Here is how the Guardian sums up 2003 (this is a review of its year-end summary book):

“Of course Iraq is central, sickeningly portrayed by Suzanne Goldenberg’s ‘Picture of Killing’ and Audrey Gillan’s ‘Death by Friendly Fire’ – though there’s too little about the aftermath or about Hutton’s inquiry into how we were duped.

But other themes flood in – Hamas’s ‘total war’ (omitting that it is because the Middle East peace map has been distorted by Sharon into a road to nowhere), and Sarah Boseley’s heart-rending picture of a soon-to-die mother in Malawi, illustrating the fate of 29 million people with Aids in sub-Saharan Africa.

Martin Kettle assesses the neocon hard-right assault on US affirmative action and pro-diversity laws. Raekha Prasad denounces the UN ‘protection areas’ for refugees that enable Britain to deport more asylum-seekers. Polly Toynbee dissects the growing trade of female trafficking, a modern variant of the slave transportation of past centuries, with 2 million women trafficked each year – a less remarked-on aspect of globalisation. Martin Jacques chronicles the jeering and booing at the Williams sisters and their father in middle-class, lily-white tennis. Racism is never far beneath the surface, and the accentuation of inequality in 2003 has served only to make it more pronounced.

The American imperium, with its unalloyed unilateralism, entered this year in full spate, and leaves it in deep disarray. But its workings are a great deal subtler and more pervasive than merely enforcing regime change. Ian Traynor recounts the brute diplomacy to secure war crimes immunity deals for Americans and the exercise of the aid card to bring vulnerable countries into compliance with US demands for exemption from the international criminal court. And George Monbiot admirably captures the new messianic order: America is not so much a project as a religion. It’s not just that Americans are God’s chosen people; America now perceives itself as on a divine mission for the liberation of mankind.”

The reviewer, a former MP, notes some omissions, however:

t would have been nice, but not essential, to have had an angle on the rise and rise of the corporate state, the first clear signs of the coming oil crunch, the collapse of party democracy, the plague of obesity, the neglect of global warming as the greatest threat to the planet, and the rebellion against spin … But you can’t have everything.

“…but not essential…”??