Re: Political - Book Report

> Brad,
> Thanks for this review.  I just might have to read Yon's book.  Have you
> read it?  It sounds well written and truthful. - Rob
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Brad Haslett" <flybrad@...>
> To: "The Rhodes 22 mail list" <rhodes22-list@...>
> Sent: Friday, May 16, 2008 10:34 PM
> Subject: [Rhodes22-list] Political - Book Report
>
>
> Re *Michael J. Totten*
> The Real Iraq
> *Michael Yon sees the country, and the war, without ideological blinders.*
> 16 May 2008
>
> *Moment of Truth in
> Iraq*<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0980076323/manhattaninstitu/
> >,
> by Michael Yon (Richard Vigilante Books, 227 pp., $29.95)
>
> Iraq is where ideologies go to die. Arab nationalism, Baathism,
> anti-Americanism, al-Qaidism, Donald Rumsfeldism, and Moqtada al-Sadrism
> have either died there or are dying. Conventional liberal opinion, more or
> less correct about the foundering American war effort from 2004 to 2006,
> has
> been severely bloodied—along with Iraq's worst insurgent groups and
> militias—by General David Petraeus's leadership of the American troop
> surge.
> Even post-9/11 fear of Islam has proven unsustainable for those who
> regularly interact with ordinary Iraqis. Independent journalist Michael
> Yon,
> who has spent more time embedded with combat soldiers in Iraq than any
> other
> reporter, is a refreshingly unideological analyst of the war. His
> self-published dispatches have earned him a loyal following around the
> world, and he has set out to reach even more people with the publication of
> a terrific new book, *Moment of Truth in Iraq*.
>
> Yon begins his story *in medias res*. "We are in trouble, but we have a
> great general," he writes on the eve of Arrowhead Ripper, the major battle
> last summer against al-Qaida's terrorist army in Baqubah, just north of
> Baghdad. Iraq was all but lost before the battle, when American forces
> under
> Petraeus surged into the capital and beyond. Yon then takes us back in time
> and to the northern city of Mosul, where Petraeus first proved that he knew
> how to counter an insurgency by working with the local population and
> protecting it from killers. Yon spent many months in Mosul embedded with
> the
> 1-24th Infantry Regiment, or "Deuce Four," and his first-person narrative
> of
> firefights in the city's streets and alleys is relentless and gripping.
>
> Despite Petraeus's early successes in Mosul, the city is now perhaps Iraq's
> most violent. It slid back into chaos when the general's strategy was
> discontinued after he completed his tour there and before he was appointed
> the commander of American forces in Iraq. There are no final battles in
> counterinsurgency warfare, as Yon makes clear, but if there were to be one
> in Iraq, it most likely would take place in Mosul. Much of Iraq has now
> been
> pacified—most famously and astonishingly in the formerly convulsive cities
> of Fallujah <http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_2_fallujah.html> and
> Ramadi, as well as in Baqubah, most of Baghdad, and regions further south.
>
> *Moment of Truth in Iraq* isn't the journalistic equivalent of a war movie,
> but parts of it could surely be used as the starting point for a
> screenplay.
> (Such a film might easily perform
> better<http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_1_urb-war.html>at the box
> office than Hollywood's string of gloomy, axe-grinding Iraq
> flicks have.) Still, Yon's book isn't just about explosions and carnage.
> It's also about the new counterinsurgency strategy and, more important, the
> Americans and Iraqis who risk their lives to make it work. When Iraq was
> degenerating into its worst levels of violence, American soldiers spent too
> much time behind their bases' walls, hoping to keep casualties to a minimum
> and to avoid being seen as occupiers by the Iraqis. Today, they live and
> work inside Iraq's cities and neighborhoods, where they tend to be
> welcomed,
> if not as liberators then as protectors. Counterinsurgency is as much about
> nation building and community policing as it is about war making.
>
> "The American soldier is the most dangerous man in the world," Yon writes,
> "and the Iraqis had to learn that before they would trust or respect us.
> But
> it was when they understood that these great-hearted warriors, who so
> enjoyed killing the enemy, are even happier helping to build a school or to
> make a neighborhood safe that we really got their attention." Images of the
> despicable abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib have become iconic for many
> around the world. But anyone who has spent significant time with American
> troops in Iraq, as I have, will recognize the truth in Yon's descriptions
> of
> U.S. soldiers as usually decent and caring. "There are lots of kitchen
> accidents in Iraq," he points out. "Kids get burned. American soldiers
> can't
> take it when they see a kid get burned. If they are in the neighborhood on
> a
> mission and they see a burned kid, they will cancel the mission to get the
> kid to an American aid station, which, technically they shouldn't be
> doing."
>
> Yon is a former Special Forces soldier, and his affection for the grunts in
> the field is palpable. He takes their honor, courage, duty, and sacrifice
> seriously in a way that most journalists don't—and perhaps can't. At heart,
> he is as much a soldier as a reporter, but he is neither a propagandist for
> the U.S. military nor a mouthpiece for its public affairs officers. He
> nearly got himself thrown out of Iraq for an article in *The Weekly
> Standard
> * challenging some top-level brass for trying to censor media coverage. And
> he calls out both officers in the field and pundits back home who refuse to
> admit that all has not always gone according to plan. "Combat soldiers have
> little patience for less than unvarnished truth," he writes. "That's why I
> spend so much time with infantry." Nothing makes a mockery of party lines
> and spin from air-conditioned offices quite like facing snipers, ambushes,
> and improvised explosive devices in 135-degree heat. Reality is more real
> in
> Iraq than almost anywhere else.
>
> But in distant places like Washington, eight time zones away, Iraq is more
> of an abstraction. There is a left-wing Iraq and a right-wing Iraq, and
> they
> only vaguely and occasionally resemble the actual place. Yon will have none
> of either, which may be why no reporter who has covered the conflict—from
> any country or for any newspaper or magazine—has managed to convey the
> truth
> with such blistering accuracy. "Happy news for the Left was that U.S.
> soldiers were demoralized and the war was being lost," he writes. "Happy
> news for the Right was that there was no insurgency, then no civil war; we
> always had enough troops, and we were winning hands-down, except for the
> left-wing lunatics who were trying to unravel it all. They say heroin
> addicts are happy, too, when they are out of touch with reality."
>
> Iraq is a tragic, unhappy, and often disturbing place, but it's less
> sinister and frightening up close than it is from a distance. That's
> because
> it's a country striving for normality, whose normal aspects rarely make
> their way into media reports that highlight violence, mayhem, and failure.
> On TV, Iraq looks like a nation of masked, gun-toting fanatics, but in
> person, one finds friendliness, solidarity, and reasonableness amid the
> chaos. "Just because Iraqis have 'Allahu Akbar' on their flag," Yon writes,
> "doesn't mean they're going to blow up the World Trade Center any more than
> 'In God We Trust' means we're going to attack Communist China." "Iraq does
> not hate America," he insists. "If they hated us, I'd be urging an
> immediate
> troop withdrawal, because there would be no hope of winning this war. If
> the
> Iraqis hated us, we would be fighting the Iraqi Police and the Iraqi Army.
> Instead, we're fighting alongside them."
>
> Yon convincingly argues that the U.S. is winning in Iraq, at least for the
> moment. "The enemy learned that our people and the Iraqi forces would close
> in and kill them if they dared stand their ground. This is important: an
> enemy forced to choose between dying or hiding inevitably loses legitimacy.
> Legitimacy is essential. Men who must always either run or die are no
> longer
> an army and are not going to found a caliphate." The outcome, though, is
> still in doubt. If Petraeus's surge strategy fails or is prematurely
> short-circuited by Congress, the American and Iraqi forces will almost
> certainly lose. "Maybe creating a powerful democracy in the Middle East was
> a foolish reason to go to war," Yon concludes. "Maybe it was never the
> reason we went to war. But it is within our grasp now and nearly all the
> hardest work has been done." Which makes the present moment the moment of
> truth in Iraq.
>
> *Michael J. Totten is a blogger <http://www.michaeltotten.com/> and
> independent journalist who has made five trips to Iraq. His work has
> appeared in the *New York Times*, the *Wall Street Journal*, and numerous
> other publications. *The Week* named him Blogger of the Year in 2007 for
> his
> dispatches from the Middle East.*
>  ad Yon's book, well worth the time.  Brad
>
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