Focusing on a Losing Battle

Interestingly, this is how the book describes doing business in Silicon Valley: "It was like palace intrigue in fifteenth-century Florence or perhaps present-day Iraq. You just assume that anyone might try and kill you at any time, that everyone has a hidden dagger and that dagger is probably poisoned."

No Holding Back

Ferguson could have spent the rest of his life as an author-scholar, private equity investor and adviser to high-tech companies. He liked to hold swanky parties at his New York digs, bringing in jazz and classical musicians to entertain.

But the Iraq invasion galvanized him; so did the 2004 presidential race. A Democrat, he raised more than $50,000 for John Kerry's campaign, including his own generous contributions.

He also invested in a film by documentary-maker George Butler ("Pumping Iron"), a friend of the Massachusetts senator who that year released "Going Up River: The Long War of John Kerry." Butler viewed the documentary as the perfect reply to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against Kerry, but says Ferguson considered the film a disaster and told Kerry as much. Butler called the episode "bizarre." ("I do not agree with his characterization," Ferguson responds. "He and I had a personal disagreement.")

Before making his own picture, Ferguson reached out to well-informed journalists, including New Yorker writer George Packer, whose coverage presaged Iraq's death spiral. "I gave him a lot of names of people to talk to. I was sort of handing over my interview list to him," says Packer, who is interviewed in the film. "And he did a very thorough job, especially in getting people to talk on camera who hadn't talked before."

Among them: Richard Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state, who tells Ferguson in the film that a decision to disband the Iraqi army " came as quite a surprise" to him, Secretary of State Colin Powell and others in the administration. "I thought we'd just created a problem: We had a lot of out-of-work soldiers."

The film says that edict by then occupation chief L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer not only blindsided the State Department but also the U.S. military command -- and reversed a plan endorsed by President Bush to re-muster, pay and put to work hundreds of thousands of ex-fighters, who were poised to help secure and rebuild Iraq.

In his research phase, Ferguson also contacted Tom Luddy, co-founder of the Telluride Film Festival and an acquaintance of several years. "I said, 'Tom, I'm thinking about making movies. Who should I talk to?' " Ferguson recalls.

Luddy says Ferguson "got the right guy" when he hooked up with executive producer Gibney, the filmmaker behind "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room."

Agreeing to help Ferguson, Gibney says, required a "leap of faith, but the subject is important." He advised the novice director in technical areas and also told him to suppress rhetoric in the film, ruthlessly simplify its narrative and focus on building characters.

"You're a smart guy, but the story is complicated and your treatment is kind of a mess," Ferguson recalls Gibney telling him. The director says Gibney "turned out to be ridiculously helpful in a thousand ways."

When Ferguson decided to shoot footage in Iraq, he lined up the best security money could buy. He went to Baghdad during a particularly parlous time, about five weeks after the 2006 bombing of the Shiite shrine at Samarra. He departed from Irbil in Iraqi Kurdistan with a convoy of four armored pickup trucks equipped with machine gun turrets, he says, and managed to avoid three roadside bombs on a six-hour ride.

In Baghdad he spent $6,000 a day on 10 bodyguards and three armored cars for himself and his Iraqi crew. "We never went back to the same place twice and never stayed more than a half hour," Ferguson says. He passed himself off as French or Canadian.

(Full disclosure: Ferguson based himself for two weeks at The Washington Post's bureau in Baghdad. A bureau staffer at the time, Omar Fekeiki, who is interviewed in the movie, recalls Ferguson working morning to night in the streets.)

Ferguson's future endeavors may include documentaries or thrillers. "I'm completely hooked," he said at Silverdocs. "I hope that I will learn my craft and that I'll get better at this."

As for the future of Iraq, with or without American involvement? It is worth mentioning here, in the end, that even this deeply schooled policy analyst must admit: "I don't know. I don't think anybody does."