No End in Sight: Iraq's Descent Into Chaos

by Charles Ferguson

The first book of its kind to chronicle the reasons behind Iraq's descent into guerilla war, warlord rule, criminality, and anarchy, No End In Sight is a shocking story of wholesale incompetence,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 158648608X
• ISBN13: 9781586486082
• Release Date: February 2008
• Publisher: PublicAffairs
• Length: 641 Pages
• Weight: 2.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.7" x 6.4" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A rhetoric-free look at the failings of the Iraqi invasion.

I cant recommend this film enough. A clear and balanced look at the grave miscalculations made before and during our occupation of Iraq. Everyone should see this film: Dem and Repub alike.

The best

Charles Ferguson's update of his superb film on the Bush war in Iraq captures the problems of the current White House to a tee. Ferguson gives over his book to interviews with top players and it works perfectly. Let them talk and you know the score. This is a terrific book and I recommend it highly.

An Interesting and Informative Summary of Indictable Incompetence!

Interviews from those involved document why we didn't start planning for the occupation until two months before the invasion - and then excluded those who know the most, why we stood by and watched extensive looting, why we naively believed that an expatriate would be quickly accepted as the new leader of a fractured country, why we disbanded the Iraq Army - despite numerous warnings not to do so, why reconstruction monies disappeared by the billions, and why our troops were poorly equipped. Bottom Line: How many lives were needlessly lost by these mistakes that should have been avoided?

or the decline and fall of the US Empire

This is heartbreaking on more fronts than you can readily imagine. If you want to know why the US election in 2008 matters so much around the world, read this book. In unblinking and unbiased assessment, Ferguson details not just the imperial hubris but the brute ignorance of a samll group of capitalist exploiters looking to make one more killing on the backs of those not among the ruling class in America. Instead of Caligula, there is Cheney, and his puppet boy President, whose track record in business and government is that he absolutely ruined financially every organization he was part of because he refused to listen to people who knew better, be it oil, baseball, the state of Texas, the US federal government... Barbara Bodine, on the ground immediately after the fall of the Hussein government and in cahrge of getting the city of Baghdad up and running, put it best: "There were 2 or 3 ways to get it (reconstruction) right and 500 or more to get it wrong, and we got all (500) of them." As a consequence, the designed incompetence that has functioned as a smoke screen for Cheney and his corporate buddies put consecutive bumblers and enablers in a volatile situation and they successfully made absoluetly everything worse: Wolfowicz, Bremer and on to Petraeus. It is a gallery of very bad actors exploiting a disaster with the mentality that it's all going to hell in a hangbasket, so let's grab what we can. The interviews speak for themselves. Rumsfeld refused to speak or comment. The White House could care less. The US is now 1 trillion in the whole and counting, and the sad prospect comes across with blunt and dismaying clarity in the final section of the book. A bloodbath seems ineveitable, unless a military coup, i.e. a controlled bloodbath, is effected by the Sunni military and their foreign backers (but not the US). Short of that, a series of civil wars destabilizing the economic tipping point of the rest of the planet has been unleashed and is all but inevitable. Cheney, Bush, and their cadre will effect what the criminals of other wars never managed - they'll get away with it. Regardless of who wins the Democratic nomination, it is abundantly clear that an immediate pullout is impossible. No matter who wins the general election, the prospect of staying another 100 years, as McCain suggests, is possible and would in much shorter time ruin what is left of the US. The electorate in the US thinks that withdrawal has something to do with bringing soldiers home. Instead, as this book spells out quite intensely, it has to do with just how precariously interconnected the entire globe has become. Whether extrication is possible without intense disaster remians to be seen. If you saw the film, that tells only part of the story. This book will keep you up awake the rest of your life, tossed between extraordinary anger at the exploiters and certain dismay for the generations which follow and will pay the price, one way or another, for the evil done.

A Case Study in War Management

For those unfamiliar with the 2007 film by the same name, No End In Sight documents the management of the war in Iraq. I bought this book at a book signing with the author after his presentation. Charles Ferguson, award-winning documentarian, obtained candid interviews with officials such as Richard Armitage, former deputy secretary of the State Department. These interviews were lengthy, hours in many cases, and the documentary film version only featured a small percentage of the material. Much of the best of this material works even better in book form. The movie is no substitute for the book, which Ferguson wrote later and which benefited from a longer editing process, follow-on trips to the region, deeper and matured analysis, and even more interviews. This is not an analysis of why the U.S. went to war. It is the classic account of what happened once the war began. No End In Sight informs us on how the big decisions were actually made and would probably serve as a textbook for the military academies. Recall that after the Gulf War, which ended in February 1991, the first President Bush went on to lose the election of 1992 despite having been extremely popular during that war. The Iraq War, began in March 2003, would be managed differently. The Iraq war was not going to end before the U.S. presidential election of November 2004. Paul Bremer, who went to Iraq in May 2003, would help see to that. Interviewees tell how the demise of the original plan happened. But nobody wanted to risk themselves personally by going public in the midst of the nation's greatest housing boom. Time ate away at the players Ferguson interviewed. They needed to talk. That's how this book got started. Meet Barbara Bodine, the ambassador placed in charge of the city of Baghdad by the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. She was determined to help the Iraqis to manage their affairs and thereby bring home the troops. Ambassador Bodine had needed, perhaps more than others, to get things right in Baghdad. A capable in-fighter in her own right, Bodine was hung out to dry. Bodine's long career as a stateswoman had become controversial when as Ambassador to the Republic of Yemen, she denied FBI agent John P. O'Neill re-entry into Yemen to continue his command of the FBI investigation into the USS Cole bombing. This was just a turf spat between State and FBI. Some scholars now believe that O'Neill would have uncovered the 9/11 plot in time to save lives, as O'Neill had already put together several important pieces of the puzzle that became 9/11. (O'Neill was subsequently investigated for losing a briefcase and many feel he was forced out of the FBI, not having recovered from losing the turf battle in Yemen. He became the head of security at the World Trade Center, where he was killed in the September 11, 2001 attacks.) Colonel Paul Hughes, a highly decorated former Army colonel, is another Iraq War veteran with tread ma