To mark the fifth anniver­sary of the Iraq inva­sion, PBS’s Front­line is air­ing “Bush’s War,” which offers “the defin­i­tive doc­u­men­tary analy­sis of one of the most chal­leng­ing peri­ods in the nation’s his­to­ry.” Draw­ing on an exten­sive archive, the pro­gram lays out the “entire nar­ra­tive,” show­ing how “the war began and how it has been fought, both on the ground and deep inside the gov­ern­ment.” If you can’t catch it on TV, you can watch it online. Click here and then click “Watch Online.”

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Dur­ing the run up to the Iraq war, the Bush admin­is­tra­tion esti­mat­ed that the mil­i­tary mis­sion would run around $50 bil­lion, even though experts doubt­ed those num­bers at the time. (In 2002, Yale’s William Nord­haus guessed that the costs could reach $500 bil­lion with­in five years.) Now, here we are in 2008, and new tal­lies sug­gest that the real costs could rise to some­where between $1 tril­lion and $3 tril­lion. This award-win­ning piece — MP3 — iTunes — Feed — delin­eates the mount­ing costs and intro­duces you to some of think­ing in Joseph Stiglitz and Lin­da Bilmes’ new book: The Three Tril­lion Dol­lar War.

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Are polit­i­cal attack ads such a bad thing? John G. Geer, author of In Defense of Neg­a­tiv­i­ty: Attack Ads in Pres­i­den­tial Cam­paigns, doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly think so. He main­tains that they often enrich, rather than cor­rode, the polit­i­cal process. And now his pub­lish­er has assem­bled The Attack Ad Hall of Fame. Includ­ed on the list is the most famous/controversial one — the “Daisy ad” from the 1964 John­son-Gold­wa­ter cam­paign. John­son’s ad, which was only aired once, nev­er men­tioned Gold­wa­ter by name, but it raised fears about whether Gold­wa­ter might bring us to the nuclear brink. For more ads, see the Muse­um of the Mov­ing Image, and watch Geer him­self get swift-boat­ed on YouTube.

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