http://www.dailyherald.com/suburbanliving/story.asp?id=324334President Bush got off relatively easy last week with Comedy Central's "Lil' Bush," a cartoon so crummy it only made one feel sorry for him.
He's not so lucky this week with the "Frontline" season finale, "Endgame," another in a series of reports on the matter of Iraq.
Debuting at 9 p.m. today on WTTW Channel 11, "Endgame" is the fifth episode on Iraq from producer Michael Kirk, and it's perhaps the darkest, most damning piece of the bunch. It suggests not only that the Bush administration was utterly unprepared for the Iraqi insurgency that sprang up following the 2003 U.S. invasion, but that the current "surge" leaves U.S. forces far short of any "endgame" to bring the war to a close and withdraw.
Four years after President Bush declared, "Mission accomplished," two years after Vice President Cheney said the insurgency was in its "last throes," there isn't even light at the end of the tunnel, to borrow that threadbare phrase from the Vietnam era.
"Endgame" is a chess term referring to how a closely played game comes down to a few pieces, requiring tact, guile and strategy on the part of the players to bring it to a close one way or the other. Unfortunately the U.S. invasion of Iraq has not been closely or well-played, and, like a kibitzer in a chess post-mortem, "Frontline" lays out where the strategy went wrong all along.