Moyers & Company; America's New War in the Middle East
Description:
Bill Moyers talks with Jonathan Landay, one of the unsung heroes of Washington journalism. During the buildup to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 he and his colleagues at McClatchy newspapers got the story right, reporting that the government was cooking the intelligence books to make the case for war. But "official" Washington, including the mainstream media, ignored the inconvenient truths — with disastrous results. Now Landay is analyzing President Obama's decision to use air power against Sunni Islamic militants in Syria and Iraq. Landay and Moyers are joined by Matthew Hoh, a former Marine Corps captain who fought in Iraq. He became an American civilian advisor in Afghanistan's Zabul province, a Taliban stronghold. But Hoh resigned in protest when he came to believe that the war was only fueling the insurgency that American troops were trying to put down. In his resignation letter Hoh wrote: "I fail to see the value or the worth in continued U.S. casualties or expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year old civil war." MOYERS & COMPANY is a weekly 30 minute series aimed at helping viewers make sense of our tumultuous times through the insight of America's strongest thinkers. The program also features Moyers hallmark essays on democracy.
