The Sundance Film Festival has started a few days ago. It promises very strong and interesting movies and documentaries. One of them is No End in Sight, which is a documentary filmed in Iraq and the States and is trying to uncover the truth about where everything started to deteriorate in Iraq after the invasion.

According to the documentary, it all started before the invasion!

I had the chance to go to the first screening of the documentary, which was in the festival in Park City, Utah. It was quite an experience.

The theater was full. More than 300 people came to see the film.

“What you are about to see isn’t a light comedy,” Charles Ferguson, the director of the movie, told the audience before the film started. I thought what he said was perfect, especially when there were some people who came with popcorn and drinks to see a film talking about the massacre of dozens of thousands of people!

“I wouldn’t be appropriate to say ‘I hope you enjoy it,’ ” he added.

The movie starts with footage from before the invasion. Footage from the preparations of “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Remember the old days? When we all were optimistic that the invasion of Iraq was going to topple a horrible dictator and help to install a democracy in the heart of the Middle East!

A few minutes into the film, Donald Rumsfeld appears speaking and addressing President Bush.

“The contributions that you’ve made will be recorded by history,” Rumsfeld said releasing a wave of laughter in the theater.

As the film goes on, you will see the usual from Iraq, scenes from car bombings with bodies burned scattered in the street, people terrified by a car bomb and running away from the scene, buildings that once were ministries where people worked everyday and now turned into rubble and many other familiar footage from post-war Iraq. One thing you would find new or rare in this film and that is the truth!

No End in Sight is the first documentary from Iraq that I’ve seen that is showing American and Iraq officials admitting the mistakes that were done and saying that they knew they were making mistakes all the way, but no one in the American administration cared at the time. It is shocking to listen to some of the top American officials, who were involved in the invasion of Iraq, talking about how unorganized it seemed to them, yet continued! Continued invading a nation with thousands of years of heritage and civilization and with no attention to any consequences that the people might suffer from because the most important thing for the American administration is to announce “mission accomplished” as soon as they could to show the world how easy and fast it was to topple a dictator.

As the film starts to show footage from before the war to remind us why the decision was made to invade Iraq, the audience chuckled. They heard Bush and Powel justifying the invasion as a way to safe the world from a regime that supported al-Qaeda and provided safe haven to it members and produced “the most lethal weapons that have ever been made,” as Bush said, they laughed because…. Well…we all know why!

One official said that the administration was going around telling congressmen and other officials that Iraq was producing weapons of mass destruction and is going to load them into ships and sail to the shores of the United States and attack Washington D.C. and New York. He couldn’t believe what they were saying because it sounded like something that doesn’t happen in the real world.

“I don’t know what they were smoking,” he said with a serious face, “but it must have been good.”

The State department prepared a 13-volume study on how possibly to handle Iraq after the invasion. The administration didn’t read it, interviewees in the documentary said.

Ambassador Barbara Bodine, former U.S. ambassador to Yemen and was in charge of Baghdad for the U.S. occupation and for a few months after the invasion, said that had they read the study, which was detailed, the situation could have been much much better now.

Bodine, who is one of the U.S. officials interviewed in the film and I had great talks with her over Iraq and the situation then and now, said that she was deployed to Baghdad just a few weeks before she actually left to Iraq. No one cared weather she knew the country or what to do there. When she arrived, she said, she didn’t have a phone list to start with, like many other occupation officials in Iraq. They didn’t even have phones, they didn’t have places to stay in, they didn’t have computers or proper internet. That is how they invaded Iraq!

When the looting started, Bodine said, the U.S. civilian and military administrations in Iraq were precisely told not to intervene and leave the Iraqis to do what they wanted.

At the beginning, there were enough U.S. troops to stop the first wave of looting. But all were ordered not to stop it.

“We area Marine platoon,” said Seth Moulton, a Marine lieutenant whose platoon was among the first to enter Baghdad and was interviewed in the film. “We could prevent the looting if they asked us.” I had good talks with Moulton too because he was in Park city.

The Coalition Provisional Authority, led by Paul Bremer, totaled the cost of the looting as $12 billion! And many U.S. officials who were in Baghdad at the time believe that the looting was the seed to the insurgency!

“Stuff happens,” Rumsfeld appears in the film as saying. The now-famous phrase that summarized the arrogance and stupidity of the Bush administration in two words.

I liked the title of the documentary. “No End in Sight.” It is unfortunately perfect!

It is clear that the marriage between the U.S. administration and the Iraqi government is on its way to end. The exchange of accusations and sharp criticism between the two former love-birds has accelerated to be the talk of the town in the last few weeks.

Between President Bush thinking the execution of Saddam Hussein last month was “fumbled” by militiamen barking in the name of their leader, Muqtada al-Sadr, and “go to hell” chanting, and Condoleezza Rice announcing that the Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government is working on "borrowed time," Maliki was left to just defending his position by accusing the United States of helping to “give morale boosts for the terrorists.”

Forget about the average Iraqis, whose number is decreasing inside Iraq either because they are leaving the country or getting killed everyday, the two governments are having a typical Middle Eastern, dictator and totalitarian way of handling issues. Because to forget the real problem and only concentrate on saving face is just for such governments, not suitable for two administrations that claim to be pioneers in democracy each in its part of the world.

Bush is upset that the Iraqi government isn’t listening to what he and his advisers are saying. And Maliki on his turn is upset that Bush’s administration is going public in criticizing his government.

This is not news for someone who’s been watching the game since the beginning. If we go back to Ibrahim Jaafari’s government, which was the first Shiite government in Iraq and was seated in late April 2005, we will find that the American administration wasn’t satisfied with it also. In fact as time went, the Bush administration voiced out its concerns that Jaafari’s government wasn’t dealing with the Shiite militias problems as strictly as it should have. Also, the Bush administration complained about the fact that Jafari’s government did not work to represent and include all the Iraqi factions in its body, the problem of expelling Baathists from the government and government jobs was obvious, not giving the Sunnis enough representation in the parliament was a concern to the U.S. administration, security was a concern, not being able to train and prepare enough Iraqi security forces was a major issue and many other problems that we see now, too.

When Jaafari was asked why the Iraqi security forces weren’t able to take over the security responsibility from the multinational forces, his answer was that “they are not properly equipped.”

“If we succeed in implementing the agreement between us to speed up the equipping and providing weapons to our military forces,” Maliki told reporters yesterday, “I think that within three to six months our need for the American troops will dramatically go down. That's on the condition that there are real strong efforts to support our military forces and equipping them and arming them," suggesting that the U.S. is not serious in its efforts to help Iraqi security forces.

After the U.S. administration got tired of Jaafari’s government last year, they pressed the Iraqi parliament not to reelect him. In fact, Zelmai Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq and its main player in the political arena, went crazy from one Iraqi politician’s house to another threatening to suspend the American support to the Iraqis if Jaafari was reelected. In a wicked trick, Jaafari suggested one of his party’s members, Nouri al-Maliki, to be the PM and threatened to boycott the whole political process if Maliki weren’t to become the first full-term Prime Minister of Iraq. [at the time, I wrote an entry, Have You Ever Seen A Turbaned Man With A Tie!, saying that electing Maliki would not mean any change because he is a member of Jaafari’s party and the problems will continue because Jaafari will stay as a decision maker but behind the stage.]

Now, the U.S. administration is facing the exact same problems it had with Jaafari’s government.

Because the U.S. administration cannot take anymore of Maliki’s inability to rule, Bush is accusing Maliki’s government of being ethnically-motivated and driven by the feel of revenge, for example he said that executing Hussein “looked like it was kind of a revenge killing." And Maliki thinks that Bush is forced to say that because of the public opinion pressure. Maliki now believes that the insurgents were able to terrify and foil the U.S. administration efforts in the Middle East and Iraq, “"But I can tell you that they have not defeated the Iraqi government," he said to reporters yesterday.

This exchange of criticism and angry statements is not new. Jaafari did the same thing when he felt the pressure of the U.S. administration for his failure to govern the country.

The problem is not Jaafari or Maliki. I think the main obstacle is that the U.S. is stuck between two main issue in Iraq: first is the fact that they have to hand over the country to its majority to rule, in this case it is the Shiite. And second is that the U.S. administration will never, never be satisfied with a Shiite ideology. It hasn’t worked and will not. What did you think when you replaced Jaafari by Maliki? Even with the Governing Council, from July 2003 until April 2004, the problems weren’t with the Kurdish members but they were with the Shiites [giving that there wasn’t a real powerful Sunni representation in the council.]

And for this very reason, we see now that the U.S. administration is trying to include back more Sunnis and the Baathists in the government. I can’t tell if that is another mistake yet because I don’t know who is going back so far, but I think it is a new strategy that shows the American frustration with what the Bush and Bremer mistakes have created in Iraq.

The Iraqi government “has still got some maturation to do,” Bush said yesterday. And I believe this is the beginning of complete turnaround in what kind of government the U.S. administration is going to keep/support in Iraq.

In the coming few months, we will see surprising changes in the Iraqi political picture, including a new Prime Minister. Maybe, and I am saying maybe, it will be the first correct step to be taken in the way to a real Iraqi government and to quell the violence.

For the first time maybe ever, I liked what Bush said. It is a rare moment of joy that I will cherish for the rest of this week!

In his speech addressing the Americans tonight, Bush was clear, to the point and not BSing. He, for the first time since I’ve started to listen to his speeches, took responsibility for the failures and mistakes his administration has committed in Iraq.

“Mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me,” he said. He told the nation that the American troops have followed the orders and exhausted every efforts they had trying to make Iraq a story of an American success in the Middle East. It wasn’t their fault that Iraq turned to be a black spot in the U.S. colonial history, he indicated.

“They have done everything we have asked them to do.”

Way to go Mr. President!

But when he started to lay out his plan for a safer Iraq, he made it clear that his new strategy will make the same mistakes over and over and the situation in Iraq will never be better.

One of the main reasons why the old security plans haven’t worked in Baghdad, he said, is that there weren’t enough Iraqi and American troops to maintain security in the areas that were cleansed by security forces. Therefore, he said, the insurgents came back to their havens after the Americans left.

To solve this problem, Bush said that he “committed more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq,” most of them will be deployed to Baghdad. The plan is to “have the force levels we need to hold the areas that have been cleared.” There are already more than 130,000 American Troops in Iraq now.

But for how long Mr. President? What would happen when the American troops leave “the areas that have been cleared?” Do you even care?

To insure the Americans that this new strategy is going to work, he quoted Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki addressing the Iraqis last week as saying “The Baghdad security plan will not provide a safe haven for any outlaws regardless of their sectarian or political affiliation.”

Have you ever thought Mr. President, why would Maliki be sincere this time? He’s been in this position for seven months now and he’s been saying this same line since then. Three Baghdad security plans have been announced under this very same slogan and failed because it wasn’t true. Why would you think this time it will work? But you don’t care also because your audience is not the Iraqis. It is the Americans, who made it clear through their representatives in the congress that they are tired of the news from Iraq and don’t want to hear about it anymore.

Bush said that “Al-Qaeda terrorists and Sunni insurgents recognize the moral danger that the Iraq’s elections posed for their cause and they responded with outrageous acts of murder aimed at innocent Iraqis.” Now, what about the Shiite militias, who killed tens of thousands of Iraqis since Ibrahim Jaafari came to power as a Prime Minister in May 2005?

Bush did not mention the word militias in his speech today. He mentioned the term “death squads” as groups formed by Shiite elements to “viciously” stir a sectarian “violence,” but just after and because the al-Qaeda and Sunni insurgents bombed the revered Shiite shrine of Samarra in February. According to Bush, the Shiites didn’t start to kill Iraqis until then! I wish he would go back and read the casualties statistics from Iraq after May 2005, when Jaafari legalized the murderous militias and gave them jobs in the ministry of interior.

His generals made it clear over the last year that the militias are the danger number one in Iraq now, but he restrained from mentioning them in his new strategy for Iraq. What happened? Suddenly there is no militia problem in Iraq anymore? What was the deal you made a few weeks ago with Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of The Supreme Council for the Islamic evolution in Iraq and the leader of Badr organization [the brutal military of SCIRI] when he visited D.C.?

Why did Bush avoid talking about Shiite militias in his speech? He’s been telling Maliki that he should deal with those militias as soon as possible, or else. Why now it’s become taboo to talk about it?

Everyone, or everyone with a healthy mind and working brain, now knows that security cannot be maintained by only dealing with Sunni insurgents but by dealing with Shiite militias too. One of the most powerful weapons to kill Iraqis in Baghdad now is the militias. Everyday we hear about dozens of bodies found shot dead in the streets.

It is troublesome to think about it. There is something fishy going on and the scapegoat is the Iraqis.

“Now is the time to act,” Bush said. But why now? Is it because the Americans are fed up with the war in Iraq? It is obviously not because Iraqis are being killed by the dozens everyday! Just now you know that it is time to act? Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and more than 3000 American casualties did not give a clue!

As I said before, the real strategy is that more troops will be deployed to Iraq. A wide military operation will be launched in Baghdad to wipe out the Sunni insurgents from certain neighborhoods. The insurgents will leave to other places and hide. The American administration will announce the success of the new strategy in Iraq and start talks about withdrawing troops from Iraq. All this happens while Shiite militias are still killing average of 50 to 100 Iraqis a day, but we will hear nothing about it. We will only hear about how many insurgents are killed and arrested and how many Iraqi and American soldiers are killed along the way to achieve this success.

“The year ahead will demand more patience, sacrifice and resolve,” he said and I couldn’t agree more! But try to tell my mother that!

** The other day I was going through one of the Iraqi blogs, Baghdad Artist, when a simple, yet powerful detail struck me. Under “Location,” the writer wrote “Changing.”

That’s what 2007 is bringing to the Iraqis. A life like the nomads’.

** Saddam Hussein was executed. Iraqis will always remember how, just a few seconds before he was hanged, he laughed when some men in the room chanted “Muqtada, Muqtada, Muqtada.” Even in his last moments, the tyrant pissed off the oppressed! What a life we lived under Hussein’s rule and what a life we are living now!

** The first Iraqi government after hundreds of years of occupation was seated in 1921 under the umbrella of a monarchy led by King Faisal I.

A few years later, in 1958, a “revolution” erupted in Iraq and the king and his family were killed and mutilated in public. It was a bloody birth of the Iraqi Republic.

Five years later, another “revolution” paralyzed the country and the Prime Minister, Abdul Karim Qasim, was killed by the Baathists. Although the Iraqis still say they did not support that revolution, I don’t know why they didn’t defend the prime minister at the time!

Then there was the first Iraqi president, Abdul Salam Arif, who after several problems with the Iraqi Baathists and communists, was killed in a helicopter crash. Then his brother, Abdul Rahman Arif, became the president. Not for long though. The man was very weak as a politician and couldn’t hold under the pressure of his position.

In 1968 the Baathists revolted against Arif and got to rule the country. That’s when Saddam Hussein came to power as vice president to Ahmed Hasan al-Bakr.

During the 1970’s, Hussein plotted against Bakr, who was a relative of Hussein’s and shared a home town. In 1979, Bakr came of T.V. and told Iraqis that he was sick and couldn’t stay as the president. He appointed Hussein as a president.

Then, the invasion in 2003. Three Prime Ministers followed that and the Iraqis are still waiting for ONE good government.

After this very brief summary of Iraq’s political struggle, I have one more thing to say: Maybe it’s not the politicians or the rulers that were wrong. I mean after 85 years, three kings and five presidents, maybe it’s the people who need to be brought to justice. Maybe it is the Iraqis who need to wake up and realize that they get what they ask for, or, as was proven recently, they get what they vote for. And maybe it is the Iraqis who should be blamed for the chaos, not the governments. Don’t you think?

** On a totally different issue, yet the same wider problem:

With all my loving and sincere heart, I want to suggest something to be added to the attempts to solve the problem in Iraq, which are being discussed by the American administration. Because all what they are discussing is so out of reality and will do nothing to help the Iraqis anyway, why don’t we try this: As a “Happy New Year” from the U.S. administration to the Iraqi parliament members, all the 275 should be invited to the State for a week before April, which is the deadline for starting amending the Iraqi constitutions and agree on the everlasting disputed issues.

Of the things they should visit TOGETHER is The National Archives. They should go directly to the Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom and be guided by someone who knows what kind of documents are displayed there. During the tour, they should learn how all the leaders of the old states with all there different cultures and education, who for a long time though it would be impossible to get together and solve there problems, agreed on the Declaration of Independence, Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights.

If that doesn’t make the Iraqi parliament members and politicians feel ashamed and make them agree on helping the people, then nothing will ever. And we can give up trying to help or advise them and never feel guilty anymore.

** By the way, can you believe they chanted “Muqtada, Muqtada, Muqtada” before they hanged Saddam Hussein? For God’s sake, at least chant “Hakim, Hakim, Hakim.” It’s much much better that Hussein dies thinking that Iraq is in the hands of a very wicked, experienced criminal than just a thug!