Interview: Charles Ferguson

Finally, a doc that explains it all. Did you ever wonder why Iraqis are killing each other? Where are all their guns and bombs coming from? Why do they ‘hate’ us if we went into their country to save them all from a devil called Saddam Hussein? And even more important, what are the reasons behind our complete failure as occupiers of a country that ranks amongst the poorest of the world? All those questions are answered in Special Documentary Jury Prize Award winning No End in Sight.

Directed by first-time filmmaker Charles Ferguson, a man turned into a millionaire thanks to Microsoft. He was the original developer of Frontpage, a website/webpage tool to which Bill Gates fell in love with in the mid nineties. Ferguson was able to sell to him on his idea and his company, Vermeer Technologies inc, for more than 100 million big ones. That’s why when he decided to fulfill his dream of becoming a filmmaker, he didn’t have to shop around to find production money. With a budget of two million dollars, a powerful mailing list built up through years of studies in political science, and his taking part in institutions as the Council of Foreign Relations or the Brookings Institute, Ferguson was ready to shot a documentary that chronicles the wrong sequence of events and god awful miscalculations made by the current administration and that led to Iraq’s bloody carnage.

Most of ‘Iraqumentaries’ talk about the economical or political motivations behind the invasion or about soldiers and civilians lives within Iraq but in this case, the main focus is to analyze the reasons that dragged Iraq into hell with the ‘unconditional’ help of the Bush Administration. High ranking officials such as Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage or Ambassador Barbara Bodine, -in charge of Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Hussein but kicked out in less than three months for her critical views of the orders she was given by Washington- recall their unfruitful efforts to make sense into an occupation that was plagued with errors of U.S policy since the beginning. Those fatal errors, such as the firing of the 50,000 technocrats that used to work for Saddam’s regime and that were the core of the Iraqi Administration or the firing of 500,000 soldiers that expressed their willing to collaborate with the American government but found themselves on the dole with all the weapons from the old Iraqi army in their hands, helped to create the insurgency and anarchy that turned Iraq into the actual nightmare.

This doc stands as recommended viewing material and a tool for future commanders in chief looking to start their own invasion and should serve as a lesson in humility for the American government and a reminder that in the eyes of the public every irrational act needs to be rationalized, justified and planned. I sat down with Charles Ferguson in New York just this past week….

Bárbara Celis D’amico: Given your background in the technology business, why did you decide to become a filmmaker?

Charles Ferguson: I always wanted to make films, I’ve loved movies since I was a child. I have a background in political science, I know many people in the foreign policy community and also journalists and academics who research about foreign policy. In 2004 I had dinner with George Packer, a journalist who was about to publish the book The Assassins Gate: America in Iraq. He had just comeback from his 2nd or 3rd trip and what he had seen in Iraq was a lot different of what the Administration was saying and a lot different of what the general media was saying. That’s when the idea of doing this documentary was born. I talked to some people about it but they told me not to do it for two reasons: it’s a difficult first film to make, which is true and since it was such an obvious and important subject there were going to be many people doing the same kind of film so I would have a lot of competition. So I didn’t make it and waited for a year, but the documentary about the American policy in Iraq never came out so I decided to do it myself.

BCD: Is it more powerful a movie than a book to talk about Iraq?

CF: There have been good books about Iraq but in America people don’t read books…so if this movie does moderately well, then maybe it will be watched by five million people and that is way more than all the readers of the books about Iraq combined.

BCD: You did many interviews in the US but shot part of your movie in Iraq, how difficult it was?

CF: It was interesting, difficult, tense, fascinating, dangerous, very emotional. I don’t speak Arabic but I had an interpreter/translator all the time, actually I had two. One was my bodyguard and the other was an emergency room doctor who found out after the invasion that could make much more money working as a translator for American journalist than as a doctor. The unemployment rate is about 50% and many people who have jobs as 2003 hadn’t been paid in months. Iraq was a very poor country because of a decade of UN sanctions. You see that it used to be a very wealthy place with beautiful homes built twenty years ago and you can also see the extreme poverty.

BCD: Are you planning to show your movie in Iraq?

CF: I wish…but it is impossible. There are no theaters, people cannot go to the movies, it is too dangerous. I am doing copies and giving the DVD to the people I met there, it is the only thing I can do.

BCD: How difficult was your stay in Iraq and shooting in Iraq?

CF: I dressed as an Iraqi and I always had an Iraqi next to me, my bodyguard and close by pretending not being with me, there would be about half a dozen of bodyguards in plain clothes with hidden weapons. If someone nearby would use a cellphone we would leave immediately… It wasn’t easy. 

BCD: What’s the most surprising thing that you discovered shooting this movie?

CF: How incredibly stupid the American policy in Iraq was. Regardless of what your political views are, if you are going to invade and occupy a country it is kind of crazy to send in the group of people who are going to be managing the occupation in a convoy of unarmored suvs without any of them having telephones, email or internet access. It doesn’t matter whether you are a democrat or a republican, that’s just crazy and many things like that happened. I just found it staggering the combination of incompetence and arrogance that was displayed.

BCD: What was your goal when you started the movie?

CF: It was already clear that a number of serious mistakes have been made but I felt that I didn’t yet know enough myself, and so I wanted to look at it really seriously and I did.

BCD: You have said it is not a political movie but it can be used politically….

CF: What other people do with the film is up to them and how they see it or interpret it, it’s up to them but my goal was just to show what happened.

BCD: How come all those errors were committed if the Bush Administration had access to all the possible information out there?

CF: If you are blind, having access to information doesn’t matter. If you are blind you can’t see and they weren’t interested in seeing so they didn’t talk to people and when people tried to talk to them they didn’t listen.

BCD: Do you see many parallels with Vietnam?

CF: There are some, certainly there was some blindness but was it as bad? In some ways and for sure in others no. In Vietnam Americans killed over 2 million people which is a lot and the majority were innocent civilians. On the other hand in the case of Vietnam there were many fewer regional geopolitical risks. When we pulled out of Vietnam it didn’t cause a bloodbath, it didn’t cause a regional war, it didn’t cause a nuclear arm race and all those things are possible in the case of Iraq.

BCD: What is it gonna happen if there is a pull out of troops?

CF: If there is a complete pull out most of the people I’ve talked to say there will be a huge bloodbath in Iraq and that we’ll see hundreds of thousands, even millions of people dying. Many people fear a regionalization of the violence, the Iranians on one side and the Saudis, Jordanians and Syrians on the other side. Nothing is certain. Some people think it could be ok, others don’t. The truth is that many experts don’t know what to do. It seems inevitable and necessary to reduce the number of American troops. Others advise to improve the diplomacy with countries in the area. Others think it is important to support a strong national government as oppose to support power centers at regional level or tribal level… how many troops should we leave? Shall we keep training Iraqi police? People disagree about these things…

BCD: So, basically, what the American invasion of Iraq has accomplished is that after four years nobody knows how to solve the big mess that was created invading the country?

CF: Unfortunately something like that is true.

BCD: Can we just blame the government and its obsession for the executive power?

CF: The congress and the American people let this government do what they wanted at least for a couple of years. For better or worse George W. Bush was reelected in 2004, he won the popular majority so you can’t just blame the executive. I think you have to blame  congress, the American people and the media as well but there is no question that this Administration controlled information very tightly and was extremely secretive and very extreme in its use of executive privilege with regard of the war.

BCD: If Democrats win in the next election are we going to see a difference?

BF: Yes. That doesn’t mean Iraq is going to become a paradise, America is going to have to keep troops there for a long time and it is going to be a violent and dangerous place for a long time but there is a difference between things being just bad and being really horrifically bad. There is a difference between a low grade civil war that looks like North Ireland and Rwanda and it could easily be the latter but I don’t think another Administration is gonna behave like the Bush Administration.

BCD: Your movie didn’t answer the question about why did we go to Iraq…

BF: I don’t think we will ever know. I think there were different motivations and reasons and each person involved in the planning had different ones. For example I believe Paul Wolfowitz, – who at the time was the Deputy Secretary of Defense –  seems to have been motivated by a sincere desire to improve the conditions of the Iraqi people. Arrogant as it may seem to create a democracy in a region where regimes were brutal and undemocratic, I think in some level he was idealistic. Rumsfeld and Cheney reasons were more related to the social American power the suppression of terrorist risk, creating a power base in the middle east, what was president bush thinking it’s hard to know…

BCD: It seems difficult to believe that in a country where most of politicians need to be millionaires to get into politics and need big money from big companies to run for a public seat decisions are taken with just ideals in mind…

BF: Money played a part but I don’t think there is much evidence it played a major part. Once the decision to go to war was made there is no question that American companies tried hard to benefit and used political influence to benefit but I don’t think they controlled the decision about going to war. There were many factors but I wouldn’t put money on the top of the list. Rumsfeld was already a pretty wealthy man. Wolfowitz isn’t entirely a rich man… I don’t think money was a dominant factor. The big mystery is what president Bush thought. It is possible that he didn’t think at all and just did what he was advised to do. It is well known that he was very passive about any sort of decision.

BCD: What was the role played by the American media?

CF: Not a good one. The American media did a very bad job in the period up to the war and the year after the invasion.

BCD: Do you think they are doing a better job now even if you there are still no dead bodies on television and virtually no explanation of what is it happening there?

CF: Yes, they no longer accept uncritically whatever the Administration says although they are not doing a good job in explaining what is happening and what it is like?

BCD: Do you think the people who took all those wrong decisions they realize now all the mistakes they did?

CF: I don’t think Paul Bremer does. He lives a very quite life. He recently wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post that was an unreconstructed defense of his behavior which at this point is astonishing. Rumsfeld? I don’t know. He hasn’t said much publicly. I would like to think that Wolfowitz is sufficiently intelligent man to understand that they made some very serious mistakes.

BCD: Are you gonna keep doing movies?

CF: Yes, I loved the process of making this film and I want to do more. I have many ideas for films.

BCD: Could you tell us more about those projects?

CF: There is one film I’d like to make about the contemporary conditions of romantic relations. I would like to make a thriller and also a documentary about religion.

Magnolia Pictures releases No End in Sight in theatres on July 27th.