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i second debaser's recommendation of the frontline piece---i found the weinberger text between the two installments of bush's war.
it is a very interesting mini-series (i suppose you'd call it that) both for what it says and for what it does: what it says is a narrative of the multiple levels of fiasco that has been the iraq war and its run-up, but pitched mostly around a story of factional fighting within the administration...this raises some interesting questions about the motives of some of the talking heads involved, really--but no matter, you can think about who these folk are (for example richard armitage) and their motives as you sift through what they are talking about.
the bad guys are clearly cheney and rumsfeld and their bureaucratic faction allies---but you don't get a whole lot of understanding of the central question from an outsider's (a viewers) viewpoint, which is: WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?
cowboy george emerges as a kind of disengaged tool, adverse to personal confrontation, sorta passive---which functionally seems the only available way to distance the legacy of his entire presidency from this debacle, if you think about it--but that's in itself sorta interesting to consider.
what the piece *does* is a wholesale dismantling of the image of the iraq debacle brought to you by all the american television networks and most of the print press and sponsored by the pentagon's press pool. the gap between what you have seen and what you see--IF you've not been looking at/for alternative sources of information/footage--is stunning.
it is in this context that i think the weinberger piece acquires more power.
a reminder.
plus i like the stylistic constraint he uses. it is not new, but it works well in this context.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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