’Arold’s tragedy

Rather deftly, I managed to avoid all but ten minutes of the 3,742 hours of programming dedicated this week to the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war. I’ve no doubt that some of it was very well done — Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha (C4), say; Ronan Bennett’s 10 Days to War (BBC1), which I caught ten gripping minutes of before the preview DVD I’d been sent went mysteriously blank — but my heart wasn’t in it.

Yes, I’m sure there were many bad, misguided things about the Iraq invasion and many even worse things — as I ranted the other week — about the post-war ‘strategy’. But I’m with that sensible chap who wrote to The Spectator last week: why must we always focus on stories which show us to be evil and wrong, never on ones where — as is more often the case – our side behaves bravely, selflessly and decently? And why wasn’t there a single programme challenging the hysteria about the cost of the war by speculating on the number of Iraqi lives which would have been lost if we hadn’t gone to war? And why no mention of the success of General Petraeus’s surge? I thought TV commissioning editors were forever trying to be controversial and counterintuitive.