- cause- cause nobody could have gotten statements from a 130,000 from anybody from anywhere in the chaos that prevailed at that point.
Paul: They had a courier system that was set up that was running around metropolitan Baghdad, of Mosul, of Basra, and of Kirkuk.
Walter: I don't understand, I mean- I mean... I- given how difficult it was to do anything, just... operationally or organisationally, nobody had 137,000.
Paul: Walt, wasn't there. He never met these people, he had no clue
Interviewer: So, did you tell Slocombe this? That this was going on?
Paul: Yes, he knew this. He and his staff, knew this.
Interviewer: Ambassador Bremner, you had already made him a recommendation and he had already made at least a tentative agreement to Secretary Rumsfeld about the dissolution of the army
Walter: On the emission of the order he finally issued, yes.
Interviewer: Yes, on May 9th.
Walter: Yes.
Interviewer: Okay.
Paul: The 9th of May, was the last time that I had a conversation with Walt Slocombe.
Walter: We talked on the phone before we went out.
Interviewer: Did you ever say to him, or thinking of disbanding the Iraqi army and stopping your efforts to recall the Iraqi army?
Walter: One of things I did was, just...
Interviewer: Did you ever say that to him?
Walter: In those words, no.
Paul: The conversation was; "I'm coming over, I'm concerned about where I am going to be living, you know, am I gonna have a motor pool with me? My own cooks? Yadda, yadda, yadda. I mean, there was nothing about the Iraqi military and I would've given him an update...I-
Interviewer: So he didn't say, he had come to the tentative conclusion and recommended to Bremer to dissolve the army?
Paul: Absolutely not, cause if he had said that, I would've been on Jay's doorstep post-haste.
Interviewer: So you guys came up with the idea and recommended to Secretary Rumsfeld without having spoken to any of the senior people in Iraq responsible for these matters?
Walter: That it was subject to and precisely because of the fact that it had, and actually been only thought of for a few days because Bremer was going out and Bremer said to Rumsfeld; "Before I make a recommendation, I will talk to the people on the ground".
Titlecard: Bremer arrived in Baghdad on May 12. His consultations with the people on the ground were brief to nonexistant.
Interviewer: Was that a surprise to you, that this had been discussed with-
Jay: No, it hadn't been discussed with me, it was a surprise, a big surprise.
Interviewer: Really?
Jay: Hmm-mmm.
Interviewer: You never called up Garner and said; "We're thinking of doing this, do you think this is a good idea?"
Walter: I don't think I did.
Interviewer: Don't you think that might've been a mistake?
Walter: No.
Interviewer: What was your reaction? What did you think?
Jay: I thought it was a poor idea. I thought we needed to bring them back.
Titlecard: The military commanders were also opposed to Bremer's decision.
Jay: John Abizaid and Dave Kiernan were... constantly telling me; "How about hurrying up?" "Let's get the army back!"
David: [Archival footage] There is a large number of former Iraqi soldiers who are unemployed now. That is a huge concern not only from a security standpoint but from an economic standpoint. They are not earning an income right now.
Paul: And there's the announcement that the Iraqi army had been disbanded. And I was floored. And at this particular point in time, Walt Slocum and his team still were not in Iraq.
Interviewer: Colonel Hughes was the person who was in charge of dealing with the Iraqi army because none of the people from your advisory group had yet showed up in Iraq including you. Didn't you think that maybe you should speak to him about this?
Walter: I talked with him alot.
Interviewer: That's funny. He says that the order to disbanding the army came as a complete surprise to him, and that he learned of it by watching it on television in an airport.
Walter: That is extr- well, if that's so, that's surprising to me, but it's possible. I mean, I talked to him - we worked together on a daily basis during the time I was there.
Paul: He came on the 16th of May
Interviewer: Sixteenth of May.
Paul: ...for a four-day, whirlwind tour of the country.
Interviewer: Oh.
Paul: And then he left. And he didn't come back until the middle of June.
Interviewer: Really.
Paul: Correct. He didn't tell you that?
Titlecard: Jay Garner and Paul Hughes weren't the only ones surprised by the disbanding order.
Jay: I got a call from the office of Secretary Defense in late January in their last meeting handling humanitarian affairs, reconstruction.
Narrator: Retired Jay Garner, was appointed to run ORHA. In the first Gulf War, he had commanded 22,000 soldiers responsible for humanitarian operations in the Kurdish zone of Northern Iraq. This time, he would be running the entire country.
Interviewer: Did you think you were prepared to run Iraq?
Jay: I don't think we were ever prepared, I mean, er, er, uh, a task of that magnitude takes years to prepare. But of course nobody had years.
Interviewer: What's your estimate of the number of people in Iraq who have been active at some level in the insurgency.
Gerald: Active in some level, uh, if they, if you say, supporting, providing safe haven to, uh, potentially well over 100,000
[Archival footage of George W. Bush] The CIA laid out, uh, several scenarios, and said... life could be lousy, life could be ok, life could be better.
Robert: The president hadn't even read it. Not even the one page summary over which we worked so hard to reduce these findings to a single readable page.
Interviewer: President had not even read the executive summary?
Robert: Correct.
Richard: This idea to disband the entire army was one that came as quite a surprise to me.
Interviewer: I see. What was your reaction when you learned of it?
Richard: I thought we had just created a problem, and we had a lot of out-of-work soldiers. The president had already made a different decision, which was to keep battalion and below in force.
Interviewer: Earlier, yes. But...
Richard: Well, within, I mean, a couple of days' proximity. I think most of us were caught relatively unaware or completely unaware by this disbanding of the army. Secretary Powell found out about it as I did.
Interviewer: Which was how?
Richard: Just as we found out one day, Jerry announced that he disbanded the army.
Interviewer: How about Condoleezza Rice?
Richard: She'll have to speak for herself.
Interviewer: Do you have any idea how much the president knew about these decisions in advance, whether he...
Richard: I've said before, I don't know if he was informed by Mr. Rumsfeld or not - no idea.
Barbara: I got a phonecall on my cellphone from someone at the State Department telling me that Rich Armitage was looking for me and wanted me in Washington, right now.
Narrator: Barbara Bodine was placed in charge of Baghdad only three weeks before the war. She was a career foreign service officer who had served in Yemen, Iraq and had been a hostage in Kuwait five months after Saddam's invasion in 1990. She was one of the few State Department's Middle East experts that the Pentagon allowed into Iraq.
Richard: She was one of the few we could get in. I thought they initially made a mistake. They thought they had a woman that'd be an easy mark but Barbara was one of toughest members in the service.
Narrator: By 2003, army colonel Paul Hughes had worked in the Pentagon for six years, doing planning and strategy work for senior department officials.
Paul: I wound up being assigned to the... Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian assistance... under Jay Garner. And I was the director of strategic policy, for him.
Titlecard: ORHA started work at the Pentagon 50 days before the invasion of Iraq.
Paul: We were given a suite off offices that had been unoccupied for a couple of years. Had no computers in it, you have people showing up daily asking; "Where do I sit?"
Barbara: They had no staff. I had no personnel, I had nothing from... either a senior deputy down to a secretary.
Lawrence: There is only one meeting at the National Defense University... and it was the... I think consensus opinion. of the people who went to that meeting... with whom I spoke afterwards. That hey... "This is a crazy". that was our first meeting... and we're not given a whole lot of confidence by that first meeting... because, essentially... we didn't do anything except meet each other.
Barbara: It was completely unstructured. There were no plans. There truly were... no plans.
Paul: On the 16th of March, ORHA flew out to Kuwait City. We had 167 people that flew with us. 167 people that were to essentially become the government of a country of 25 million.
[Titlecard scene of Saddam statue being toppled entitled and dated; "BAGHDAD, APRIL 9th, 2003" ]
Seth: After the fall of Baghdad... we had no idea what really was gonna happen and there certainly didn't seem to be much of a plan What we generally were being told is that we'd be getting back on the ships within a month or two... of..., essentially conquering Iraq.
Titlecard: As American forces entered the capital, looting broke out everywhere.
Barbara: While we were in Kuwait, we were as glued to the TV, as everyone else. There was the realization... that there was absolute lawlessness and chaos going on in Iraq.
Chris: The Americans weren't doing anything. They, would sit at certain intersections, but, they wouldn't actually get out of their humvees or out of the tanks and really do much.
Omar: Time passed and we didn't see any progress. The only progress we found is the uncontrolled freedom looters had... to loot all the governmental buildings and even private owned companies.
George: The looting was partly a factor of the troop levels... and the sense that Rumsfeld communicated to his commanders... and his commanders communicated down the chain... to the...platoon and company level. That... we were not there to run Iraq. We were there to get rid of the regime, and get out.
David: We are not under martial law here.
Paul: In his order, General McKiernan was not told... to establish martial law. Not once was martial law declared.
David: I just... I'll tell you honestly. We're in a transition period. I mean, there is an Iraqi civil law... but there is no... You just heard we just opened up they first two courts today... so, I mean when we're starting at nothing.
Paul: Had martial law been declared, which would have been... authorized under the 4th Geneva Convention... maybe we would have had... a bit more security.
Seth: We are a platoon of marines, I mean we could... we could certainly have stopped the looting, if we... if that was our assigned task.
James: The greatest mystery... of postwar Iraq involves that month or so after the fall of Baghdad... Why the US didn't do anything to... to control the looting. Because in a way... everything that has been a problem since then, started in that first month.
Richard: People at the National Security Council Secretary Powell, myself and others... CIA director, did express concern about the looting.
Interviewer: Did you express any concern to President Bush?
Richard: I was at a meeting where it was expressed by my boss. Tell me what Mr. Powell said at that meeting. Well you know, it's not the way we generally work. Our advice to the president is generally kept that way, private to the president.
Barbara: The word came from Washington... that we're not getting involved in that we're not going to stop the looting... we're not doing police work... that's not what we're here for. And I think...
Interviewer: So there were explicit instructions from Washington... to not interfere with the looting.
Barbara: [Emphatically] Yes.
Titlecard: The looting of Baghdad quickly transformed into organized, violent, large scale destruction of the city.
George: Hospitals, governmental offices, universities, ministries... One CPA estimate had the cost of the looting at 12 billion dollars (i.e 12,000 million). That was the revenue for Iraq... in 2003-2004.
Donald: The images you are seeing on television over and over and over and it's the same picture of the same person carrying a vase out of a building...
Barbara: I think that was probably the day we lost the Iraqis.
Donald: ...and you think; my goodness, were there that many vases?! Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?!
Barbara: That's when it became very clear, that... this liberation didn't really have anything to do with the average Iraqi.
[Archival footage of Eric Shinseki testifying before Congress]
Senator Carl Levin, D-Michigan: General Shinseki, could you give us some idea as to the magnitude of the Army's force requirement for an occupation of Iraq?
Eric Shineski: Something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers are probably a figure that would be required.
Donald Rumsfeld: What is, I think, reasonably certain is, the idea that it would take several hundred thousand U.S. forces, I think is far from the mark.

Cast

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Archival footage

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