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I stumbled last night into watching Frontline’s documentary, “Bush’s War,” which was as captivating and fascinating to watch as New York magazine promised it would be: “If you’ll watch only one television program on the catastrophe in Iraq, make it this one.”

Like Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence and Freud’s return of the repressed, the war in Iraq keeps on coming back to bite us in the pineal gland. We do our best to distract ourselves with the collapse of the American economy or the rehab of pop tarts, but then another suicide bomb explodes in Baghdad and we are made to wonder once again—$3 trillion for exactly what? Bush’s War can’t tell us exactly ‘what,’ except for a fiasco, but this two-night, four-and-a-half-hour Frontline special is the best audiovisual history of who, why, when, and how available to date.

The second half airs tonight. Watch it.