Documentary reveals 'sobered' U.S. military in Iraq

By Charlie McCollum
Knight Ridder News Service

"Frontline" correspondent Martin Smith, left, talks with the imam of a mosque in Mosul, Iraq. PBS 'Beyond Baghdad' 9 p.m. and midnight tomorrow PBS

One of those who took up Bremer on his offer was veteran TV news producer and reporter Martin Smith. For five weeks just before Christmas, Smith and his crew from PBS' "Frontline" crisscrossed Iraq, talking with both Iraqis and American soldiers in the farthest reaches of the country.

"We went back and went almost everywhere but Baghdad," says Smith, who has won a fistful of awards for his work at both "Frontline" and ABC.

The result is "Beyond Baghdad," and the sense one gets from talking with him is that the show is going to paint a pessimistic picture of what is taking place in Iraq.

Smith doesn't disagree, but he is quick to add that "the point of view we take in this film is no more pessimistic than the views I heard from the American military, who impressed me to no end. They're very sobered by what they see."

What U.S. officers see and face daily, Smith says, is a complex political, religious and social situation that goes far beyond the firefights between coalition forces and insurgents that dominate most TV news reports from Iraq.

"What you see mostly is a story of us against the resistance, the coalition against the resistance," he notes. "It's a simple story, one that plays well in smaller clips on the evening news."

But what Smith and his crew found were "sectarian and ethnic tensions within the country that are imbued with lots of history and are not easy for us to grapple with. We'd like to think that deposing Saddam Hussein was enough to get out."

Adds Smith: "There's almost no one who's serious and knowledgeable who thinks that things are going to be resolved in a matter of months. It's a very complicated problem."

A complicated problem that, he suggests, was underappreciated or misunderstood by key policy-makers in the Bush administration who chose to ignore warnings about what would come after the fall of the Iraqi dictator.

"They listened to certain exiles who had different agendas, exiles who had the agenda of removing Saddam at whatever cost," Smith says. "So they got rosy scenarios. Wishful thinking had its effect."

Some of this has filtered down to the American military now in Iraq, particularly officers who are very aware of the lessons of Vietnam.

"A fair number of them are bitter about the policy and bitter — as one said to me — that we've been left holding the bag for a bad policy," Smith says.

What concerns Smith is that the Vietnam lessons will begin to loom large and that it isn't "going to be very many months before we'll hear about 'Iraqi-ization' and peace with honor."

Now, he says, "the question is: Are politics in the U.S. going to drive our withdrawal too soon and leave more of a mess? I think we need to be very careful — at this point in time especially — because we're going to be really wringing our hands if a bloodbath erupts after we've walked away."

The Bush administration is grappling with its Iraq policy and a schedule for handing governance of the country over to its citizens. Exploring the dilemma, Smith travels across the Iraqi-Turkish border to Kurdish Mosul and Kirkuk, across the Sunni lands of central Iraq, which harbor many rebels, to Baghdad, and finally south to the sacred Shia cities of Karbala and Najaf. He encounters tribal sheiks, ayatollahs, politicians, aid workers, soldiers and U.S. authorities in an effort to explore just what the United States is facing.

PBS calls the documentary "a long, hard look at the Iraq to which the president vows to bring democracy" and asks, "In this diverse and fractured land, can his experiment work?"