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NBC had Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski run through the statistics of five years of war while anchors Charles Gibson and Katie Couric performed those chores at ABC and CBS. All three had 4,000 US military dead and 29,000 wounded. CBS' David Martin, meanwhile, filed from a memorial at Fort Campbell Ky where the names of the base's fallen in Iraq are etched in stone. As for the civilian death toll in Iraq, Couric offered 60,000 dead, Gibson 85,000, and NBC's Richard Engel in Baghdad a range of 85,000 to 600,000.
Both CBS' Couric and NBC's Miklaszewski contrasted the initial estimate of the total cost of the war--$60bn--with the current pricetag of $600bn and counting. ABC's Gibson proposed his six most memorable vignettes to summarize its five years: first Shock & Awe, then the Mission Accomplished speech, next the abu-Ghraib photographs, then the purple fingered elections, the capture and execution of Saddam Hussein--and Gen Petraeus' "so-called surge."
On NBC, Barry McCaffrey, a retired general and the network's in-house military analyst, used his airtime not to analyze but to advocate. "You had better fix the broken equipment of the USArmy in particular the National Guard. You have got to grow the force," he instructed Congressional appropriators directly in response to anchor Brian Williams' questions. "We have got to modernize our air power and sea power. That has been put in abeyance so the force is getting hollowed out. We are going to be in trouble five years from now if we do not have Congress step up."
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