Good News on Iraq Is No News
Independent journalists like Michael Totten and Michael Yon are doing invaluable reporting from the Iraq, says Bob Owens, shining light on the stories of heroism and success the mainstream media ignores.
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There never seems to be a shortage of bad news coming out of Iraq, and the deaths of eight American soldiers Monday merely add to a cacophony of stories about terrorist bombings and lives damaged or lost in a war half a world away.
These stories, once a continual barrage, are more sporadic in recent months, but their tone and subject matter rarely deviate from a template, where only the dates, numbers, and names change.
And yet, violence is down significantly in Iraq, and there is news other than the drone of death. It simply goes unreported.
Michael Totten is one of a rare breed; a western reporter in Iraq that does not report for a wire service or news agency. He survives on direct reader contributions to fund his travels and reporting. His recent reports from Al Farris and Fallujah are anything but combat stories, speaking more of the tedium of uneventful patrolling and the tedious process of rebuilding that the wire services tend to ignore.
Make no mistake: some parts of Iraq are still very much a war zone, and American forces still fight. But there is far more to the experience of American forces in Iraq than the dreary recounting of casualties enumerated after infrequently successful enemy attacks.
Far more frequent are the mostly unreported stories of Americans and Iraqis defeating terrorist cells, one by one. Another independent reader-supported journalist on the ground in Iraq, Michael Yon, recounts the bravery of one such group of American pilots in his most recent dispatch from Mosul, the city where al Qaeda in Mesopotamia intends to make its “last stand.”
Guitar Heroes chronicles the bravery of a group of American soldiers, Kiowa helicopter pilots that often engage terrorist cells at near rooftop level, at ranges so close that pilots engage the insurgents below them with rifles instead of rockets. You won’t read many stories such as these in the New York Times or USA Today. More than willing to publish one story after another alleging how our military and our soldiers are being broken, these national media outlets seem loath to print the stories of heroism and success being written by American and Iraqi patriots.
These same media organizations devoted thousands of column inches to an anti-war radical in August of 2005 for the simple act of sitting on a ditchbank in Crawford, Texas to protest the war. The coverage these news organizations afforded Cindy Sheehan has rarely been afforded supporters of the war, even those that have a far more informed firsthand opinion that most anti-war activists lack.
A startling case of “stories ignored” is happening right now, but you are unlikely to read about it.
Dennis McCool is 60 years old, the veteran company commander of Charlie Company, 326th Engineer Battalion, 101st Airborne in Vietnam who served his nation from 1965 to 1985. He volunteered to serve his country yet again, and was stationed in Iraq from December of 2006 to December of 2007.
Marc Breslow, 56, served in four combat zones during his 26 years of service, and retired in 2000. He was recalled for a final military tour with Multi-National Force Iraq HQ in 2006.
Carl Heerup is a bit younger at 51, and graduated from ROTC at UC-Berkley, and served in the regular Army and Reserves between 1977 and 2003. He feels that the United States never should have invaded Iraq, and yet he “un-retired” to spend 2006 in Iraq because he feels we have a legal and moral obligation to win the war we started.
These men formed the core of a group called Resolve to Win that began on March 1 a nearly 400-mile march from the North Carolina/South Carolina border to Washington DC. They plan to conquer 25 miles a day, arriving at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC on March 16, in advance support of General David Petraeus, who will be reporting to Congress in early April.
This is a not a “pro-war” march. Major Heerup, in fact, says pointedly that in his opinion, deciding to go to war in Iraq was a mistake. None of these men could be described as “pro-war.”
Their purpose:
The reason is to show support for the Troops and the Mission of the Troops. The purpose is to demonstrate resolve to do a difficult task and to create a dialogue about our National “Will to Win”. We firmly believe that you can not support the Troops without supporting the Mission which the Troops are asked to give their lives for. The Troops are resolved to win and over 3900 brave men and women have sacrificed their lives for America and for victory. Sacrificing your life demonstrates the greatest possible sacrifice and resolve. The march will cover over 400 miles, but if it were not incredibly challenging, it would mean nothing.
To honor the resolve and sacrifice of those who have died here, we must “Resolve to Win” in Iraq. To protect our way of life and insure that our children do not have to re-engage this enemy in 5 or 10 years, we must “Resolve to Win”, here and now.
They are now more than halfway through their journey, but you haven’t read about them on A1 of the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, or Newsweek, despite undertaking a task far more compelling than the Texas ditch-sitting that so enthralled these media giants for days at a time less than two years ago.
If you have read about these men or their self-selected mission, you must have stumbled across the Dunn Daily Record, the Fayetteville Observer, or other local newspapers and television and radio stations along the route.
There is a messy, often contradictory reality of life in wartime and there are tremendous difficulties in covering such conflicts objectively. With rare exceptions, the professional media has embraced the far easier route of storytelling, excising and excusing those stories that run counter to the collective narrative of how the war should be going they’ve developed over five years.
The national media has decided on their preferred storyline of an inevitable defeat, so perhaps it isn’t surprising that the mundane process of rebuilding reported by Totten is ignored, the bravery revealed by Yon bypassed, and the efforts of McCool, Breslow, and Heerup sniffed at, and then quickly and quietly discarded.
It is no wonder that an American public saturated under such a media onslaught holds views of the war quite contrary to those who are actually in Iraq.
Overwhelmingly our troops are fighting to win because they view it as a war not only worth winning, but actively being won.
One can only imagine how different our national perception of the war may be if our media took the same approach.
Bob Owens blogs at Confederate Yankee.
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8 Comments
Mark L:I guess the message today’s William Randolf Hearst telegraphs to his stringers is “You send the pictures, we’ll supply the defeat.”
Mar 14, 2008 - 12:39 pm Johan Amedeus Metesky:What surprises me is that the media which is normally gung ho about women in the military isn’t even doing stories about heroic women, like Monica Lin Brown and Leigh Ann Hester who received the Silver Star for valor in Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively, or Kim Campbell, who was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross (Iraq).
Mar 14, 2008 - 1:56 pm Joey:You could reverse many of the arguments here and they would still stand, it’s absolutely great.
Mar 14, 2008 - 4:27 pm David:The media hates the military.
Hate them back.
Mar 14, 2008 - 5:26 pm Harvey Levy:It’s not surprising the only one of the group against the invasion is a UC-Berkley graduate. I long ago stopped watching network news because of the glaring anti-republican bias. The internet is were it’s at.
Mar 14, 2008 - 7:49 pm Dan:The msm has put all their efforts into trying to make Iraq end up like Vietnam. But thanks to the internet the real story is getting out. Now polls show over 50% of the public think we can win. The democrats have painted themselves into a corner as defeatist and it’s going to be a real problem for them in the general election.
Mar 15, 2008 - 9:57 am Rubicon:In this war of idea’s, the only way to counter the anti-America, anti-war, anti-military, anti-anything to do with America attacks that have saturated our media, the real victory can only come through performance.
Mar 16, 2008 - 8:45 am An European:If the Democrats win, they can & will impede or take away any progress we have, are or will make.
If our troops are left to do their job & are not stymied w/ lack of tools, troops, money, etc., & are not blocked at every turn by legal vultures, they can produce the victory Democrats now fear with all their hearts.
If we win, if Iraq stabilizes & we can exit quietly, with dignity while that nation simply goes about its business, it will destroy the anti efforts of Democrats & their socialist allies, for decades to come. They know this & they will do all they can to stop us from achieving victory.
Hate to say it folks, but only by electing a Republican to the White House & diminishing the power of Democrats in Congress, can America walk away from Iraq with a successful mission, which will translate into victory for freedom loving people worldwide!
Defeat of America is success for worldwide socialism & their nanny state idea’s.
The War in Iraq is the central and most sensitive question of these strange American elections (for an European), where the most absurd voices are opposed to the most obvious reasons. I am sure the racial or religious problem is secondary in these elections, if not quite irrelevant. The primary problem is the historical destiny of the United States. And the destiny of this great country is the destiny of the World. So I think it necessary to have a clear idea (from my European point of view), based on the reality and not on the demagogical fantasies of American liberals and European leftists, of this “strange” War.
Mar 18, 2008 - 11:32 amFrom the military point of view the Iraqi war was perhaps the easiest of all the wars in the history of the United States, and nevertheless, it provoked more resistance everywhere than any other. And not because it was a “mistaken” war; on the contrary, it was absolutely right and necessary, lead with a mastery that not very often has been seen in contemporary history. There must be not confounded, as mass media do, the war in strict sense, fought and won in little more than two weeks, and the terrorist guerrilla of post-war period, that still lasts and that was always particularly difficult for a regular army.
In Northern Ireland it lasted more than forty years with almost four thousand dead, mainly civil, and it was extinguished rather because the terrorist groups lost their “social base” than by the military action. But Americans have demonstrated their effectiveness and, above all, political wisdom also in this “war without rules”, organizing the new Iraqi army and assuring free elections. Clausewitz would be ecstatic before this military and political capacity of the Americans. In effect, war becomes inevitable, like a surgical operation, when the “ordinary medicine” of pure politics works no longer, creating a new context that allows politic to follow its course again.
From the historical point of view its consequences can be compared only with those of the II World War, which created a new order based in the separated “spheres of influences”. The dismantling of the Soviet Union finished off this system of “balances”, quite fluctuating, by the way. The nations had to find a new equilibrium or direction in order to continue their historical existence and no to be lost in the labyrinth of the time without exit and end. In effect, time is not a simple “physical quantity”, but a creation of the man, that is to say, only the historical time is real.
From the political point of view, for those who have been witnesses of the evolution of the last 20 years, the change produced by the Iraqi war appears still more radical, because it has concluded definitively the era of coexistence with the dictatorships, that are impenetrable, except for crime and putrefaction, like a dense and dark matter, to all vivifying movement. The dismantling of two monstrous and irremediably criminal regimes, like those of the talibans and of Saadam Hussein, has created new democracies, reinforced the existing ones, and not only in the Middle East, but also in the Eastern Europe, causing contemporarily the weakening of dictatorships that still remain and try desperately to counteract and to resist the extension of the democratic sphere.
And, on the contrary, the lack of American military response after the terrorist attack of the 11 of September would have flooded Europe and the United States with terrorism, and not only Islamic, but also “revolutionary”, constantly awaiting propitious occasion to resume its destructive action; it would have reinforced the criminal regimes, weakened the existing democracies and suffocated the new ones. This is the unique and main reason that provoked the protest of the “pacifists” and “liberals”, who have always collaborated with all totalitarian regimes of the worse kind, without hiding their irrational hatred for democracy. In effect, all these protests had an only aim: to prevent the expansion of the democratic sphere, that can happen only under the American sign, because the American democracy is the only one that has a true universal vocation, and for that reason no reactionary force, represented by all dictatorial regimes, can stop its march to freedom.
In our time the most reactionary force is Islamism in all its forms, radical and “moderate”. That is why the Afganian and Iraqi Wars were true revolutionary ones, like the American War of Independence, and George W. Bush is the only true revolutionary President, like the great Commander-in-Chief George Washington. In this historical context, one vulgar megalomaniac, like Obama who preaches tolerance and peace with the criminal Islamofascist and communist dictatorships, these by-products of the History, can only disappear in the Nought from where he came out.
M.E.