Pictures of a war, coming to an end (maybe)

Those pictures capture the early celebration-by-defacement — the ebullient tearing down of the murals, statues and mosaics of Saddam Hussein, at times aided by U.S. troops pleased that the initial thunder run to Baghdad had ended swiftly.

But the joy passed quickly, subsumed by the wholesale looting of the capital and the beheadings of those captured during a nascent insurgency, by the Shiite uprisings and the Sunni Triangle, by the haunting evidence of American-supervised humiliation and torture inside Abu Ghraib, and by the bodies of Blackwater contractors hanging burned and beaten from a steel bridge over the Euphrates. 

Washington Post: Arc of Iraq war told in images, December 14, 2011