No End In Sight

"[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."

"[Archival footage] We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

"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."

"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."

"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 [[w:Under Secretary of Defense for Policy|"

"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 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 civilization. The museum was never protected."

"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]."

"14... out of Iraq's 18 govenors (provinces)... were under rebel control... when general Schwartzkopf... allowed... Saddam Hussein to use... helicopter gunships... to massacre... the rebels... men, women and children."

"We were starting from zero. I mean, if there are no desks, no chairs and no typewriters 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]"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"[Archival footage] His regime aids and protects terrorists, including members of Ạl Qạedạ."

"[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..."