Charles Kaiser on Bush's War

The New York Times is at its worst when it dismisses a cultural event that is recognized as important by everyone except the Times.

That's what the newspaper of record did to Bush's War, the two-part documentary about America's invasion of Iraq, airing yesterday and today on PBS. Written, produced, and directed by Michael Kirk, with reporter Jim Gilmore assisting, these four-and-a-half hours of television are an extraordinary work of explanatory journalism.

Drawing on 40 previous Frontline pieces about the war (including several produced by Kirk), the documentary demonstrates exactly how the neoconservative establishment turned 9/11 into a false pretext for invading Iraq. Cheney and Rumsfeld even went so far as to create their own intelligence agency inside the defense department when the CIA refused to confirm fake events, like the alleged meeting between 9/11 plotter Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi diplomat in Prague. The FBI dismissed this idea after a positive confirmation that Atta was actually in Florida on the date of the alleged meeting, but that never stopped Cheney from repeating this canard almost every time he went on television.

Details like that one aren't new to serious students of this catastrophe. But Bush's War performs an enormous service by gathering all of the relevant facts together and getting great reporters like Jane Mayer of the New Yorker to talk about torture, and James Risen of the New York Times and Dana Priest of the Washington Post to talk about the run-up to the war and "make the obvious less obscure," as John Leonard put it in his rave review in New York magazine. "This two-night, four-and-a-half-hour Frontline special is the best audiovisual history of who, why, when, and how available to date," Leonard wrote.

TV Guide's Matt Roush wrote, "PBS's greatest asset, the trenchant and enterprising news magazine Frontline, devotes 4 1/2 hours to telling the stories behind the current Iraq conflict in sobering, gripping detail." Dozens of other newspapers, like the Detroit Free Press, identified it as "tonight's must-see."

Not so in the Times. Neil Genzlinger complained of "numbing detail," called the show "a little late to the party" (because the war's fifth anniversary was last week), and warns that this retrospective will only be appreciated by those who are already convinced "that the war is wrong and that the decisions before and during it were poorly made."

Apparently for Genzlinger the jury is still out, although he conceded that "maybe there's no longer even an argument to be made that the war has accomplished some worthy objectives." Then he complains about "a parade of underlings—deputies and other secondary players—and journalists. After an hour or two you may start to wonder how much of what you're hearing is an accurate first draft of history and how much professional Washington insiders (yes, including the journalists) trying to make themselves sound more savvy and less culpable in hindsight than they actually were."

You might think that the Times would have chosen an Iraqi expert to write about the most important documentary ever made about the war in Iraq. Maybe Genzlinger has a secret political background I'm not aware of it, but you wouldn't know from any of his most recent 100 bylines, all of which appeared over theater, TV, and movie reviews that had absolutely nothing to do with Iraq or politics.

The documentary is at its most depressing when it highlights how much the machismo of Bush's men is responsible for this calamity. "Underline the word men," as John Leonard put it. "Over and over ... we're told that Rummy, Cheney, John Bolton, George Tenet, and John Yoo are 'men's men' and 'alpha males.' Red-faced and beefy, they say so themselves. The vice president and the secretary of defense do their best to undermine the CIA, nobody talks to Condoleezza Rice, everybody lies to Colin Powell, and the State Department's counterterrorism coordinator Cofer Black dreams of 'heads on pikes ... flies crawling across their dead eyes.'"

In the Los Angeles Times, Tony Perry focused on the most depressing detail of all—how two generals' taste for tequila helped to make all of this possible.

"Gen. Franks likes margaritas," says Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong, "and I've got a margarita recipe—of course, I'm a tequila connoisseur. And so we sat down and had some margaritas and tequila and discussed whether this the right thing to do for us, for the country? Can we look our troops in the eyes and say, 'You're going to die tomorrow and here's why?' And the answer was yes."

Perry pointed out one other detail Frontline omitted: "Other high-ranking Marine officers, presumably without access to DeLong's margarita recipe, continued to believe they needed more troops than Rumsfeld was allowing them."

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