Cover Story
The incomparable Utne Reader has put together a slideshow recalling the Iraq War in magazine covers. TAC makes the cut. They chose our first cover, which seems conventional now, but at the time–six months before the invasion–pronouncing the anticipated “cakewalk” folly was a bold stroke for any magazine, and particularly one on the Right.
The Iraq War as Told Through Magazine Covers from Utne Reader on Vimeo.
One of the periodicals appearing in this slideshow – that’s to say, Clamor – has gone, as of 2006, out of business. A look at its archives suggests that I wouldn’t myself have found much common ground with it (save on Iraq) but I take no pleasure in, and derive considerable sorrow from, its decease. Any self-respecting author knows that we can never have enough literate print magazines. Let 100 flowers bloom and all that.
Of course I recall TAC‘s very first issue as if it were yesterday. Am astonished and rather alarmed to realize that nearly eight years have elapsed since I bought a copy of that issue (while visiting the States, at Barnes & Noble’s store in Ballston, Virginia, since you ask). Where did the time go? Where, indeed, did my 2002 head-full of hair go?
It would have been more effective if it had pro-war covers as well.
James is right; someone (maybe TAC?) should cobble together the narrative as told by the pro-war press, including newspaper headlines, from the early murmurs through the full-throated hysteria about WMD and imminent peril, on to the triumphalism after the fall of Baghdad, the mumbling excuses for the lack of WMD, etc.
Re Dennis Dale’s suggestion, I think that TAC has already done a time-line of a rather similar kind, giving the dates on which particular horrors occurred and so forth. Can’t recall which issue included this time-line, though; I remember only that it was well after the Abu Ghraib revelation.
You could punctuate the thing in “Friedmans”–the ever-recurring six month periods of gestation.