Frontline: Bush's War

In the age of Big Brother and The Bachelor it is a pleasant surprise when television features a documentary that is incisive, balanced, informative, and thought provoking. Maybe I've just been watching the wrong channels, but this week I found it very refreshing to watch Frontline: Bush's War, a two part special aired to mark the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, being a documentary analysis/ distillation of the extensive archives of related footage from the PBS archives.

I watched it online (and perhaps you can too, if you follow this link, or follow this link for the DVD/ transcript). I would have to rate this a solid 2 on my scale of ratings, and I consider it necessary viewing for anyone interested in current affairs/ with even a passing interest in U.S. politics.

The documentary begins in the hours after the attacks on 9/11/2001 and covers roughly the next five years... It sheds a light on the neo-conservative mania with Iraq and how that, coupled with political infighting between Cheney/ Rumsfeld on one side and Powell/ Rice on the other, (good old 'W' and George Tenet were somewhere in the middle) and all-round short-sightedness and incompetence have given the world one of its worst messes.

It physically pains one to realize it takes so few to royally f*ck up so many, and literally strip a civilization back into a feudal form.

The one thing that impressed me for all four hours of the running time was the very high journalistic standard that the director was following. Since I watched it online, every time someone was speaking in the documentary, I had the option of clicking through to watch/ read the full un-edited interview, or reading interesting sidebars, documents, etc. that backed up the story content.

The documentary also avoids falling into Bush-bashing - if anything, at times you realize Bush was the adjudicator of major disputes and the gridlock breaker. At most times though, you realize Bush was merely rubber-stamping what was ultimately Cheney and Rumsfeld's foul-up.

Not once does the documentary say anything approaching the level of judgment that most news shows and political rhetoric feature these days - and yet, in its objectivity, it is a more profound indictment of the Bush administration than any partisan muck-raker could ever manage.

If I have any complaints at all from this piece it is that they did not cover two important things -

1) The effect that the war in Iraq and the way it was handled had on Afghanistan (the focus of the documentary is arguably Iraq, but one can argue that 'Bush's War' is simply a two-front war on terror)

2) The events in Iraq and in the U.S after the U.S. Congressional elections of 2006, when the Democrats took back the Congress from Republicans, the Iraq Study Group, and the recent troop 'Surge' strategy.

These two things get at most a passing mention, and so leave a viewer who is not adequately informed about them in the lurch, looking for more information sources - of course, that may not be a bad thing.

Also, I have to admit these events are perhaps too recent to chronicle effectively - let's wait another 3 years for another Frontline special!

In the meantime, watch/ read/ buy this now!