By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 20, 2006

"The Dark Side" is an extensively reported, if visually dull, summation of the infighting, bureaucratic kneecapping and preconceived notions that led the United States to its invasion of Iraq. Its portrait of the triumph (or perhaps "triumph") of Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld over the administration's internal war skeptics could have been subtitled "How Dick and Don Rolled the CIA and State Department and Got Us Into This Mess."

The 90-minute documentary, part of PBS's "Frontline" series, contains a few things that are new and a few things that are surprising, but it's mostly about context and historical sweep. The program's central thrust -- that Cheney and Rumsfeld maneuvered the nation to war, sometimes using dubious evidence -- won't surprise anyone who's been paying attention for the past few years. But it should serve as a reminder of the arrogance of power and the manipulation of information to suit questionable aims.

"The Dark Side" draws its title from Cheney's characterization of government intelligence activities, but "Frontline" probably won't mind if viewers mistake it for a description of Cheney's prewar machinations. Apparently jealous and suspicious of the CIA's rising stock after the invasion of Afghanistan, the vice president and his old chum Rumsfeld sought to control the run-up to the next war. To that end, according to the show, they stocked key government agencies with loyalists, created a separate intel fiefdom inside the Pentagon to end-run the CIA, leaked selective information to the media (Judy Miller, white courtesy phone) and elevated such unreliable sources as Ahmed Chalabi to "truth-tellers."

A tone of deep regret (and 20/20 hindsight) hangs over the comments of the many ex-spooks, authors, journalists (including several from The Washington Post) and mostly disillusioned former administration officials who are interviewed. There's a stunning reflection by a former senior CIA analyst, Paul Pillar, who wrote a white paper assessing Iraq's prewar weapons programs. The paper (a public version of the CIA's hastily prepared, deeply flawed National Intelligence Estimate of Iraq) helped sell the administration's prewar case. A plainly regretful Pillar now says of his work, "It was clearly requested and published for policy advocacy purposes. . . . The purpose was to strengthen the case for going to war. Is it proper for the intelligence community to publish papers for that purpose? I don't think so and I regret having had a role in it."

Well, good to know. But that confession prompts a follow-up question that isn't asked in "Dark Side": Why didn't Pillar and other unwillingly co-opted government types raise hell (or at least quit their jobs as an act of conscience) when they were being squashed by the Cheney-Rumsfeld steamroller?

The most seriously co-opted of all is former CIA director George Tenet, who initially thought that the evidence of Iraq's weapon's program was murky or nonexistent, but he nevertheless wound up as Mr. Slam Dunk, going along with the program. "Dark Side" suggests that Tenet might have stopped Cheney and Rumsfeld if only he had stood up to them and used his "personal relationship" with the president and cashed in a few chits earned by the CIA's success in Afghanistan.

From the evidence here, in fact, it appears Tenet willingly sold his soul. The best quote comes from former Iraq weapons inspector David Kay, who says, "George Tenet wanted to be a player. And he understood that if you didn't give the policymakers what they wanted, you weren't a player. . . . He traded integrity for access. And that's a bad bargain anytime in life. It's a particularly bad bargain if you're running an intelligence agency."

Oddly, President Bush remains a remote, above-the-fray figure in this treatment. He is portrayed as a neutral party, even a skeptical one, waiting for one side -- the Cheney-Rummy hawks or the CIA doubters -- to emerge with conclusive information about Saddam Hussein's arsenal. That might suggest that persuading the president about war or inaction was a fair fight among equals, but "Dark Side" piles up the evidence that it never was.

As damning as all that is, it wouldn't have hurt to hear a bit more from the Cheney-Rumsfeld camp, or maybe just from its allies (Cheney and Tenet declined to talk to "Frontline"). What were they thinking then, and what do they think now? And are they, like Pillar (or Robert McNamara), sorry for anything now?

All that material is strong enough without the addition of an irritating "production value" -- "Frontline's" use of music, particularly bass notes, to underscore something the filmmakers apparently want viewers to think is sinister or foreboding. That is both irritating and gratuitous, considering that the subject itself -- orchestrating a war -- is plenty foreboding enough.

"The Dark Side" could also use some visual Viagra. Its idea of excitement is shots of cars zooming up and down Pennsylvania Avenue for God-knows-what-reason. Maybe it's hard to make great TV images out of the concept of "bureaucratic infighting."

Stick with the show anyway. It's a solid historic document about a serious, complicated subject. Historians will be arguing about the war in Iraq for decades. This is a pretty good starting point for those debates.

The Dark Side (90 minutes) airs tonight at 9 on WMPT (Channel 22) and WETA (Channel 26).