Battle on Two Fronts

By James Poniewozik

As TV news bureaus send reporters TO boot camp and work graphic designers and theme-music writers overtime to get ready for Iraq, we're hearing an old truism again: that TV can change the course of a war. It can. But that doesn't mean it will. Any discussion of TV and war, for instance, starts with Vietnam. Yes, seeing the carnage soured Americans on the fight. But the conflict was still America's longest, ending years after the onslaught of body bags at dinnertime. As FX's timely movie The Pentagon Papers (March 9, 8 p.m. E.T.) shows, many of that war's most egregious mistakes were made thousands of miles from a battlefield, in Washington parlors and Pentagon basements--and one of the greatest journalistic coups of the war involved plain old words in print.

Young Daniel Ellsberg (James Spader) is one of the Rand Corp.'s best and brightest, writing papers for the think tank that advocate brinkmanship and "the political uses of madness" in the cold war. In 1964 his work takes him to the Pentagon, where he sees madness in action. He learns that the entire war policy, in effect, is a mess swept under a carpet of inflated enemy body counts. Asked to help write a history of the war effort, he finds that the U.S. has remained hopelessly entangled because no President wanted to be the first U.S. leader to lose a war. The 7,000-page report is quickly suppressed until, in 1971, Ellsberg leaks it to the New York Times.

It's a relevant story but told through a man who morphs from insufferably confident hawk to insufferably righteous dove. Fortunately, Spader has built a career on making creepy soullessness intriguing. Ellsberg compares the quagmire to quicksand: it's the stalest cliche imaginable, yet Spader sells it with his bitter, weary delivery. Later, after a fact-finding trip to the front line, he says he learned "we couldn't win unless ..." He trails off, and in that moment you see his brashness silently shatter. There is no "unless."

Meanwhile, amid all the Iraq preparations, America is still fighting a perfectly good war--in Afghanistan and elsewhere--that has largely vanished from the screen. That war is the subject of ABC's Profiles from the Front Line (Thursdays, 8 p.m. E.T.), a surprisingly engrossing reality series that takes us along with a special-forces unit as it brings in an al-Qaeda suspect and aboard a smugglers' ship that the Navy has interdicted off Iraq. In the process, Profiles makes us realize that we have spent a year and a half fighting a war, with scant idea of what it looks like.

Profiles was received skeptically before it started, partly because producer Jerry Bruckheimer is better known for blow-'em-up movies like Armageddon and partly because the Pentagon had mostly kept news cameras away from the hostilities. Military officials probably thought they would come off better in a series from the maker of Black Hawk Down, and you can see why. There's a little about Afghan civilian casualties--from Afghan-laid mines, not U.S. bombs--and a lot about troops building girls' schools and teaching kids to play baseball. And many of the soldiers' comments are backhandedly political. One sailor says he has no scruples about rifling through the Iraqi smugglers' things, because "they wiped out how many thousands of peoples' personal stuff at the World Trade Center?" They? The link between al-Qaeda and Iraq may be disputed but not in Profiles.

Yet this is still a valuable, if one-sided, picture of what our soldiers are doing and thinking. And its quasi-propaganda --the tear-jerking goodbyes with sweethearts, the boilerplate (albeit sincere) talk about duty--hardly differs from much war news. In a way, the series is even subversive: the Bush Administration won the semantic battle to describe the struggle against terrorism as a war, but Profiles shows that the actual work looks more like policing. As with the battlefield reports Ellsberg pored over, it needs a skeptical eye--but that just makes its story that much more interesting.