I’d say the most impressive thing in the series is the complete lack of the President appearing anywhere. He is sort of asked to make a decision every once in a while, but while everyone is out doing things, he just sort of stays in a cave and comes out every once in a while to give a yes or no or make a speach.
And anytime someone talks about him, they’ll say things like, “He likes people who give a lively, energetic presentation.” or, “He prefers to avoid confrontation.” and such. I rather get the sense that he’s very passive aggressive–which could explain a lot of this. If you realise the person you are with hates confrontation, they’re real easy to bully into a “Yes.” Whoever can lock the president into a room for five minutes and make him squirm, is going to get a “Yes” out of him.
The Cheney/Rumfield/Bremer thing is just plain stupidity, on the other hand. You dismissed 300,000 Iraqi troops? :eek: None of these guys has any capability of considering any outside advice as reasonable if they’ve already decided something by the seat of their pants.
I also find it interesting that it’s the silent majority that pretty much ruined everything for everyone. So far as the far left and the far right were concerned, get in and get out, and if the Iraqis set to killing themselves left and right in the vacuum, that’s a-okay. All the democrats who wanted to “just get out” would have done better to back Rumsfeld and Cheney. They rather chopped themselves off at the knees by blindly fighting against those two.
I’m not sure why the reviewer feels like he has any authority or sources to back up the idea that the President didn’t, for all intents and purposes, serve largely as a spectator to all the events. All the people being interviewed have nothing in particular to lose by attacking the president versus attacking Cheney/Rumsfeld/Tenet/Bremer/Wolfowitz and for all of them to have chosen to and successfully erased the President from their account would be a rather impressive feat. So I don’t see any reason not to believe that they’re largely presenting their side of the fight as they see it–and in that, Bush really doesn’t crop up.
Even having an axe to grind, its still unlikely that most people will blatantly lie. Really the only place they had available to lie about was whether or not they did or didn’t have doubts about the CIA evidence of WMD and Tenet. True, you could always find the four people out of one hundred that didn’t buy it at the time, or these four were the only ones who are willing to lie they didn’t, now. But, like they pointed out, even at the time, the CIA were leaking to the newspapers that they had had pressure put on themselves en masse. For instance, look up the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS.) I’m sure the guy running them is a bit of a media hound or he wouldn’t have started it but still, when would you ever expect a bunch of CIA, anti-war or not, to team up and start issuing anti-Whitehouse memos?
Cheney carved his own group inside the CIA . He rejected any intelligence that did not agree with what he wanted to hear. He went to the CIA and baby sat the intelligence gatherers. He desperately wanted this war and would do anything to get it.
When Tenet left he put in Porter Goss to clean out as many who disagreed with him as possible. I remember when they were searching for a new director one person said Goss was absolutely not qualified to take over the CIA. It was Goss himself. Then he got the job. Then fired or squeezed out a huge group of experienced agents. Cheney was the crook in chief.
PRO: I thought it did a very good job on the inter-U.S. Intelligence War and the inside the Pentagon Intelligence set up it lead to - and the clusterf^ck that came off of that, not to mention the blatant disregard from a primo lesson of the 9-11 Commission.
CON: I thought it was entirely too sympathetic to Tenet who was cool with torture, gave the “slam dunk” comment of his own free will and soldiered along and abetted the crazy lead up to war. This made him out to be a little-Powell/Condi a voice brushed aside & - while he wasn’t Rumsfeld, Feith or Cheney (& he certainly fought them at times) - his pissing was more over turf than policy ala Powell. The show never really calls him on this after the fact a$$covering (& maybe that is the price of him cooperating).
Good sum up show that gives nuance and detail with breaking a whole lot of “news”