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• Q&A with Dr. Ferguson
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Political Scientist turned filmmaker says, "We took an aquarium and turned it into fish soup" in Iraq. (1:54)
 

Tavis: Col. Hughes talked just a moment ago, as you heard, about one of three major mistakes that you come to believe that Mr. Bremer made with regard to the Iraqi occupation. We talked about one of those mistakes, that is disbanding the military. We'll talk about the other two big mistakes that the filmmakers believe Mr. Bremer made when we are joined in a moment by the filmmaker behind "No End in Sight," Charles Ferguson. Stay with us.

We continue now with our look at the acclaimed documentary, "No End in Sight", with the film's writer, producer and director, Charles Ferguson. This is his first ever film project, believe it or not, following a successful career as a political scientist and business executive. Here now another scene from "No End in Sight."

[Film Clip]

Tavis: The president hadn't read a single page?

Charles Ferguson: That's correct. This was referring to one of the National Intelligence estimates on the growth of the insurgency that was prepared by the National Intelligence Council of which Robert Hutchings, who we just saw, is the chairman.

Tavis: Let me back up and ask - I said a moment ago that this is your first ever film project - how did you come to have this as your first project? You couldn't have picked something a little less tedious the first time out (laughter)?

Ferguson: (Laughter) I've wanted to make films for a long time. I've loved films since I was a child. Actually in 2003 and 2004, I was starting to think about how I might start making a film, but then Iraq happened. I had a background as a political scientist. In fact, my Ph.D. thesis advisor had been Deputy National Security Advisor for President Kennedy and this just struck me as a subject that had to be seen.

Tavis: Let me stand back for a second before I go back in for some more details, to continue our conversation following our chat with Col. Hughes. How do you begin the process of wrapping your brain, much less your production staff, around this thing that is Iraq?

I mean, there are so many pieces to it, so many components to it, so many complexities to it. How do you go about figuring out what piece of this, because you can't do the whole thing, you're going to focus on to do a documentary that actually makes sense?

Ferguson: Well, I talked to a lot of people, I read a lot of books, I've read a lot of articles. So first, I just informed myself. Then I tried to think, what's really the core question here? What's the issue? And it struck me that the issue was really how did this all happen? How did Iraq come to be this way? How did we come to be in this terrible quagmire? What decisions were made? What were their consequences that led to this? So that's what I made the film about.

Tavis: If there were a short answer - this is a whole documentary. This is an unfair question, but I'm going to ask it anyway though. If there were a simple answer, a less complex answer, for how this happened beyond the documentary, what's the answer to that question? How did we get in this mess? Is there a short answer to that?

Ferguson: Well, there's a somewhat short answer. First of all, I don't know if we're ever going to know the complete answer because it depends on what was going on inside the minds of a very small number of men and one woman, Condoleezza Rice.

I think what occurred was a kind of perfect storm. Two things came together, 9/11 which gave the administration the impetus and the political air cover to do this kind of thing, and then the fact that the government was run by a very small number of people who had very strong, very rigid, ideas and who had remarkably little experience in doing these kinds of things.

Tavis: I left our conversation with Col Hughes to continue it with you. We stopped at the point at which he laid out the first of three mistakes that that small group of people made. I want to expand that group out and maybe you meant to include Ambassador Bremer in that group, but if you didn't, we're going to put him in there for the time being.

Ferguson: Yes.

Tavis: So you see the documentary, you come to believe - or at least the documentary makes the point that there are three major mistakes that Bremer made. One of them we talked to Col Hughes about which was disbanding the Iraqi military. I want to discuss those other two with you, if I might.

In no particular order, the first is halting the formation of the Iraqi government early on in this process. Tell me more about what that was and why that was a big mistake on Mr. Bremer's part.

Ferguson: Well, not just Jay Garner, but many people involved with the occupation and with Iraqi affairs, felt that it was important that this not seem like a hostile occupation imposed on the Iraqi people, that there be both the appearance and the reality of giving sovereignty and influence and a public face to Iraqis and Iraqi leadership as soon as possible so that Iraq could begin to govern itself and the Iraqi people would not feel themselves to be under an oppressive occupation as opposed to being helped.

Very abruptly, Bremer issued an order that there would in fact be a long-term official occupation and that there would be no provisional government. Not only would there be no provisional Iraqi government, but Bremer in fact paid very little attention to Iraqi opinion, disregarded the advice that he was given by many Iraqis, refused to speak with many of them and behaved in a remarkably rigid and narrow way like an occupier.

Tavis: So to your point, if we had given the Iraqi people a greater stake in this process, that is to say, to allow this formation of an Iraqi government so they wouldn't feel like they were being occupied, how might that have made things different, do you think?

Ferguson: Oh, I think there would have been much less resentment, much less hostility to the Americans, and there also probably would have been better advice. Of course, it would have been necessary to listen to them. It would have been necessary to give them some real power and some influence, but if that had been done and if it had been done well, then I think that a number of these other mistakes would not have been made.

Tavis: If I were playing devil's advocate, which I will just for the moment here, one could argue that they now do have an Iraqi government that is now in place. One by any number of objective standards could say they still ain't got it together yet. So the argument that they would have gotten it together sooner when they haven't gotten it together later suggests what to you?

Ferguson: Well, you're absolutely right. The present Iraqi government is a mess. Everybody agrees on that. However, you have to understand that the present situation in Iraq comes after we basically destroyed all the political, economic and military infrastructure of the country.

You know, if somebody invaded the United States, toppled the United States government, fired everybody in the government who knew how to run the country and then disbanded the military, the FBI and all local police forces and then said, "Now go form a government," we'd have a few problems.

Tavis: Yeah.

Ferguson: So Iraq has problems. You know, there was an enormous power vacuum. We angered half a million armed men by disbanding the army with no severance pay. Then there's the growth of an insurgency and the growth also of religious and political militias who now have an enormous amount of power in Iraq. They have as many armed men as the United States military has. Political parties derive their power in large part from the fact that they have a militia arm with fifty thousand people with machine guns.

So, yes, Iraq is a mess now. We took an aquarium. It was already an aquarium in bad shape. It had been under a brutal dictatorship for twenty years. But we took an aquarium and we turned it into fish soup. When you've done that, it turns out that turning fish soup into an aquarium is a little bit harder.

Tavis: Those are the first two problems, mistakes to put another way, that Mr. Bremer made. The latter one which requires even for me at this point still some explanation in terms of the terminology. What we're talking about here is this debathification program. Tell me what that means and why that was a mistake on Mr. Bremer's part.

Ferguson: Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq through a political party called the Bath Party. Saddam was a very nasty man, a horrible genocidal dictator, and many people at the top of the Bath Party were in fact very evil people. However, the Bath Party was very large and like, say the Communist Party under the Soviet Union, you had to join it in many cases in order to get ahead and in fact in many cases in order just to survive, in order to avoid being shot, in order to keep your job.

Mr. Bremer didn't understand this and/or he felt that it didn't matter. One of the first things that he did was to order a purge of the Iraqi government which led to the immediate firing and the banning for life from government employment of an estimated fifty thousand people including most of the senior administrators and technocrats who knew how to run the country. So the ability to manage and govern Iraq was immediately crippled.

Tavis: I assume that his argument would have been, though, that we got rid of people who had been part of a brutal regime.

Ferguson: Yes, that was his argument.

Tavis: Okay.

Ferguson: But in the first place, sometimes you need people even though they had been part of a brutal regime if you have to prevent a crisis in the disintegration of a country.

Tavis: That's even worse.

Ferguson: That's even worse. In the second place, many of these people were not brutal people. They had been doing what they had to do in order to keep their jobs, in order to feed their families and in order to keep themselves alive. There seems to have been no understanding of that and the result was that these people left the government and the government crumbled and also, of course, these people were immediately turned into enemies.

Tavis: Let me ask you finally what you as a filmmaker hope comes out of the airing of a documentary like this.

Ferguson: Well, two things, I think. The first is that, with regard to the specific current situation in Iraq, I hope people will come to understand what a terrible mess this is and what its nature is so that, when we debate how to conduct ourselves going forward, we'll do better.

The second thing that I hope is that people will remember this because this is not the last time that America will use military force. The next time someone tells you that we have to go to war, I hope people will understand that war is not a videogame and that, if you enter into it casually and arrogantly and sloppily and without thinking and planning, terrible things will happen.

Tavis: The documentary is called "No End in Sight," the filmmaker, Charles Ferguson. Nice to have you on the program. Thanks for your work.

Ferguson: Thank you, sir.