'NO END IN SIGHT' SHEDS LIGHT ON IRAQ WAR MESS.

Byline: BOB STRAUSS

>FILM CRITIC

"No End in Sight," the latest anti-Iraq war documentary, can honestly be called indispensable.

Writer-director Charles Ferguson methodically details what certainly feels like each significant misstep the Bush administration made leading up to and following the 2003 invasion. Some of the information is elementary, some of it inside and in-depth, but all of it seems crucial.

Ferguson quite reliably presents mountains of factoids and revelations in a clean, logical time line. He's a veteran of the Brookings Institute and Council on Foreign Relations, a visiting scholar at M.I.T. and Berkeley, an author and software millionaire, which enabled him to finance this filmmaking debut with no outside interference.

The film is everything you always knew was wrong with this war, and more, in one handy, under-two-hour package.

Even though Ferguson studiously avoids Michael Moore-style theatrics, he clearly knows his target audience. "No End in Sight" may be coolly reportorial, but the underlying spirit is one of unadulterated righteous indignation.

Hard to avoid that. Ferguson has great connections from his think-tank days. A lot of semi-powerful, unhappy people who weren't listened to by the more powerful were eager to unload here.

Who wouldn't want to say "I told you so"? Letting civilians run riot as soon as we displaced Saddam Hussein, disbanding the Iraqi army, delaying the formation of a real replacement government, not even supplying our own reconstruction officials with desks and phones (to say nothing of workable plans), putting Republican fatcats' college-age kids in charge of crucial services ... it's all outlined here.

Early word on "No End in Sight" implied that the movie did not address the morality of attacking a country that pretty obviously had no WMDs nor love for Al-Qaida from the get-go. Ferguson sure seems to recognize that root cause, although indeed, the bulk of his focus is much more informatively on occupation mismanagement.

What Mad magazine would call the usual gang of idiots -- Rumsfeld, Cheney, woebegone (and thankfully long gone) Ambassador L. Paul Bremmer, a not-really-in-on-everything George W. himself -- catches most of the blame. In an unusual display of collective wisdom, they all declined to be interviewed for this film. One administration loyalist who was gracious, or foolish, enough to face Ferguson's camera, senior advisor Walter Slocombe, is predictably eviscerated with crosscuts to other talking heads that know more than he probably ever did.

Enjoyable as that particular stretch of intellectual bloodletting is, "No End in Sight" can and does get bogged down in wonkery. But for the most part it nicely balances archival footage with folks telling us what they think.

Ferguson plays a few cheap hands by including disillusioned soldiers and traumatized civilians with informed analysts and such privileged witnesses as Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Ambasador Barbara Bodine and Col. Lawrence Wilkerson.

He didn't need to do this -- or anything else manipulative, really -- to make "No End in Sight" a strong indictment. The facts speak for themselves, and it's great that we have so many of them now in one movie, whatever its flaws.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

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NO END IN SIGHT - Three stars

>Not rated: violence, language.

>Director: Charles Ferguson.

>Running time: 1 hr. 42 min.

>Playing: One Colorado, Pasadena; Sunset 5, West Hollywood; Landmark, West L.A.; University Town Center 6, Irvine.

>In a nutshell: Comprehensive, if by no means objective, report on how everything about the Iraq occupation has been done wrong.