Preview: Frontline Takes on Bush's War
Consider this a DVR/TiVo/VCR/whatever alert for those distracted by tonight's Britney sitcom appearance, the return of
CSI: Miami or the latest round of
Dancing With the Stars. For the next two nights, PBS's greatest asset, the trenchant and enterprising news magazine
Frontline, devotes 4 ½ hours to telling the stories behind the current Iraq conflict in sobering, gripping detail.
Bush's War is lucid, engrossing, infuriating, timed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the conflict and arriving on the heels of another grim day of terrible violence in the region (with sad irony, on Easter Sunday)- also the day when the U.S. death toll reached 4,000. This is the sort of program network-news divisions ought to be devoting their resources to. Which is why we should be so thankful to
Frontline for being there all along the way.
Building a narrative from an archive of more than 40
Frontline reports (with updated interviews) dating back to the 9/11 attacks through the planning, selling and execution of this war,
Bush's War might more accurately be called "All the President's Men- and Condi Rice." Though there is war footage here, this is really the story of the political infighting that got us into this situation and why the end is not in sight. You could almost lose sight of the war against terrorists in all the scorched-earth tactics in the bureaucratic battles between agencies (CIA vs. FBI vs. Department of Defense vs. State Department) and the power-play turf wars and blame games between the (mostly) men in charge, notably Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld against Colin Powell.
It's a scandal wrapped in a tragedy, with the first night (the build-up to war) a study in arrogance and the second night (shock and awe followed by insurgency) a chronicle of incompetence.
What's really sad here is that this won't be
Frontline's last word on the subject.
