Gollum Watches TV. It’s PBS so it’s OK. (Review of the ‘Bush’s War’ documentary from Frontline.)
The last two nights PBS has been showing a documentary called ‘Bush’s War’on Frontline. It was a two part doc run over two nights, with the first night covering the run up and the second night covering the aftermath. I know what many people are going to say, ‘It’s PBS ergo it is liberal minded, BDS trash.’ Not quite, and, honestly, not really.
On the whole, no, I didn’t like this. I found this to be rather contrived and predictable in its treatment. I’d call it journalism but not real documentary making, and I’d definitely never call this a good historical chronicle of events. Liberals will watch this and feel justified in their daily five minute hates. Conservatives will watch and be even more convinced that PBS is nothing but a liberal mouth piece. People who didn’t pay the greatest of attention will be left with a flawed and incomplete view of what happened and why, though better than what they had on their own dime. I may not have liked it, and sorry for being all Terry Teachout here, that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth watching. It is worth watching. It is detestable at points, and maybe misleading at some others by my estimation, but it is worth watching for the many things it does do well (even if I don’t include them in my highlights). It does present some arguments that some of us on the rightish side of the aisle might not be able to easily answer, disprove, or set aside. For that it is worth watching.
There is a lot worth sitting thru the 3+ hours of this documentary to see. I cannot go into all the things I liked or disliked here (John’d kill me if I wrote a 10 pager (‘My bandwidth, my beautiful bandwidth!’), plus I simply don’t want to write that much about it.). Highlights include things like why Cheney may have had reason to distrust CIA and answers about the Atta in Prague story. There are nuggets here worth watching for. I, and you, may not agree with the total treatment but it is worth watching. It definitely goes out of its way to show things as controversial and to delve into office politics heavily, which I didn’t really go for. That turned it into nothing more than power politics and pecker waving contests, and I don’t believe much is ever that simple.
It is worth watching simply to have a single, coherent primer of what the dominate narrative about the Iraq *is*, right or wrong that narrative may be.
The short of it is that it does seem to follow a preset script and the Iraq War a bad thing and that there are definite villains of this play we are supposed to hate (boo Rumsfeld, essentially). The short of it is a reason not to watch. The long of it, the volume of data and other events surrounding the how and why, is a reason to watch.
(The long of it is below the fold.)
There are villains that this documentary wanted to ‘get’. They just happened to be VP Cheney and SecDef Rumsfeld instead of President Bush and the entire Administration. Quite honestly, this worked more like a hit piece on them than an indictment of President Bush. At their feet was laid almost all the blame for the run up to war, including claims of fudging the intelligence and ‘Curveball’, and the mishandling of the post takedown of Saddam. Rumsfeld, most heavily Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Yoo take the heat for Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, and things over which there is debate over like ‘is it torture’ and should Taliban or other insurgents be considered POWs. These are the villains. Cheney is Darth Sidious/Emporer Palpatine, and Rumsfeld is his acolyte, sort of, Darth Vader who has things so drastically wrong at every turn.
I was actually quite surprised at the treatment of just about everyone else in the current Administration. President Bush is not a villain or a war criminal in this. A weak man maybe, someone mislead by those closest to him, and dominated by Cheney but not a villain. Dr. Rice gets a mixed treatment. She’s given a ‘weak nancy-girl’ treatment in the first installment but given kudos for pushing the Administration toward the ‘Clear, Hold, Build’ strategy and for taking on Rumsfeld after being made SecState. She’s given a lot of kudos for that. SecState Powell is treated like a sage who should have been listened to, but wasn’t. Surprisingly the flaws in everyone but Cheney and Rumsfeld are not taken as a pathway to denounce them as war criminals. They are portrayed as flawed, tragic, or unready for prime time individuals, but not evil. People caught up in events beyond their control or erroneous lines of thought, but not evil.
There is an assumptions underlying how this documentary’s first night unfolds that I don’t and never will agree with. One of the most prominent being the proposition that the War on Terror is solely about al Quaeda. Rumsfeld and Cheney, our villains, push for a broader conflict in the ME, or seek to satisfy some bizarre jones to attack Iraq, but the CIA wants to keep it only about bin Laden and aQ. I’ve always rejected this. Why? For the best formal reasoning read Dr. Tom Barnett’s books and blog. In a nutshell: because turning this into retributive raids or manhunts doesn’t end the threat. We did Libya, and still got attacked. Did Sudan, the infamous cruise missile diplomacy. Still got attacked. We tried the first WTC attackers in civilian court, and attacks still continued. Whack-a-mole and targeted manhunts all thru the 70’s to the late 90’s and it only gets worse. No, the solution to the problem of Islamicist ideology driven terrorism has to be larger and more complicated than simply hunting for OBL and taking down the Taliban because if that’s all it was we’d never have had a bin Laden because we did that in the 80-90’s (Libya et al.) to seemingly no effect. So, right there, I find a major flaw in this documentary. They’re pushing people who looked to the problem of int’l terrorism as a bigger problem than just bin Laden and labeling them traitors or people with, possibly evil, ulterior motives for the broader view. Since that’s a very critical assumption, underlying much of the first night’s case, it is a crippling disagreement.
The second night is by far the weakest in my opinion. It showed a real lack of knowledge by the documentarians of what Rumsfeld was trying to do. They really try to play it as strategy summed up in nine words: “Do it small. Get out fast. Screw the aftermath.” Rather simplistic, and also tosses aside what they laid out as the plan going in for the aftermath, yes, they admit that there was a post Saddam plan drawn up before the invasion, the first night (Achmed Chalabi). Something they spent a good twenty or thirty minutes on the previous night. That constitutes a continuity problem in my eyes. Honestly, Barnett does it best. Rumsfeld was right, and wrong. He had it 100% right on how small we could go to take down Iraq but was 100% wrong on the post conflict reconstruction being able to be done by the same sized force. The documentarians take the tack that Rumsfeld’s a grandstanding idiot, mostly.
The second night follows a chronology that could have been taken straight from the New York Times staff writers. It does present the first Battle of Fallujah in terms I’d not considered in the past, and bases their claims on interviews of ‘insiders’ (but not faceless, nameless ‘highly placed officials’). But, even here, it doesn’t look like they’re willing to go much outside their preset script. They deserve credit for trying a multidiscipline treatment of event, but they still take a preset position and are unwilling to deviate from it (the insurgency became indomitable after that because there were too few troops in Iraq, and it’s Rumsfeld’s fault).
By far I found the weakest bit of this whole thing was the panel of people they interviewed. It seemed stacked to me. Much of the commentary was done by some of the harshest critics. Where were the critics but not opponent type people? Did Barnett get called but turn them down? I’m not saying that they should’ve put Jonah Goldberg on there, but couldn’t someone like Max Boot or Mark Steyn---people who present cases for other rationales for doing Iraq---have been put on there? Now that would have put the real question to the people: is it or isn’t it part of a larger campaign, is the WOT only a big name for what amounts to ‘Get bin Laden!’? Some of the people they got were excellent choices. Andrew Krepinevich being one example, COLs Hammes and McMaster being others of the dozen or so out of the 50 or so people who offer commentary that are experts instead of journalists who really lend something substantive to the doc. Unfortunately the experts don’t get as much time as the journo’s and book writers do. I’d much rather have listened to dueling accounts of what happened and why between Col HR McMaster and Col Hammes or Gen Keating than listen to Ricks deride the strategy of the Gen casey tenure as ‘war tourism’.
One of the best, if painful, elements to this was the documentation of Rumsfeld’s role in ‘energetic interrogation’ implementation. They did this one well, if somewhat melodramatic. They laid they case, they showed the documents, they didn’t trot out someone un-named source. This was straight up reporting.
Worth watching. Gollum can’t give a number of ‘yes my preciousssssessss’ or anything like that on this. It is too complex for that kind of treatment. I’d watch it again. I want to watch it again. But that doesn’t mean I liked it or agreed with much of it. I know, it’s PBS, but it is worth the time.
--ry
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