Corridors of Power: Should America Police the World?

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.

Utterly spellbinding and tragic. What an excellent series of historical lessons. Gut wrenching insight into some of the most appalling acts of human savagery that have occurred over the past few decades. Insight from a US-only perspective doesn't taint this documentary series, instead it gives clarity into why decisions were made, even though they may now (and then) be considered wrong.

In today's inward looking, dictator led, foreigner hating, nationalistic fuelled world, this series illuminates more "how did it come to this" on a macro scale. The horrors being suffered by too many people, leading to displacement at best, or death at worst, clearly illustrates why so many refugees are seeking salvation and hope, driven to dangerous and difficult bids for freedom.

What an appalling species we can be. Or perhaps more accurately, there are some truly terrible men who have no consideration for many of their fellow human beings.

It's a mixture of talking heads, on the ground footage and photography and whilst this has been done before, not quite like this.

For starters, the quality of the talking heads are top notch (Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Hilary Clinton and the very impressive Samantha Power amongst others), as these were the people directly involved in making tough and often impossible decisions, where they're damned if they do and damned if they don't. There's virtually no scapegoating, just honest explanations about what was going on at the time and the pressure the US government was under to make the right decisions, which in hindsight, were often wrong and where inaction was just as bad, if not worse than action. It's certainly not a Team America **** yeah puff piece.

The on the ground footage is at times an extremely hard watch and I don't think it's a spoiler to say that you're going to see a lot of dead bodies and worse. No doubt the makers thought long and hard about what they could and should include and as hard a watch as some of the footage is, I think they made the right and brave choice. There's reality tv and then there's actual reality tv.

They also do something quite funky with the photography, with many images (or maybe video stills) taken in the Oval Office and the War Room, whereby they kind of 3D it, so the camera pans and the perspective moves as if you were the one moving in the room, whilst Meryl Streep continues to narrate. It's hard to explain, but very effective.

The editors in particular deserve a huge amount of credit for how they brought this all together and I suspect the series will win many awards.

N. B I'm in the UK where all 8 episodes are already available and this is a review of the entire series.