“Shock and awe,” Peter Arnett intoned over and over. “This is shock and awe.” Arnett was reporting for NBC from Baghdad as the aerial bombardment lit up the night sky on March 21.
It was “A-day,” the beginning of full air combat operations in Gulf War II. As the live television cameras watched, coalition airpower was obliterating Saddam Hussein’s Presidential compound on the other side of the Tigris River and other government and military sites in and around Baghdad.
Arnett was not alone in calling it “shock and awe.” That term, which had burst suddenly into public awareness in January, was by then in near-universal usage to describe the US strategy for Operation Iraqi Freedom.
“ Shock and awe” was repeated endlessly. In the week the war began, more than 600 news reports around the world referred to “shock and awe,” according to a count by the Washington Post.
