Shock & Awe

Hello, I'm filling in for Miss Sapphire today. And when I realized that I would be posting on the sixth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war -- a war that wasn't even supposed to last six weeks -- I thought it was important to mark the anniversary. 

Although we as a nation now have other priorities, the echoes of what we started still rings; the blood of dead and wounded Americans and Iraqis still stains; the shattered lives of the men and women we sent there as well as those who live there still need rebuilding.

The debt we owe those who served and those who still serve is enormous, whether we believed in the cause or not. Likewise the gratitude we owe to the reporters who were our eyes and ears in the midst of hell and without whom we would have remained ignorant of the sacrifice of our troops and the suffering of the innocent civilians.

These clips are from last year's special AC360 presentation 

"Shock and Awe Five Years Later"

March 2003 -- Nic Robertson is in Baghdad as the bombing campaign begins:

November 2004 -- Michael Ware (then with Time magazine) and Yuri Kozyrev embed with an Army unit going in to recapture the city of Fallujah, which has become home to the insurgency; Yuri shoots stills for print while Michael films the battle with his handheld video camera:

Late 2005 through 2006 -- Nic recounts the gradual increase in armor needed to protect the troops; Michael discusses the bombing of the Golden Dome mosque in Samara; Christiane Amanpour talks about the civil war between Sunni and Shia; Nic looks at IEDs, a new and horribly effective weapon against our military; John King reflects on the political issues in this country; Candy Crowley shows some of the reasons the American public turned against the war:

January 2007 -- Nic and Michael look at the Surge, which in addition to adding 30,000 American troops to Baghdad, was an entire new way to fight the war, including arming the Sunnis and letting them fight al Qaeda while the political process was pushed forward:

March 2008 -- Michael reflects on why soldiers fight ... and why reporters go to war:

If you missed this special and would like to see the entire program,

 it is available here.

Also, Michael Ware did a 30-minute special for International last year 

called Inside the Surge.

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