The script to Charles Ferguson's "No End in Sight" will certainly be in the hands of the prosecutors in the event of impeachment hearings. It's a furious, if quietly stated, indictment of the president and all his men in re the debacle that our adventure in Iraq has become. Ferguson builds a compelling case of bad judgment, error, stubbornness and arrogance.

It's also, most impressively, an evocation of that horror. Astutely edited by Chad Beck and Cindy Lee, it assembles archival films into a depressing cascade of imagery from the war: The tanks pulling through the dusty, ancient towns, the young Americans scooting through the ruins in their Terminator shades, optics-festooned plastic rifles, the detonation of roadside bombs and, of course, the talking heads, who talk, then talk some more, then talk still more, that is, if they'll talk at all. (Paul Wolfowitz, L. Paul Bremer and Donald Rumsfeld wouldn't; all are represented in archival footage.)

Ferguson, a Brookings Institution scholar and software entrepreneur, has rounded up mostly mid-level bureaucrats who served in the occupation and watched in horror as the chaos doubled and redoubled. They form an effective set of witnesses because they don't seem instinctively anti-Bush. To be sure, some of the complaints are common to all bureaucracies: My supervisors didn't pay any attention to me; they made policy based on unrealistic wishful thinking; they wouldn't admit mistakes; they blundered ahead, going from bad to worse.

The case everybody makes seems pretty tight, and Ferguson keeps it simple. He zeroes in on three decisions Bremer made, seemingly on the spot, the most disastrous of which was to disband the Iraqi Army. Suddenly there are 500,000 men armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades with nothing to do, no way to make a living. Mischief seems almost preordained from that single mistake. Most of the witnesses say that they warned Bremer against the short-sightedness of the decision but that he wouldn't listen.

In all this, Bush is portrayed not as a master manipulator, nor as Karl Rove's sock puppet, but as a man truly disengaged. It's distressing to learn that the president didn't even bother to read a one-page summary of arguments regarding a certain policy decision, but simply allowed Defense Secretary Rumsfeld to decide.

-- Stephen Hunter (July 27, 2007)

Contains disturbing scenes of real combat violence.