In the middle of 2003, not long after President Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln in May to tell the world that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended,” Time Books came out with a glossy hardback titled 21 Days to Baghdad — The Inside Story of How America Won the War Against Iraq. The book concludes with a shot of the president on the Lincoln in that snug flight suit. Although it includes one horrific shot of Ali Ismail Abbas, the twelve-year-old Baghdad boy who lost both arms and his family to a U.S. missile in March, the book is an oddly sanitized thing, the portrayal of a tidy and limited little war. The triumphant text tells us that the V-J Day moment in Iraq arrived “on April 9, when a U.S. team tied a chain to a statue of Saddam in Baghdad’s Paradise Square and, with a couple of hefty yanks, pulled it from its pedestal.”

The book is a time capsule in a way and, though it is not a very old one, it has a whiff of rot. It is an embarrassment, but it’s also a useful reminder of how reportorial curiosity can surrender to patriotic stagecraft, and in turn, how such stagecraft can shield policy from inquiry at critical moments. The book feels both innocent and cynical.

For this special forty-fifth anniversary issue of the Columbia Journalism Review we have constructed a different kind of history of the war, an oral history told through the voices of many of the journalists who have covered it. We interviewed forty-five reporters, photographers, translators, and stringers, and gathered war photos, too, many of them previously unpublished in the U.S. Our starting point is the fall of Baghdad, and the reader will see that even...

Complete access to this article will soon be available for purchase. Subscribers will be able to access this article, and the rest of CJR’s magazine archive, for free. Select articles from the last 6 months will remain free for all visitors to CJR.org.