Quotes of the Day
I like to think that time covers many kinds of stories well, whether they're about politics, global affairs, business, science, society or the arts. But one story that I think we've covered especially well is the most important story of recent times: the war in Iraq. Even before fighting began, we put the topic on the cover six times, ranging in focus from what life would be like after Saddam was gone (our conclusion: the peace would be messier than the war) to the role of women in the new military. As war loomed, we dispatched 18 reporters and photographers to the region. Many of them were embedded with U.S. troops, but we also kept a team in Baghdad as bombs rained down on the capital, and a team in northern Iraq, where the Kurds were launching their own war against Saddam.
We continued to cover the story aggressively once Saddam was ousted; by the end of 2003, we had devoted 19 of the year's covers to issues concerning Iraq. Our stories explored every important angle of the conflict, among them an investigation by Michael Elliott and James Carney on how the team around George W. Bush decided to take on Saddam, an account by Michael Ware and Nancy Gibbs on how Saddam might have been fooled into thinking he had weapons of mass destruction, an examination by Michael Duffy and James Carney of how Bush came to rely on bogus evidence to bolster his case for war, and an up-close look by Brian Bennett and Michael Ware at the methods being employed by the insurgents fighting the U.S. We ended 2003 by naming the American soldier as Person of the Year, which included a profile by Michael Weisskopf and Romesh Ratnesar of the Tomb Raiders, an artillery survey unit in the U.S. Army's 1st Armored Division. As many of you know, Weisskopf and photographer James Nachtwey were seriously wounded in a grenade attack while traveling with the unit.
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As we approached the first anniversary of the start of the war, we decided to divide our coverage into a two-week series. This week we take an in-depth look at the Bush Administration's exit strategy, which keeps shifting as the realities on the ground change. Reporter Vivienne Walt interviewed Coalition Provisional Authority administrator L. Paul Bremer, and reporter Stephan Faris gave accounts of rising frustration among Iraq's Shi'ites and of the bombings that killed scores of civilians in Karbala. "Anyone who'd been in Iraq always knew getting out cleanly was going to be infinitely harder than getting in," says senior foreign correspondent Johanna McGeary, who wrote the story and visited Iraq four times until the regime blacklisted her shortly before the war.
We also dissect the Iraq-policy views of Senator John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee who has made Bush's handling of the war a centerpiece of his campaign. In an hour-long interview with nation editor Lisa Beyer, national political correspondent Karen Tumulty and correspondent Perry Bacon Jr. the day after Kerry's sweeping victories in nine states last week, the Senator revealed his plan to send his own team to Iraq to assess the situation and help him develop a detailed plan for going forward. "Kerry has been living and breathing foreign policy since he was a diplomat's kid growing up in Europe," says editor at large Nancy Gibbs. "You get the sense there's nothing he'd rather talk about — or challenge this President on — than the uses of power and the keys to security." You can hear our journalists discuss Iraq on the Charlie Rose Show on March 8, a weekly collaboration with one of PBS's leading interviewers.
In next week's issue, we plan to examine the state of daily life for the average Iraqi. This is a follow-up to our "Where Things Stand" survey last fall, when a team of TIME and ABC News correspondents fanned across the country to determine how Iraq was faring. Los Angeles bureau chief Terry McCarthy, who spearheaded our coverage last time, is once again touring Iraq, and this time he is joined by anchor and senior editor of World News Tonight Peter Jennings, who is scheduled to broadcast from Baghdad the week of March 13. Other ABC correspondents on the scene include Dave Marash, Jim Sciutto and Bob Woodruff.
How are Michael Weisskopf and James Nachtwey doing, by the way? Jim, who suffered shrapnel wounds, is back at work. And Michael, who lost his right hand tossing out the grenade thrown into his humvee, is also back at work. And though Michael is based in Washington, I'll give you one guess where he wants to go as soon as he can.
- James Kelly, Managing Editor