Archives » Monday, March 17, 2008
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David Botti
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Mar 17, 2008 09:13 AM
he fifth anniversary of the Iraq war is about to come upon us, and so too will an endless amount of media coverage on the issue. Later in the week I'll be writing up some personal reflections on the anniversary, but today I've compiled some of the better anniversary stories that have already popped up. First, take a look at NEWSWEEK's in-depth look at where the Army stands (plus these great video interviews with soldiers now in Iraq), and then see below for how other stories address the past five years.
On Sunday The New York Times gave former Baghdad bureau chief John F. Burns a few column inches to give his take on where the war has taken us. Burns penned this article at the war's outset which I've always considered to be an amazing piece of journalism. For Sunday's article, Burns, who spent five years in Iraq, reflects on his position as a journalist covering he war, and on the larger meaning for both the U.S. and Iraq. As his opening line puts it ("Five years on, it seems positively surreal"), Burns seems in awe of the course the war has taken; and frustrated over miscalculations that occurred. He writes of watching the first U.S. air strikes from a Baghdad roof:
...from that first impact, among many on the roof, the mood was scarcely one of cool detachment, or at least not as cautioned as it might have been by the longer-term implications of what we were seeing. Part of it, no doubt, was the air show — the sheer, astonishing, overwhelming demonstration of power, more like an act of God than man, unleashing in those watching from the roof something approaching awe.
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