It's been ten days, so I thought we needed a follow up to a previous post about good news in Iraq. I spoke yesterday to a two-tour Iraq vet about whether any of the positive developments were reaching the ears of the American public. It's probably not (otherwise Gen. Petraeus would have been Time's Man of the Year).
The veteran said that he had to read Stars and Stripes to find decent reporting about the turnaround in Iraq. Much of the mainstream media (CNN, New York Times, network news, the AP, etc.), in the absence of bad news, reports nothing or buries it "below the fold," i.e. where no one will see it.
I recommended that he become a regular reader of Michael Yon, this generation's Ernie Pyle in a fire-retardant suit. He has spent more time as an independent reporter in Iraq than almost anyone else, embedded with American and British troops. Yon is most well known for this photograph he took of an American officer holding a dying Iraq girl in a blanket. I really believe that when the history of Iraq is written years from now, any serious historian will be required to read Yon's dispatches.
How do you know that Iraq has dramatically changed for the better in the last six months? Next year Michael Yon will be in Afghanistan so he can be where the action is. Think about that for a minute, it ought to radically challenge our notion of what's going on in the Long War.
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