3 posts from October 2007

People watching my del.icio.us feed lately have probably identified the recent trend of me adding Michael Yon's dispatches from Iraq to my suggested reading list. Today, Yon posted an important dispatch provocatively titled "Resistance is futile: You will be (mis)informed". In this dispatch, Yon takes the traditional corporate press to task for their shoddy reporting in Iraq. Yon describes the disconnect between what we see here in the states and what's happening on the ground:

I was at home in the United States just one day before the magnitude hit me like vertigo: America seems to be under a glass dome which allows few hard facts from the field to filter in unless they are attached to a string of false assumptions. Considering that my trip home coincided with General Petraeus’ testimony before the US Congress, when media interest in the war was (I’m told) unusually concentrated, it’s a wonder my eardrums didn’t burst on the trip back to Iraq. In places like Singapore, Indonesia, and Britain people hardly seemed to notice that success is being achieved in Iraq, while in the United States, Britney was competing for airtime with O.J. in one of the saddest sideshows on Earth.

No thinking person would look at last year’s weather reports to judge whether it will rain today, yet we do something similar with Iraq news. The situation in Iraq has drastically changed, but the inertia of bad news leaves many convinced that the mission has failed beyond recovery, that all Iraqis are engaged in sectarian violence, or are waiting for us to leave so they can crush their neighbors. This view allows our soldiers two possible roles: either “victim caught in the crossfire” or “referee between warring parties.” Neither, rightly, is tolerable to the American or British public.

In his post, Yon goes on to describe some of these disconnects between the mainstream reporting and what's actually happening. Unsurprisingly, the mainstream press does not come through looking good.

Longtime readers of this blog and its previous incarnations are likely aware of my conflicted past with respect to the Iraq war. Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations initially made me a staunch supporter as I bought in to the rhetoric that Iraq was an immediate threat that needed to be dealt with in the post-9/11 era. My staunch support quickly turned to disgust and opposition as we (the American public) discovered that Powell and the Bush administration exaggerated the threat and had mired us in a conflict that we had no business being in. I disliked Saddam as much as the next fellow, but I felt that his ouster was a poor use of American treasure and soldiers' lives. However, I also subscribe to the "you break it, you buy it" philosophy, and I became against any premature withdrawal that would produce a messier situation that we'd have to clean up later on.

I was not very optimistic about the conflict until General Petraeus was appointed to lead the Iraq effort. I had been following Petraeus' progress since early in the war, when he did a wonderful job bringing stability to the areas his units controlled. Early articles (such as this one from the New York Times) convinced me that he was the sharpest knife in the drawer and that he was probably best qualified to lead this mission. To this day, I remain a staunch Petraeus supporter.

About the time Petraeus was appointed to lead the Iraq effort, I began to pay attention to the independent reporting of Michael Yon again. I had read Yon's dispatches in the past, but they failed to "stick" to my attention. However, earlier this year, something made me begin reading Yon again and his dispatches currently enjoy a special place in my RSS reader. Contrary to all of the bad news coming out of the mainstream press, Yon provided many examples of why we should be optimistic about Iraq. He reported on the good men on the ground doing a heroic job of helping this country off of its knees. He shared details about the local population's repudiation of insurgents. Most importantly, he provided a rare glimpse of what was happening on the ground at the level of the individual soldiers and local populations. And in my opinion, he did it much better than the regular professional media in Iraq by going out and putting his neck on the line day after day after day.

I'm happy to report that for he first time since the beginning of the conflict, I have a sense of optimism about the mission in Iraq and I'm no longer convinced that we're wasting money and men trying to bring peace and security to a nation that refuses it. Despite the idiots we may have at the political level, the military men and women in Iraq are doing their jobs and success or failure will not be the primary result of the administration's or opposition's speeches and policies. The outcome will depend upon the collective actions of those on the ground - soldiers and Iraqis alike.

Yon's reporting has been instrumental in restoring that "everything will be alright" feeling. His reporting has done a stellar job illustrating exactly whats going on at that local level between our soldiers and the local population. And given this glimpse, I have a lot more confidence in the Iraq mission than I did a year ago. I hope that Yon continues his stellar work.