The invasion of Iraq, three years on, gets a blunt verdict from Spectator political editor Peter Oborne: a foreign policy failure he compares to the Munich Agreement. Oborne reports from Sadr City alongside US troops, watching the coalition's grip on the streets thin out in real time, and argues the original goal, a unified liberal democracy serving as a model for the region, is no longer within reach. He puts the case to figures on both sides of the Atlantic, including Richard Perle, Peter Galbraith, and Deputy Chief of Army Staff General Jack Keane, pressing each on how the war's aims curdled into occupation and insurgency. A conversation with Rory Stewart, a former deputy governor in Nasiriyah, turns to the rise of pro-Iranian fundamentalist parties now embedded in the Iraqi government, a development none of the war's planners had banked on. The film's argument builds through these interviews rather than narration: the people who ran the war and the people who watched it fail, side by side.