‘Frontline’ cuts through the fog of Iraq war

“The Invasion of Iraq,” a special two-hour documentary that airs tonight on the PBS program “Frontline,” marks the upcoming one-year anniversary of the war with an investigative report that recounts the day-to-day reality of the conflict as experienced by commanders, soldiers and civilians on both sides in meticulous, often grueling, detail.

Forgoing political analysis and back story in favor of a more clinical approach, producers Richard Sanders and Jeff Goldberg rely on first-hand accounts to provide a blow-by-blow rundown of the war. The sources are as diverse as Raad Majid Al-Hamdani, formerly a senior general in Iraq’s Republican Guard, and the most senior Iraqi general still free; Iraqi leadership analyst Marc Garlasco, Lt. Gen. William Wallace and dozens of others including coalition soldiers, ranking officers, American journalists and Iraqi civilians.

These accounts are tersely intercut with combat footage and are rather eloquently book-ended by a couple of iconic presidential TV appearances: the March 2003 news conference in which President Bush stated that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and his May 1 shout-outs to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Tommy Franks, the U.S. commander of the war, aboard the Abraham Lincoln.

The stories, mostly variations on the theme of confusion and misinformation, come together to form as clear a sense of the fog of war as seems possible. In other words, opinions clash strongly. The film delves into the “culture wars” that raged between top Pentagon officials and senior military brass -- although they presented a unified front, the film maintains that Rumsfeld and Franks were in strong disagreement on the issue of troop deployment. Taken as a whole, “The Invasion of Iraq” draws a straight line from what some military officials argue on film was a serious underdeployment of troops to the lawlessness that resulted from the toppling of Hussein’s regime. Garlasco, who has since left the Pentagon to conduct a study of the war for Human Rights Watch, maintains that high civilian casualties were the result not of imprecise weapons but of faulty intelligence.

Bush’s simple declarative style would seem to contradict what many military people interviewed maintain was the amazing inaccuracy of the intelligence provided to the troops.

“During the war,” the narrator says, “50 attempts were made to kill Iraqi leaders. Not a single one was successful.”

Garlasco elaborates, “Whatever the U.S. aimed at was hit, and hit magnificently. Buildings destroyed, smoking holes in the ground, that sort of thing. The problem is, the people whom the U.S. was aiming at were not there. These leadership strikes led to the highest number of civilian casualties in the air war.”

For their part, the Iraqis fared no better under the confused leadership of a Hussein in decline. According to Al-Hamdani, the former dictator imagined the first two weeks as “a strategic deception,” and ordered troops minimized in the south -- the direction from which coalition forces were indeed advancing -- and fortified in the north.

After a while, the documentary begins to feel like something imagined by Joseph Heller, with wildly diverging opinions canceling each other out. What Rumsfeld offhandedly described as “a boy walking out with a vase,” referring to a widely shown act of looting immediately after Baghdad fell, others saw as the unrest filling a power vacuum. Ultimately, the dominant image is one of almost absurdist theater.

The documentary suggests that with no apparent post-war plan, insufficient troops on the ground and an Iraqi infrastructure in ruins, the mission accomplished by the administration now seems to have been different from the mission declared.

Says the Washington Post’s Tom Ricks: “In tactical terms, the war was brilliant.... The question in my mind is whether, in retrospect, it was brilliantly bad, and whether a war plan so narrowly conceived created the problems that followed.”

*

‘Frontline: The Invasion of Iraq’

Where: KCET

When: 9-11 tonight

Producers, Richard Sanders and Jeff Goldberg. Executive producers, Eamonn Matthews, Michael Sullivan and David Fanning.