Robert P. Laurence

San Diego Television

Whose idea was this war, anyway?

And: "Miss Guided" on ABC
By Robert P. Laurence
Posted on Mar 19 2008
Last updated Mar 19 2008

Next time somebody says we don’t need PBS, that cable’s news, history and nature channels have made it unnecessary, remind that somebody of “Frontline.”

Specifically, you might mention the latest “Frontline” opus, the four-and-a-half-hour “Bush’s War,” a detailed and often gripping history of how and why the United States got into the fix where it finds itself today, five years after the shock-and-awe invasion of Iraq. This was a job that needed to be done, but nobody in television but “Frontline” was about to do it. (Part 1 at 9-11:30 p.m. Monday, March 24, on KPBS/Cable Channel 11; Part 2 at 9-11 p.m. Tuesday)

“Frontline” has for 25 years been television’s foremost documentary and investigative series, winning every prize imaginable several times over while reporting with insight and unmatched persistence on subjects ranging from Tibet to credit cards, school integration to the plight of farm famiies, torture to Mogadishu. Significantly, when former New York Times book editor Charles McGrath asked in the Times a few weeks ago, “Is PBS Still Necessary?” and answered himself in the negative, he somehow forgot to mention “Frontline.”

Cable may have three all-news channels of varying quality – CNN, Fox News, MSNBC – but they differ from each other primarily in political slant, not in basic approach to the news. They cover their subjects again and again and again, but they seldom delve below the surface. They go long, but they don’t go deep. For that, we need “Frontline.”

“Bush’s War” uses material from 40 past “Frontline” documentaries dealing with various aspects of the “war on terror” plus tons of new material to piece the whole story together, including the roles played by Vice-President Dick Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, neocon Paul Wolfowitz and myriad other actors in the continuing melodrama.

This is the first time, says producer Michael Kirk, that anyone 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.”

President Bush emerges more as follower than leader, a figurehead president heeding with little question the advice of Cheney and others of like mind. However many people told him that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks of Sept. 11, the President chose to believe the opposite from Cheney. The vice-president, remembering that the CIA’s information had occasionally been wrong in some past instances, decided on his own that it must be wrong again to say Iraq wasn’t involved with Sept. 11. He and Rumsfeld set up their own intelligence operations to produce the information they sought. In the words of the narration, “they needed people with experience in the world of intelligence, but they hired politically connected policy analysts.”

For two years after the CIA and FBI had discounted the story, Cheney persisted in spreading the idea that one of the Sept. 11 hijackers had met in Prague with one of Saddam Hussein’s agents. He's seen in several consecutive TV appearances repeating the allegation over and over.

Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post calls Cheney “the Moby Dick of the Bush administration. And it’s all very mysterious and it only occurs between him and President Bush. But you get a sense that as soon as the meeting’s over, he sits down with the President and says, ‘OK, here’s what you need to take away from this.’”

But Cheney is by no means the only person whose prewar statements linger to haunt him. Here's Wolfowitz in the runup to the war: "It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself."

With Part 1 focusing on the buildup to the war, Part 2 of “Bush’s War” focuses on the conduct of the war, from the futile search for weapons of mass destruction to the disbanding of the Iraqi army, to the dismissal of Rumsfeld following the Democratic takeover of Congress in the 2006 election to the surge in troop numbers, to the recent downturn in violence.

“Bush’s War” closes with these words from the narration: “Soon, Bush’s war will be handed to someone new ...”

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Like its heroine, a young woman who returns to her old high school as a guidance counselor, ABC's “Miss Guided” wants to be liked. (two episodes at 8 and 8:30 p.m. Thursday March 20 on KGTV/Channel 10)

In fact, Becky Freeley (Judy Greer) and “Miss Guided” both yearn so desperately to be liked that I couldn’t help but dislike both intensely. They’re just so needy and clingy, with Becky and everyone else speaking so cutely and so sweetly into the camera so many times, I wanted to shake them off, like lint stuck to my sleeve.

“Miss Guided” bears a message, though -- adults working in high school are still in high school. They worry over who likes whom and who said what to whom yesterday and last night, who stole whose boy friend when they really were in high school, who’s sitting where at lunch. Did these people ever graduate?

Ashton Kutcher, an executive producer of the show, provides a few laughs as a nomadic and slightly sleazy substitute teacher in the first of Thursday’s two episodes. Alas, plans do not call for his character to make a return engagement.

About the author: Robert P. Laurence was television critic at the San Diego Union-Tribune for 21 years. He previously wrote about politics, jazz, rock 'n' roll and all manner of news. He graduated in journalism from San Francisco State University, and earned an M.A. in political science at San Jose State. He's lived in San Diego since 1971.
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