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Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
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Decent Job reporting
It was a decent documentry. Not to biased in either direction.
Rating: 
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Anti-Americanism...CNN style
A heavy-handed dose of civilian casualties, cynical skeptics and military mishaps. It's amazing how one story can be retold in so many different versions. From the Arab press to the socialist press to the right wing press...who the hell knows what really happens in the world?
If you're looking for a document of what happend on the road to Baghdad, don't look to this piece of anti-American propaganda. According to CNN it's our fault that everyone hates us and we can't even tie our own shoelaces.
Highly disappointed.
Rating: 
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Some Truth
In response to some of the earlier posted anti-war rhetoric, here are the real facts:
"Saddam was a secularist and hated al Qaeda" - as though simultaneous enemies of America have always shared the same ideology. Just ask the Japanese and Germans, or the Chinese and Russians, who agreed to set aside their mutual hatred to fight us for being emissaries of freedom. Under the Clinton administration it was considered standard intelligence dogma that Osama and Saddam worked together; only the controversy over Iraq has post-facto questioned that former pillar of American and European intelligence doctrine - and for entirely political reasons.
There was a reason Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas were in Baghdad. And it was the same reason why al Qaeda was working in Kurdistan, why al Zarqawi went to Baghdad to Saddam's doctors, why there is good reason to believe that before the first World Trade Center bombing the culpable terrorists had ties with Iraqi intelligence, and why seized documents now coming to light in Iraq reveal a long history of cooperation between Islamic terrorists and Saddam's secret police. To think otherwise would be crazy, given the shared aims of both in attacking Americans and getting them out of the Middle East. The only puzzle is whether Saddam contributed to the 9/11 terrorist fund or simply was apprised of al Qaeda's general efforts.
Thanks VDH.
Rating: 
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god help me...I'm defending CNN
This review is just as much response to the one-star reviews as it is my own personal review.
First of all, I would consider this to be a very neutral look at the war. Since the two main reasons for going to war (WMD & Al Qaeda) have been disproven, this release can only be seen as a neutral look strictly at the military aspects of the war. I'm not sure what the right-wingers and fox viewers were expecting, but the DVD shows that the U.S. military had a more or less easy go of it in Iraq. If all the release is supposed to do is look at the military aspect of the war, then this dvd does that. It is one-sided and comes from only an American perspective, but it covered what it was supposed to.
For those of you who think CNN is "liberal," I would say that just because CNN would seem to favor Democrats (in a less extreme version of how fox favors Republicans) does not make them "liberal." Democrats have been a lot of things the last 25 years...cowardly, accomodating, and spineless...but "liberal" is certainly not a label the Democrats can wear these days.
And for my friend that complained about all the footage of injured or dead Iraqis: Just because you'd rather not hear about them (for whatever reason) does not mean they cease to exist.
Rating: -
CNN Presents: Noam Chomsky, MANUFACTURING CONSENT
"Right now the Bush administration is pushing something called 'The Right of Pre-Emptory Self Defense.'... According to this logic, the Allies could have pre-emptively attacked Germany [toward the beginning of World War Two], and perhaps saved millions of lives...Of course, THIS IS PRECISELY THE EXCUSE THAT GERMANY ALSO USED TO ATTACK POLAND AND MANY OTHER COUNTRIES (emphasis mine)...
"... We can't give Iraq a clean bill of health; therefore we can't close the book on their weapons of mass destruction. But simultaneously we can't reasonably talk about Iraqi non-compliance as representing a de-facto retention of a prohibited capability worthy of war..."
Scott Ritter
WAR ON IRAQ
Facts ARE stubborn things.
Commenting on the "tense debate" as to whether or not war with Iraq is justified and the steely resolve of our military to follow through on its objective is hypocritical at best. Particularly when thinking, if nothing else, of the supposed rift between the press and the government that took place during Vietnam, mythically clearing the air for truth to actually be told on our airwaves. Commenting on the DVD quality, considering it comes from the highly lauded CNN, is also pretty silly. Moreover, the moral and ethical dilemmas referred to by the journalists and producers of this video, regarding the justifiability of this war, become not just irrelevant but deeply immoral pretensions in and of themselves, in light of the simple and obvious truths purposely obscured in its construction. This slick, well made, informative video is actually an unconscious indictment of the Media in our time.
Let's review some unrefuted historical facts, shall we?
1) Saddam Hussein was an ALLY of the United States during the Reagan Administration for reasons that make it clear that our invasion of Iraq could not possibly have had anything to do with the establishment of democracy in the region, long before the members of the Bush cabinet started coming out with their own books and telling tales out of school, effectively proving this to be the case. Iraq has a more than 60% Shi'ite Muslim population, corresponding to the more than 80% Shi'ite population of the presently hated Iran. A parliamentary, majority-rule democracy in Iraq would make both a Shi'ite alliance with neighboring Iran and a Muslim nationalist restructuring of the oil distribution of both countries a foregone conclusion. The price of gasoline would probably leap to *seven* dollars a gallon in the US, instead of the rapid climb to two dollars we are currently experiencing over merely the threat of a continued guerilla "police action", in the event of a REAL Iraqi parliamentary democracy being born and the subsequent Muslim Alliance domino effect spreading like wildfire across the Middle East; a domino effect which could easily become the first step in the (inevitable) reincarnation of the Ottoman Empire that Dr. Zbigniew K. Brzezinski warned the Pentagon against in THE GRAND CHESSBOARD more than twenty years ago.
The Reagan Administration, with a younger and even bolder Rumsfeld, allied itself with Saddam's secular and oppressive 17% Sunni Muslim ruling regime (illegally established forty years ago by the CIA of the Kennedy Administration) specifically to prevent this. We not only looked the other way as he used the very chemical weapons we supposedly went to war with him now about on the Iranian people but, VIA THE SURPLUS OF CHEMICALS FROM AMERICAN FIRMS, WE SUPPLIED HIM WITH THEM, to prevent this very post-Iraqi democracy Shi'ite alliance of Iran and Iraq from ever happening, back in 1982. It was only after the subsequent seven-year war of Iraq with neighboring Iran, where Hussein began to save his regime FROM democracy while bankrupting the country (again, with our military assistance), did he begin to look to an invasion of oil-rich Kuwait in 1990 (which before World War I, lest we forget, *was part of Iraq*; separated by the Europeans and Woodrow Wilson into a separate country now for very familiar political reasons). The only thing that could possibly be palatable in the eyes of American Foreign Policy, given these facts of political life, is not a democratic Iraq, but an equally oppressive regime run by a castrated, more easily controlled version of Saddam, completely reflecting the current set-up but in a newly democratic disguise.
And to date, thousands of innocent people, journalists and soldiers have died for this.
2) Iraq's illegal weapons program had already been so well dismantled since the end of the Gulf War via the inspections process that it would be all but impossible for our (corrupt) intelligence community to not see and surgically abort any attempt of restarting it YEARS before any weapons program he attempted to reconstruct--biological, chemical, or nuclear--could become even remotely functional. Sanctions and inspections, simply put, WORKED; maybe not as well as France wants to believe, but better than our administration actually wants, let alone wants to admit. Every other day, it seems, a former member of the Bush Administration reveals how this was common knowledge to his staff but purposely ignored, making Noam Chomsky seem more like a prophet with each passing day.
But perhaps most importantly:
3) All of the comparisons of today's Baghdad to yesterday's Berlin for the benefit of propaganda and television ratings are designed to help us forget the fact that, as this supposedly ended war now demands an American military presence in the region for several years, *Baghdad is becoming the new Vietnam, with Afghanistan the new Laos*. America can win the battle with any army in the Middle East in a matter of hours (maybe even Iran)...AND LOSE A BITTER, ESCALATING GUERILLA WAR WITH THE ENTIRE ARAB WORLD A FEW YEARS LATER.
I would suggest triangulating this DVD with three books: WAR ON IRAQ by Scott Ritter, WAR ON FREEDOM by Mosaddeq Ahmed and UP FROM CONSERVATISM by Michael Lind, to fully reveal the shadow side of our country's national character. And to enable one the achievement of moral clarity in these morally schizophrenic times.
Oil isn't everything. Neither is CNN.