War's overview, with a political bent

THE SHOW "Day of Destruction -- Decade of War"

WHEN | WHERE Friday night at 9 on MSNBC

REASON TO WATCH Overview of the war on terror, with the channel's pungent "lean forward" flavor.

WHAT IT'S ABOUT This three-parter -- hour 1 first aired earlier this week -- takes a long look at the war on terror, most notably its costs, and accomplishments, from Afghanistan to Iraq to the Horn of Africa. NBC News chief foreign correspondent, Richard Engel, heads into the field -- where he's been almost constantly since the first Gulf War -- to report on extremists who (actually) go to reform school, and Somalia, for a piece on al-Shabab, a homegrown Islamic militant group there. Prime-time host Rachel Maddow, meanwhile, explores the war on terror mostly from the perspective of interrogation techniques.

MY SAY "Day of Destruction" is a bit of thumb in the eye to anyone who has comfortably, confidently decided the past 10 years yielded real progress in America's standing in the world or in the battle against extremists. It is relentlessly tough, skeptical, downbeat, and hard-bitten -- which isn't to say it's necessarily wrong, by the way. "Are we safer as a nation?" asks Maddow, who clearly believes she knows the answer. "If you swing wildly at something and exhaust yourself," does that mean you've ceded some ground to your enemy, asks Engel -- who also knows the answer.

What's best here, however, isn't the pontificating, but the genuine reporting from the field -- mostly Engel's. Maddow's dense pieces on U.S. interrogation, from waterboarding to hypothermia, feel like old battles once vigorously waged on MSNBC's air; they will make your head throb, while forcing your hand in a desperate scramble for the channel changer.

GRADE B-