I have been attending a lot of documentaries at the  Sundance Film Festival, but the one that has gotten the biggest response so far is No End in Sight which is about the critical decisions made by those running the Iraq operation that almost ensured that the occupaion, stabilization and reconstruction plans would be failures.  First-time filmmaker Charles Ferguson has focused mostly on the 2 months before the invasion and the six months after -- using archival footage, original footage and interviews with key players such as Richard Armitage, Lawrence Wilkerson and others, he illustrates that every step of the way the powers that be, mostly Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bremer, were not only arrogant, but they refused to listen to true experts and people on the ground who knew the consequences of the decisions being made by the ideological desk jockeys in DC.

While there is some new information in the doc about what was being told to the Pentagon and how they decided to ignore the information, what the film does brilliantly is to piece together the news items we hae seen for four years into a comprehensible account of not only what went wrong but, piece by piece, why it did so.  From not beginning the planning for Iraqi reconstruction until just 60 days before the invasion, to disbanding the army, debaathification and taking power away from the soldier on the ground, No End In Sight deftly illustrates each piece.  As one interviewee says, "We were told that there were 2 or 3 ways it could work and 500 ways it could fail -- who knew that we would make all 500 mistakes."

I would love to try to get a screening of the film in DC if anyone has any ideas -- also for a more detailed description of the film and some other write-ups of films I have seen at Sundance, I am blogging at www.punditry.com