"No End in Sight" begins, as many indictments of the United States' Iraq policy do, with a simple, plain-faced shot of a Bush Administration official discussing Iraq and the American military occupation there. The belief behind this device is typically that the official's words, in this case those of Donald Rumsfeld, the former secretary of defense, will be so totally wrong-headed that they speak for themselves.

Not here. When Rumsfeld, referring to the war in Iraq, asserts that "it is not well known; it is not well understood; it is complex for people to comprehend," it isn't to trap him in his own words in the conventional sense. First-time director Charles Ferguson (who also wrote and produced) somberly agrees with him, and though the thesis of "No End in Sight" - that whatever its intentions, the Bush Administration has consistently failed to include qualified minds in its post-occupation Iraq policy - is not new, it's streamlined here in a coolly comprehensive way that seeks not only to anger the audience but more pointedly to sadden it. Unlike many Iraq documentaries, this isn't necessarily a call to action so much as an attempt to make clear how exactly we got where we are, and as the film's title implies, it doesn't see much hope for the future.

Told in a series of blunt chapters with titles like "The Void" and "Choas," the film begins and spends most of its time in 2003, in the early months of the war where it finds the initial failures that dovetailed and helped create the Iraq of today. It focuses in particular on the Bush Administration's failure after the fall of Saddam Hussein to combat looting, which gutted the Iraqi economy as well as cultural centers, and the decision to disband the Iraqi military, which puzzles and infuriates Ferguson more than any other single disaster of the U.S.'s Iraq policy. He sees inexplicable inconsistencies in the decision, which left hundreds of thousands Iraqis unemployed and vulnerable to a brewing insurgency discontent with the continuing American occupation.

The value of Ferguson's film is its efficiency and the palatable scope of its rhetorical ambition. It makes simple sense of the occupation's failures through a series of interviews with many since-departed government officials in power in the early days of the invasion, including a former deputy secretary of defense under Rumsfeld, spliced together with simple charts and figures that illustrate their arguments. There are several interludes with an intense score by Peter Nashel ("Bee Season") that recall Errol Morris, and the film's cumulative effect is a general sense of retrospective astonishment and unease. Most American Iraq documentaries employ a certain conceit to that end - the point of view of soldiers on the ground is a recurrent focus - but this is the perspective simply of a bewildered observer who can't believe what has happened in Iraq.

That befits Ferguson, whose biography has in many cases trumped the press his film has received. A self-described sympathizer with the original invasion, he's a writer, a political scientist and, perhaps most unlikely, a software-based millionaire, and he came to write, produce and direct this film after a conversation with a friend over dinner. (The movie has since gone on the win a special jury prize for documentaries at the Sundance Film Festival.) Ferguson's path to this material, though unexpected, is clearly reflected in its simple rhetorical sensibility. The information is public, the future is stormy, and "No End in Sight" is the disturbing product of just how far awry this invasion went from its very first days.

No End in Sight
At the Michigan Theater
Magnolia

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars