I think I should say at the start that this series contains most of the most awful video of its generation. The images will burn into you and, once seen can never be unseen. If you are going to watch this please do so with the determination to use the experience for a positive outcome, whatever that means for you. By all means tell your children that John Wick is much worse if it encourages them to watch that instead, until they are ready to tackle the horror story that is modern warfare against civilians.
The reality footage is often horrific. Not since Vietnam has the truth of the violence been so mercilessly exposed on freeworld TV I feel. It features repetitive visions of mass starvation, bombing and gassing of civilians, execution, torture, genocide - including the actual moment of death by explosion, bullet, machete and chemical - and repetitive reporting of systematic sexual violence.
The ONLY justification for showing these atrocities is surely that we will learn the truth and it will help us to become better and act better. That is the greatest challenge we as a species have yet faced.
In years to come I wonder if this may become one of the most important pieces of video documentary history made about the period 1990-2015, i.e. Bush Senior through Clinton to Obama, Iran-Iraq and Gulf War through Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Darfur, Libya, ISIL to Syria.
Albeit that it focuses only on the war zones and foreign policy decision-making in the Oval Office and White House conference rooms of the President of the United States, excludes 9/11, Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine and several African conflicts, and finds more Democratic appointments to talk than Republican ones (well, the period is roughly 2/3 Clinton and Obama, 1/3 H Bush), this work manages to assemble many of the most important actors, and they are singing a single song: being the world's policeman is an agonising task in which, almost without fail, one is damned if one acts and damned if not, and will be blamed for being too late in the decision anyway - even if one's heart is pure and no self-interest can be discerned.
Of the many chilling moments that made me sit up, I thought General Wesley Clark's report of Yeltsin's pleas to Clinton echoes longest. Clark says that Clinton's decision to bomb the Serbian leadership apparatus in Belgrade was done despite the protests of Boris Yeltsin, who told the West that his inability to dissuade them from action would make his position in Russia untenable. So our consensus view is that intervention to protect Kosovo was a success, but the unintended consequence is that Yeltsin was replaced by Putin, and the horrors of Aleppo and Homs in Syria turned out to be mere experimental prototypes for the annihilation of Mariupol and God only knows how many more Ukranian cities and beyond if Putin gets his way.
There is also the ever-present but unseen hand of the horror of Iraq War 2 that seems to have dominated Obama's manifest unwillingness to intervene in Syria, leading to a resurgence of Russian confidence in foreign intervention that is only touched upon herein.
If anything one feels the horror is getting even worse, and that "opposition" reporters, doctors, hospitals, women and children are now routinely actually the intended targets of an autocratic logic that started the period unfocused and disorganised, and ended with an emerging anti-world order coalition that has no commitment to the United Nations or respect for life of ordinary people, and thinks the creation of refugees is a great weapon to help defeat democracy.
Watch this if you can: it's a long tough eight hours work but if you want to be a conscious citizen it may even be your duty. When you've finished, join up with an organisation that can make a difference. It will surely be better than just being a bystander. At least, that is the thesis for intervention.
