It’s really tough knowing that my tax dollars fund this government.

While I like to think of myself as fairly informed, watching this I sure realized there is so much I don’t know about the early stages of the war.

It would seem as though they were ill-prepared to the point of absurdity, sending too few people with little in the way of resources and almost no preparation. Ignoring the significant body of work done by intelligence agencies and the advice of military commanders who had run post-conflict zones in the past makes me think that the few people in charge wanted a descent into calamity.

This combination of arrogance and cronyism seems to characterize this administration and will certainly leave a difficult job for the next one to clean up.

Interesting and offers a lot of information, although it doesn’t go as in depth as I wanted it to. With the amount of people they had at their disposal they could have had the definitive review of the US-Iraq debate. The film presents a lot of facts, but at times just rests on those instead of delving into cause and effect and trying to find the story behind everything. I think it would have benefited greatly if they made it into a series, but at about 90 minutes it’s still a decent survey. For further information you can read “Hubris”, “Assassin’s Gate” and “Imperial Life in the Emerald City.”

Even though I try, I am not as familiar with the details of the Iraq War as I really should be. I saw this film was critically-acclaimed and I thought I’d check it out. If you have one hour and forty minutes to dedicate to one of the most important world events affecting our country, than this a well-organized, well-directed documentary that will explain step by step just how we got into the war and who the key players were in the process. Stop reading this and go get the movie now.

Not only is this an informative film that presents lots of points of view, but it underlines the fact that despite all the horrific mistakes made in the progress towards war that there were many people that tried their best and failed to save the country of Iraq. This only makes what we know today about the situation even more tragic. I could hardly bear parts of this film (the looting of the national museum and the burning of the national library as America stood by and watched was painful to see and the way Iraqis were treated as they were round up and arrested by our troops was particularly disturbing).

I’d love to get five minutes alone with Bush or Cheney or Rumsfeld to give them a piece of my mind. I’d also like to sit down with an Iraqi to try to explain that not all Americans supported these actions and somehow apologize for the arrogance of my country. Until then, get this movie and get angry, it is the best possible thing we can all do for our country.