03.23.08
“Bush’s War”, PBS, Mon & Tues 8-10pm,
| Bush’s War - Part 1 Air: Monday, 8pm-10pm |
| Bush’s War - Part 2 Air: Tuesday, 8pm-10pm |
| repeats digital Channel 323 Tuesday & Wednesday March 25, 12:00 am and again Wed. & Thurs 2am |
| 9/11 and Al Qaeda, Afghanistan and Iraq, WMD and the Insurgency, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Fallujah and the Surge. For six years FRONTLINE has been revealing those stories in meticulous detail, and the political dramas played out at the highest levels — George W. Bush and Tony Blair, Dick Cheney and Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, Condoleezza Rice, Osama Bin Laden. Now, on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, the full saga will unfold in this special four-hour broadcast over two consecutive nights on PBS, titled Bush’s War. Drawing on one of the richest archives in broadcast journalism (FRONTLINE’s 40+ films), veteran producer Michael Kirk (Cheney’s Law; Endgame; The Lost Year in Iraq; The Dark Side; The Torture Question; Rumsfeld’s War; The Man Who Knew; The War Behind Closed Doors; Gunning for Saddam; Target America) also delivers new reporting and fresh 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 — the invasion of Afghanistan, torture, flawed intelligence and the invasion of Iraq, failures in the American occupation and the saber-rattling over Iran," 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." |
DOUG MILLS : ASSOCIATED PRESS
President George W. Bush speaks by telephone from the Oval Office at the White House in
TELEVISION Frontline turns no-nonsense lens on war in
Associated Press
BUSH’S WAR
• Part one of the two-part Frontline series on Channel 8 airs at 8 p.m. Monday.
Part two airs at 8 p.m. Tuesday. Join Bush’s War in marking a dismal anniversary.
This two-part Frontline documentary begins with the Sept. 11 attacks. Then, step by step, it moves toward the Bush administration’s shock-and-awe response. With Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein successfully branded Public Enemy No. 1, the invasion of Iraq began five years ago this month.
But that’s just the first part of Bush’s War. What Frontline calls a secret war — not so secret by now, but seldom exposed in such detail as in this film — airs at 8 p.m. Monday on Channel 8.
Behind the scenes, Secretary of State Colin Powell and CIA Director George Tenet were battling Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Interviewed on camera, Powell says that on 9/11, "I suggested to the president and my other colleagues that this was an opportunity to begin pulling together a worldwide coalition."
But according to journalist Bob Woodward, that same night Rumsfeld said, "Part of our response maybe should be attacking
In this fractious environment, Rumsfeld distrusted the CIA’s findings, so he set up his own Pentagon information-gathering unit. One of its reports drew the all-important link between Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Although both the FBI and CIA disputed the report’s supporting evidence, Cheney cited it repeatedly as justification for attacking
Richard Clarke, then the nation’s counterterrorism czar, remembers being scolded by Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, for declaring he didn’t believe the report.
As Clarke recalls, "I said, ‘I don’t believe it, because it’s not true.’ And he said, ‘You’re wrong. You know you’re wrong. … Go back and find the rest of the reports, and find out that you’re wrong.’ And I understood what he was saying, which was, ‘This is a report that we want to believe, and stop saying it’s not true.’ "
Part two of Bush’s War, airing at 8 p.m. Tuesday, begins with the swift American victory in Iraq, followed within hours by looting by Baghdad citizens, to which Rumsfeld responded with a breezy, "Stuff happens."
The film lays out this drama, through the rise of the insurgency (with no ready U.S. plan to counteract), the mythical WMDs, continuing disorder and danger, the scandal of Abu Ghraib prison, the strategy of a "surge" in U.S. troop strength, up to the present day, as public support of the war erodes and the 2008 presidential race is being waged, in part, on how (and how fast) we can get out of Iraq.
Produced by Frontline veteran Michael Kirk, Bush’s War came together rather quickly — at least, by Frontline production standards.
The idea was conceived only last November. But along with fresh reporting and new interviews, the film draws on a Frontline archive of some 40 prior programs on the war on terror, and a treasury of nearly 400 interviews shot since 9/11.
Richly told, Bush’s War is a political thriller, all the more so for unfolding in the no-nonsense Frontline fashion, with the series’ signature narrator (Will Lyman) lending his somber off-screen presence.
Bush’s War gives us heightened understanding of a situation whose anniversary we will almost certainly be marking again and again.
Meanwhile, the film is a pointed reminder of what Frontline delivers every week: an in-depth, no-glitz examination of something significant — and without commercial interruptions or pre-break teasers ("Coming up next … !").
Many TV documentary and magazine shows could be likened to fruit-flavored soda. Frontline, in somewhat startling contrast, tastes fresh-squeezed. A series like this wouldn’t seem a good bet to have lasted a quarter-century. But here it is, in the midst of its 25th season, having thrived journalistically under David Fanning (who has been executive producer since it began in 1983), and drawing an average cumulative audience of 4 million viewers each week.
It continues even in the face of politicians’ annual threats to slash the budget of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, where Frontline, like most PBS shows, gets a large share of its money. (The federal tax bite for public television — plus public radio — for the average American is less than $2 per year.)
Another threat: the familiar argument that what public television offers isn’t necessary in the era of cable TV’s multiplicity, especially since PBS can’t compete with the quantity and variety of cable’s programming.
Last month, a New York Times columnist wondered in print whether "the glory days of public television … are past recapturing?" He took issue with PBS fixtures like The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (whose 73-year-old anchor, he noted, has been in place since 1975), and with knockoffs from commercial TV such as America’s Ballroom Challenge.
But in building its case that PBS is irrelevant or redundant, or both, the column made no mention of Frontline. This was a conspicuous omission. Whatever the viewer’s beef with PBS — and there’s lots to complain about — Frontline is a series to be recognized, and valued, as unique.
And a bargain at two bucks a year.
