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Speaking softly but packing a fearsome punch, Charles Ferguson's "No End in Sight" is the best documentary to be made about the war in Iraq - a precise prosecutorial brief that quietly but urgently dissects how the United States' post-invasion policy in Iraq went so disastrously wrong.

Ferguson - a political scientist who wrote, directed and produced the film - doesn't try to debate whether the U.S. should have invaded Iraq (though narrator Campbell Scott mentions, almost as an aside, that Iraq had no link to those responsible for 9/11). Instead he looks at what followed the 2003 invasion, with interviews and documents that present the case so evenhandedly that even those who supported the Bush administration should be incensed at the blunders and arrogance.

The first mistake, the movie alleges, was a presidential order giving control of postwar Iraq to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The Pentagon ignored an extensive State Department plan for rebuilding Iraq, and instead set on its own goal to install Iraqi exiles to establish a post-Saddam democracy. But the agency charged with organizing the rebuilding, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), was formed only 60 days before the invasion, and even then was understaffed and had no clear mission.

Helpless to stop the looting and street violence after the invasion, ORHA and its leader, retired Gen. Jay Garner, were soon replaced by diplomat L. Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority. Bremer made three decisions that, the movie states, doomed hopes for an Iraqi democracy and sowed the seeds for the violent insurgency that followed:

* Halting the formation of the Iraqi government and excluding Iraqis from the decision process.

* De-Ba'athification, systematically purging members of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party from government - even the lowly civil servants who only joined to keep their jobs.

* Disbanding the Iraqi military, which turned 500,000 trained soldiers into unemployed men with guns.

There's little new information in "No End in Sight" that a faithful NPR listener or Atlantic Monthly subscriber doesn't already know. Ferguson's contribution is to collate all the data, all the mistakes and hubris, into a concise form. It's like a well-condensed executive summary to a long intelligence briefing - the sort of thing, the movie informs us, that President Bush doesn't read either.

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* SEAN P. MEANS can be reached at movies@sltrib.com or 801-257-8602. Send comments about this review to livingeditor@sltrib.com.

No End in Sight

WHERE: Broadway Centre Cinemas.

WHEN: Opens today.

RATING: Not rated, but probably PG-13 for war images and language.

RUNNING TIME: 102 minutes.

BOTTOM LINE: A clear-headed case for how the U.S. occupation of Iraq went wrong.