Our Special Series on Iraq One Year Later

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.

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.