Bush's War

Jambo has recommended the program by Frontline called “Bush’s War” for a week now, and I have been either too busy or too lazy to watch it… until today. I know he has seen it, and I am under the impression that Ryan has seen it, as well. I know that watching a PBS program must be physically painful for a man like Ryan, but I do hope he watched the whole thing. After all, some of his taxes helped fund it….

This is as close to an “objective” over-view of the lead-up and initial stages of the War in Afghanistan and Iraq as you will likely find in America today. I am especially impressed with the additional content offered by PBS on their web site… they read like footnotes to the documentary, and add an additional dimension to the experience that you simply wouldn’t have by just watching TV.

The questions this program raises about the planning and execution of the war in Iraq is particularly interesting to me. Anyone can look at the contributing interviews of many of the people that went into the making of this show as questions asked of people with determined opinions and agendas, but the strength of the show is that no ONE opinion is fronted as correct, unless it is substantiated by numerous others. Richard Clarke, for example, has had his opinions and views brought to question, but nothing he says or contributes to the program is unsupported by other facts or sources. THIS is real journalism.

Sources vary from the New York Times (very liberal) to the Weekly Standard (very conservative), and the interviews used range from Gen. David Petraeus, US Army, to Dana Priest of the Washington Post, and Collin Powell to Caspar Weinberger.

The conclusions made in this program are ones I would love to discuss at length in this forum. In only the few hours that have past since I watched it the first time, I have gone back and watched numerous “chapters” again, and have found innumerable resources on the web via the material and links found that the PBS site.

To think that if each and every situation described in this program were even partially accurate, than the manner in which the first Bush Administration conducted itself prior to the invasion of Iraq is shocking in the extreme. To think that people like Rumsfeld and Cheney would place personal pride and political in-fighting before the concerns of American foreign policy interests and national security are mind-blowing enough, but the ability of Bush to knowingly allow this situation to develop to the point it did, then follow through with what he was told by no fewer than 50% of his senior Cabinet officials was patently wrong really does make me wonder what the post-Presidency of Bush is going to bring to history.

This isn’t conspiracy theory, and this isn’t unsubstantiated rumors floating around the “Beltway”. These are corroborated facts and documented actions by the nations “top level” leaders… the SecDef, the Director of Central Intelligence, the Vice President, the President, the Sec. of State, and the National Security Advisor. This is as “big” a documentary that I have seen since I first watched “Fahren-HYPE 9/11” back in 2004.

If you haven’t seen it, watch it. The online version is easy to use, and you won’t be able to keep up with my arguments if you don’t watch it… that’s not a slam on anyone, but I am going to demand that any Bush apologist be ready to respond to my questions clearly and with no hesitation. I’m willing to accept that some aspects of this program are biased and may have inaccurate depictions of what actually happened, but those inaccuracies will have to be proven above and beyond what the producers of “Bush’s War” have done.