Frank Rich - "We'll Win This War - on '24'"

[housewolf]

Frank Rich has been writing some great articles lately, here's his latest in the NYT - good read!



<snip>

... the new season of "24," Fox's all-cliffhangers, all-the-time series about Jack Bauer, the relentless American intelligence agent played by Kiefer Sutherland. You will find no plot surprises divulged here. But tune in, and you'll return, not necessarily nostalgically, to the do-or-die post-9/11 battle that has been all but forgotten as we remain trapped in its nominally connected sequel, the war against Saddam Hussein.

This show is having none of President Bush's notion that Iraq is "the central front in the war on terror." In "24," the central front of that war is the American home front, not Mosul. "We weren't thinking of the war in Iraq when we came up with this story," said Joel Surnow, the show's co-creator, when I spoke with him last week. On "24," they're thinking about Islamic terrorism instead of Baathist insurgents, about homeland security instead of the prospects for an election in the Sunni triangle.

<snip>


Richard Clarke, the former American counterterrorism chief who once helped lead that fight, has yet to catch up with "24." But in coincidental tandem with its premiere, he is giving it some competition: for the cover of the January-February issue of The Atlantic Monthly, he has written his own distressing piece of fiction about the war he feels has been sabotaged if not lost by mismanagement, complacency and the squandering of resources in Iraq.
Titled "Ten Years Later," it takes the form of a 10th-anniversary 9/11 lecture given by Professor Roger McBride at the Kennedy School of Government. This professor, like Jack in "24," does not buy into what Jonathan Raban, writing in The New York Review of Books, calls "the pretense of fighting terrorists abroad to prevent them from attacking us at home."

<snip>

His next attempt to make himself heard will also be fiction: a novel steeped in national security and foreign policy, scheduled to be published in October. Though it may not have sex scenes - "it's one of those things I'm debating" - Mr. Clarke sees popular fiction, which can outsell nonfiction by several multiples, as a way of reaching a still larger audience. He has also contributed some ideas to the script of "Dirty War," an HBO-BBC docudrama (to be shown Jan. 24 on HBO) that "24"-style portrays a self-satisfied British government as woefully ill-equipped to either prevent or respond to Islamic terrorists' detonation of a dirty bomb in central London.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/09/arts/09rich.html?oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=

[theorist]

1. I know this is going to piss off all the FR trolls.

I've been reading Ted Rall's To Afghanistan and Back, so my initial reaction is to wonder of how much time Fox and HBO will spend showing why Islamic terrorists want to kill us and why more and more of them are recruited everyday. Eh...that might just be too "unpatriotic".

[saltpoint]

2. housewolf, you couldn't be more right about Frank Rich.

His columns this past year have been sizzlers.

And since the election, he's just been on fire.