A 12-hour take on U.S. and a post-9/11 world

If the war in Iraq is being fought by an all-volunteer military, it is also being broadcast by all-volunteer media companies to an all-volunteer viewing audience.

In this context, everybody is stretched thin, having their tours of duty extended. On TV, the Iraq story has long since been Cliff-noted and compartmentalized as a powder keg far, far away, though this week NBC News President Steve Capus made a hopeful statement about the “trust placed in us” by viewers of NBC News and how his organization “must honor and respect this trust.”

He was talking, of course, about the war on Imus.

PBS next week is attempting a surge of empathy, history and context with an intimidating 12-hour series of programs, all airing over one week, on the genesis of modern-day Islamic militant movements and the U.S. engagement in Iraq.

It’s called “America at a Crossroads.” Twelve hours in one week defies you to hang in as much as the breathlessness of the evening news defies you to stay informed.

One hesitates to call “America at a Crossroads” a miniseries; it’s more super-sized than that, a media company marshaling forces behind a subject because it can, and nobody else is. The series cost a reported $20 million. Hosted by Robert MacNeil, it kicks off Sunday with the two-hour “Jihad: The Men and Ideas Behind Al Qaeda,” an absorbing history of the roots of Osama bin Laden’s franchised terrorist network and the forefathers of radical Islamic thought (turns out, the war in Iraq fit nicely into the Bin Laden “script” of bringing the infidel superpower enemy to fight on Middle Eastern soil).

There is courageous work in front of and behind the camera in such hours as “Warriors,” which takes an embedded look at the dicey, “Cops”-like missions U.S. troops find themselves conducting in Iraq. “Europe’s 9/11” is about the 2004 train bombing in Madrid. There is also “The Brotherhood,” in which Newsweek investigative reporters Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff kind of interview each other about their investigation as they investigate the Muslim Brotherhood’s possible ties to terrorist attacks against the West.

The film is an interesting exercise, practically ushering in some kind of new-fangled meta-investigative journalism. Odder still is “The Case for War: In Defense of Freedom,” airing Tuesday. Here former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle -- a poster boy of interventionist regime change and a still-fervent defender of Bush’s Iraq policy -- plays a neocon version of Huell Howser, a cock-eyed optimist about democracy traveling the world over to chat with critics.

They include war protesters on the Mall and Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based Arabic newspaper Al Quds Al Arabi and critic of the U.S. military adventure in Iraq.

“You liberated Samarra three times!” he tells Perle. “Three times after heavy bombardment. Do you think these bombs fall on insects? It falls on human beings!”

“If the acts of terror stopped,” Perle says evenly, “you know and I know that you would see stability and order in Iraq more or less instantly.”

For comfort, Perle goes to Pat Buchanan’s house, but his old Reagan administration crony is in a surly mood (“The idea that we’re going to democratize the world, that Bush put in that Rousseau-istic inaugural he delivered -- you know, we’re going to eliminate tyranny from the face of the Earth -- is he kidding?”).

It actually ends up feeling kind of fresh, to let a conservative drive the PBS bus. Perle gets misty-eyed for the dreamy Reagan perestroika years on a visit to Moscow and follows that up by attending an international media forum in Kazakhstan.

There, he sits down with Richard Holbrooke, U.N. ambassador under President Clinton.

“Bush and Blair have been viciously attacked by people suggesting not that the information that was available to them was wrong but that they deliberately lied and lied us into a war,” Perle says. “And that’s what some of the people who are now gearing up to run for president are saying to the American people.”

“Richard, this is inside baseball,” Holbrooke counsels. “You’re focusing on a specific, narrow issue.”

Here is the hour that “America at a Crossroads” should have led with, given the roiling issue of the war and the air of righteous authority -- in the face of, you know, information -- that the Bush White House propagates. True, Perle doesn’t visit an open-air market in Baghdad, but his adventures have the atmosphere of a hard-liner coming out of his ideological bunker to actually touch and talk to his dissenters -- to America, at its crossroads.

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‘America at a Crossroads’

Where: KCET

When: 9 to 11 p.m. Sunday to Friday