The war has two fronts, in D.C. and in Iraq, as told in this month's Frontline four-parter. At left: a scene from the series' 2003 "Truth, War and Consequences." (Photo: AP/WideWorld.)
In depth, seven years deep: Frontline’s ‘Bush’s War’
When the United States went to war in Afghanistan in October 2001, a government source called Frontline producer Michael Kirk and told him to pay attention to Iraq.
“I knew there had been some unhappiness inside, among Paul Wolfowitz and others, about how we hadn’t finished the fight,” says Kirk, who’d covered the 1991 Gulf War, “and I thought, ‘Man, I have not been paying attention to the right signals.’ So we made a few phone calls, and indeed, we could see through the fog.”
He saw a shift in emphasis toward Iraq — guided by Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi National Congress and Pentagon forces — and made the film “Gunning for Saddam.”
That was one of the first of 40 Frontline docs about what President Bush called the war on terror.
On the Iraq war’s fifth anniversary next month, Kirk will retell the tumultuous story in a two-part, character-driven anthology, using material from the 40 programs as well as new reporting. “Bush’s War” is scheduled to air March 24 and 25 [2008].
Beginning with the 9/11 attacks and ending with the president’s 2008 State of the Union address, the March broadcasts are a super-sized version of Frontline’s usual package — a contextually rich, methodical look at recent history that attempts to explain how powerful peoples’ motives or how cultural institutions operate.
Drawing on some 380 interviews with journalists and civilian and military officials, “Bush’s War” surveys two fronts: the strategizing and infighting behind the scenes in Washington and the intervention abroad that has devolved into civil war.
Frontline Executive Producer David Fanning says the program takes a new look at what people think they know about the war. It’s a “tremendous public service,” he says, comparing it to WGBH’s 1983 series on Vietnam and contrasting it with much TV reporting about Iraq that he believes is “unintelligible.” Kirk surmises that the public’s fatigue with war news comes from commercial TV’s “verbal food-fights” and “half-baked” reporting.
Most news organizations these days don’t have the resources or attention span to step back and analyze — they’re too busy trying to cover the war’s day-to-day developments, says Walter Dean, broadcast and online director for the Committee of Concerned Journalists and a former CBS news producer. Viewers are fatigued by the daily diet of brief updates, he says, but not by attempts to understand what the U.S. is doing and why.
If people watch all four hours of “Bush’s War,” says Kirk, “I have a feeling they’re really going to know what happened, and that can’t be bad.”
Frontline has come closer than any other broadcaster, says Dean, to addressing the big question: “Was declaring a ‘war on terror’ the most appropriate response to 9/11, and is having a war on terror as the master narrative of U.S. foreign and domestic policy . . . in our best national self-interest?”
Though such questions are heavy, viewer interest was high in the first years of Frontline’s war coverage, and certain programs since — such as “Rumsfeld’s War” — have earned higher ratings. The series’ war programs did 21 percent better than Frontline’s average in the 2002-03 season, when the Iraq war began, says Craig Reed of TRAC Media Services.
Since then, war-related programs generally have followed the season average, not grabbing as many viewers as shows such as “Is Wal-Mart Good for America?” and “American Porn.” For the 2006-07 season, Frontline’s audience was comparable to PBS’s average primetime audience.
But Reed forecasts that “Bush’s War,” with its broad scope an strong title, will once again beat the average.
One-third of programs war-related
Instead of setting out to break news, Frontline gives producers time and resources to investigate topics thoroughly, followed by weeks of editing and fact-checking. The series spends time on issues “just recently left behind by the press pack,” says Kirk. “When the journalism circus came to town, doing its appropriate job of reporting ‘the now,’” he says, “what angle of vision did they miss?”
Frontline has devoted more than a third of its coverage since 9/11 to the so-called war on terror, including the following.
2001: Two days after 9/11, the series broadcast “Hunting Bin Laden,” an updated version of its 1999 report by a team of New York Times reporters and Frontline correspondent Lowell Bergman that traced Bin Laden’s previous anti-U.S. violence, explored his international terrorist network and probed U.S. intelligence efforts. Soon after, “Target America” looked at lessons from President Reagan’s 1980s “war on terror,” and “Looking for Answers” explored the roots of Al Qaeda’s anti-Americanism.
2002: Frontline investigated U.S.-Saudi relations, the possible implications of U.S. action against Iran, and an account of how three 9/11 terrorists became fanatical opponents of America and, undetected, prepared their stunning blow. “Campaign Against Terror” dissected the U.S. war in Afghanistan and the selection of Hamid Karzai as president.
2003: Kirk’s “The War Behind Closed Doors” traced how Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, rose to power and set the course for Baghdad. Three days before the March 20 U.S. invasion began, Frontline dug into its archive to produce “The Long Road to War,” about America’s complicated relationship with Saddam Hussein. At the time, according to a 2007 study by the Pew Research Center, 71 percent of Americans thought it was the right decision to use military force in Iraq.
Early in the fighting, Frontline was asking questions about the war’s consequences, says Fanning. Its producers cast a skeptical eye on information from official sources. But Frontline has been returning to films and re-editing segments on weapons of mass destruction to include later revelations. At the time, Frontline reported accounts that they believed were from reputable sources, says Fanning. They have since realized, as other journalists have, that they were taken in.
In April 2003, TV broadcasts showed Saddam’s statue toppling. President Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” and dispatched Paul Bremer to help reconstruct Iraq. That fall, Frontline began its season with Martin Smith’s “Truth, War and Consequences,” which asks why the U.S. was unprepared for the post-war civil unrest in Iraq and whether the rationale for war was based on faulty intelligence. Ahmad Chalabi told Frontline he had documents proving a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, though he didn’t produce the evidence.
2004: In January, four months after the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group said it found no WMD in Iraq, BBC reporter Jane Corbin shadowed the study group’s continuing search with former U.N. weapons inspector David Kay. That fall, with public support of the war hovering around 50 percent, “Rumsfeld’s War” investigated the Secretary of Defense’s effort to remake the military.
2005: Frontline aired programs about terrorism in Europe, U.S. troops’ experiences in Iraq, post-traumatic stresses, the use of torture in interrogation, and the power struggle between the CIA and Cheney.
2006: In October, some journalists began to acknowledge that they were witnessing a “civil war” in Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld stepped down in November, and, by the end of the year, a majority of the public said the war was not going well, according to the Pew Study. Frontline aired reports on the effectiveness of the domestic counterterrorism efforts and Bremer’s “lost year” in Iraq that failed to establish peace and order.
2007: In the months after the February troop “surge,” Frontline evaluated the domestic spying program and whether it jeopardized civil liberties. “Gangs of Iraq” looked at the Shia gangs when everyone else was looking at Saddam’s partisans and other factions, says Fanning. Kirk made two character-driven narratives: “Endgame,” investigating how and why U.S. strategies led to the civil war, and “Cheney’s Law,” about the vice president’s view that the Constitution gives the president unlimited wartime power.
2008: Last month, Frontline investigated what happened in Haditha, Iraq, where 24 civilians were killed by U.S. troops.
Second sight: a train wreck
“Bush’s War,” a foreboding play-by-play, supplements Frontline’s archive with more information about the troop surge and details gathered along the way about Colin Powell’s position, Condoleezza Rice’s role and Rumsfeld’s removal, says Kirk.
“My interest is in the human beings,” he says. “It’s almost impossible to imagine a better cast of characters for a drama than these people.”
The stories, Fanning agrees, are truly “Shakespearean.”
As Kirk sequenced footage in the editing room, he saw new patterns appear. Shiite leader Muqtada Al-Sadr emerges in the second part of Bush’s War in a way Kirk didn’t notice when Frontline first covered the events. “You watch his growth as a force in this place,” he says, “and you watch Washington consistently miss it or consistently trade off against it, not realizing what they’re doing, and it’s like watching a train wreck.”
To tell what occurred in war councils behind closed doors, Kirk pulls still photos from a huge archive and interviews journalists who can narrate what happened. For many of the films, inside sources — U.S. and Iraqi military leaders, political advisors and former Justice Department officials — have given Frontline 2- to 3-hour interviews because they trust the series and want their interpretations of events on record, says Kirk.
“They often will say to me, ‘I’ve been interviewed 50 times on this, I’ve been on every television show in America, and I’ve never quite said it that way.’ That isn’t because of some great skill I have, that’s because of the time for them to think about it and talk.”
Fanning hopes “Bush’s War” will have a long life in the country’s “intellectual commons.”
“Bush’s War” may be television’s most complete record of the administration’s war on terror to date. But it won’t address what’s next or how to get out of Iraq.
“That’s politics,” says Kirk. “We’re about talking about how we got in.”
Web page posted March 3, 2008
Copyright 2008 by Current LLC
