A Long Iraq Goodbye : The New Yorker

“It is easy to see the beginnings of things,” Joan Didion wrote long ago, in “Goodbye to All That,” “and harder to see the ends.” I can remember vividly where I was when the Iraq War began: in a moldering room on the eighth floor of the Hotel Ivoire, in Abidjan, the capital of Ivory Coast. I had gone there to cover the country’s civil war—a complex and gripping story, in a part of the world I knew a lot better than I did the Middle East, and cared about more. But when CNN—where all modern wars begin—started airing the images of Shock and Awe on my room’s TV, I wanted to get out of West Africa as quickly as possible. Whatever the outcome in Iraq, something huge and important was happening there and I wanted to …

MORE via Comment: A Long Iraq Goodbye : The New Yorker.