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The endgame: the strategy to give Iraq back to the Iraqis began in earnest when the votes were counted after the midterm elections. The Democrats were demanding the Bush administration come up with a plan to bring the troops home, and many Americans believed they would. Then, in the months that followed, the once secret battle over how to use American forces began to boil over in public. Senator John McCain advocated a strategy to increase troop deployments, and some in the military agreed. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell and the prestigious Iraq Study Group wanted a policy aimed toward withdrawal. But at the White House and on the ground in Iraq the impulse was to stay the course: keep the troops at full force, possibly increase their numbers, until the endgame could be worked out. The Endgame examines the military options available to the president, as the FRONTLINE team that produced Rumsfeld’s War, The Torture Question, The Dark Side, and The Lost Year in Iraq, follows the early efforts by the American military to stop the insurgency, the steps the U.S. took to intervene in what increasingly looked like a civil war, and the scramble to find an honorable way out of Iraq.

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