BUSH'S WAR

From Frontline's website:

From the horror of 9/11 to the invasion of Iraq; the truth about WMD to the rise of an insurgency; the scandal of Abu Ghraib to the strategy of the surge -- for seven years, FRONTLINE has revealed the defining stories of the war on terror in meticulous detail, and the political dramas that played out at the highest levels of power and influence.

Now, on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, the full saga unfolds in the two-part FRONTLINE special Bush's War. Veteran FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk draws on one of the richest archives in broadcast journalism -- more than 40 FRONTLINE reports on Iraq and the war on terror. Combined with fresh reporting and new interviews, Bush's War will be the definitive documentary analysis of one of the most challenging periods in the nation's history.

"Parts of this history have been told before," Kirk says. "But no one has laid out the entire narrative to reveal in one epic story the scope and detail of how this war began and how it has been fought, both on the ground and deep inside the government."

More here.

They ran this in two parts on Monday and Tuesday. I haven't seen the whole thing yet, but I have watched some huge chunks - it runs somewhere between four and a half to five hours in total - and lemme tell ya, it's fucking great as far as I can tell. I mean, it was one thing to see this drama to unfold over the course of five years, watching tv reports and religiously reading newspapers and essays on the internet, but packing it all together in this two-parter creates quite an experience.

Some early observations:

1. We've been in this war for a really long fucking time.

2. The US may very well have failed in the invasion's aftermath if it had done everything correctly; instead, we did everything incorrectly, virtually guaranteeing the rise of the insurgency and sectarian violence.

3. The same White House incompetence that botched the WMD intelligence is pretty much the same incompetence that botched the occupation, the same people, the same decision-making process, the same disregard for facts. (It's also, I suspect, the same incompetence that botched Katrina, as well, but the documentary doesn't go into that.)

4. There is a segment which strongly suggests that all the torture at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Graib, and elsewhere, was directly ordered by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. They even showed a document he signed. I was like, "Wait a minute, I didn't know this had been proven yet." Apparently, it has: the torture wasn't from the "few bad apples" of grunt soldiers and low-level officers now disciplined for it to varying degrees; it was ordered out of the White House. Just as many left-wingers have been saying for years.

5. Bush isn't really the President, and probably never has been. Yes, he holds the office, but very early on he intentionally ceded a great deal of actual power to Vice President Cheney. What power Cheney didn't possess, he gained by expertly playing Machiavellian games, often butting heads with Condi Rice and Colin Powell, who were often quite literally locked out of important discussions. This is probably the most frightening aspect of this documentary: Bush isn't really in charge of the White House, and probably never has been. Indeed, the absence of clear Oval Office leadership has probably been responsible for the most spectacular of Presidential failures these last seven years.

6. I think the only way to "win" this war, if we really want to, which I don't, is to reinstate the draft and send some 500,000 to a million troops over there to "clear, hold, and build" the country up from the rubble it now is. That means staying there indefinitely while we teach, beg, force, and cajole the Iraqi people to get along and get serious about democracy--this aspect may be my victory plan's Achilles' heel; Iraqis might not actually want democracy.

Anyway, go check it out. You can watch the whole thing online here. It's truly kickass.


Left to Right: Former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, Vice President
Dick Cheney, then-National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, President George W. Bush
(photo courtesy of Frontline)

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