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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I think Stephen Den Beste's summary of why we went to war in Iraq is one of the best I've seen so far:

http://denbeste.nu/essays/strategic_overview.shtml

I also watched the Frontline piece and it is worth the time. In the theory that you have to pan a lot of dirt to find a nugget this piece should be one of a number of sources. But yes, it was more like a docudrama then a true documentory.

why did we go to war in Iraq? Because I said so.

Ryan, The bottom-line is this, I agree with "Kat-Missouri". It really comes down to this- Because, Grumpy said so." But it is equally true, NONE of us have the facts! Everything has been intentionally blurred. Therefore, we have a whole series of different docudramas, this would include the whole military-veteran blog world, including this one. I am not saying you are liars or are trying to deceive anybody. You are dealing with perceptions. Even the people who are there only see a microcosm of the whole real picture. Many could accurately say this whole blog world is nothing more than a glorified op-ed piece. In the final view, these men will answer to the old "Hag" herself, her name is History. There will be a day when all of this will hang out in the open for all to see, totally and factually, with no spin.

You think there's no spin in History?

For a fascinating read on the subject, I would highly encourage everyone to read Yossef Bodansky's The Secret History of the Iraq War.

I found it to be a thorough study on the rat's nest that was/is Iraq.

Historians tell only the unvarnished, verifiable, uninfluenced truth, Trias!

Don't undermine my confidence!

No. this war will be spun so badly in history, no one will know what's real or not, not even if they put it "all out there". Our grandchildren will look back and think we were crazy, uber-hubris near nazis that over responded to the death of a tiny number of our citizens by giving our oil hungry and imperial government the go ahead to trample on some poor nation that we had alternately wanted to blow to pieces and annex to our country for over a decade for its oil wealth under the guise of getting the people who attacked us on 9/11.

Which will also have deep caveats about the probability that 9/11 was a conspiracy by the government in order to start the war in the first place.

I want to write McMillan and demand that, under the Iraq war, when they are explaining why we went to war, they should put my picture and the words "I said so." Someone should take the responsibility and stop dumping it all on the administration like some horrifically bloody scape goat.

Helllloooo???? I hope they write in those books how the Iraq war started out with 70% support. Of course, if they do, they will write that American citizens believed Saddam ordered 9/11.

History was already written in the newspapers. You just have to marvel at the bizarre parallel universe we live in. I can't decided which of us actually went down the rabbit hole.

Saddam will be a martyr to imperial dreams.

As we start going down the path of history, "She" will reveal all of the truth. Kat, you are right, people will try to spin it. The old saying many years ago was, "When politicians die, they don't bury them, they just screw them into the ground." The question becomes, "Is it a right handed thread or a left handed thread?" But as we grow older, we see things differently. There was another old saying, "He who does not learn from history is condemned to repeat it, repeat it and repeat it over again until you learn." D.O.D. made a policy change to disregard history, military and other types. In truth, this is like disregarding the 800 pound gorilla in the room. This is the most arrogant moronic move a human can make.

Somebody said "History is written by the winners" I guess nobody cares what the loosers think. At least there will be more sources for historians when this chapter is written and not just the front page of the NYT. Well...if they can make sure the Sandy Bergers of the world ain't stuffing history down the front of their pants.

I try to read different accounts so I can determine what was to have supposed to maybe happen. My father made me read British accounts of the Revolution when I was young just to make that point. Lordy but we were not nice people.

And..to get this off my chest...if it was just for oil...Canada and Mexico are next door and Chavez sits just around the corner. With what we have in country; we use very little from the middle east.

Don't go starting anything while I'm fishing in the Bahamas. I need to get back here. I promised my grand children to be out for trout season.

My father made me read British accounts of the Revolution when I was young just to make that point. Lordy but we were not nice people.

Nope, we sure weren't. For the most part, we refused to stand and fight unless we had an advantage in position or numbers and we had our sharpshooters target the officers *on purpose*, which was the height of Bad Sportsmanship in EuroWarfare back in the day.

We're *good* at guerrilla and counter-guerrilla warfare, whenever our doctrine doesn't get in the way...

BTW, my branch of the family had combatants on both sides during that scrap, so we usually refer to it as "Our First Civil War"...