Ex-soldier shares rawn honest take on Iraq
Minneapolis Star Tribune, MN - 2 hours ago
"Since December 2004, I have been with the combat soldiers all over Iraq," Yon tells us. "I have been on countless combat missions, patrols and meetings, ... |
The Iraq war has produced a number of exceptionally good books and a raft of very bad ones.
I speak with some authority here, having read 17 and examined dozens more since the war began in March 2003. This book is one of the very best.
Michael Yon is familiar to everyone who has a close interest in this conflict. His remarkable blog from the sites of the worst fighting has proved time and again to be accurate, professional and relentlessly unbiased. It has infuriated the military brass, but it has also won the respect of the fighting men and women on the ground -- an encomium that is rarely given.
Star Tribune readers with good memories might recall the sequence of photographs by Yon published on the front page on Aug. 27, 2005, of Army Lt. Col. Eric Kurilla, formerly of Minneapolis, engaged in a firefight with insurgents in Mosul. Kurilla was severely wounded and down in an alleyway, yet he kept firing at terrorists holed up in a shop until troops arrived to put an end to the ordeal. It was outstanding photography. Yon recalls the incident in his book -- the photos are here, too -- with gripping, economical prose.
He is not a journalist by training. A former Green Beret, he became a reluctant chronicler of the war when a close friend was killed early in the fighting. He bowed to entreaties from colleagues and went to Iraq -- on his own dime -- to see for himself what was happening. What he found was not good.
"Al Qaeda and associates had little or no presence in Iraq before the current war. But we made huge mistakes early on and now we pump blood and gold into the desert to pay for those blunders. We failed to secure the streets and we sowed doubt and mistrust. We disbanded the government and the army and we created a vacuum. We tolerated corruption and ineptitude," he writes. "But then Al Qaeda raped too many women and boys, cut off too many heads, and brought drugs into too many neighborhoods. And they haven't even
tried to get power going, or keep markets open, or build schools, or playgrounds, or clinics for children."
Yon admires the critics of U.S. policy: Without them "we might never have made the great changes of 2007, and the war would be lost today."
This is not a policy study, but an unvarnished, no-nonsense look at the war from the ground up. "Since December 2004, I have been with the combat soldiers all over Iraq," Yon tells us. "I have been on countless combat missions, patrols and meetings, spoken to Americans of all ranks and to Iraqis with incredibly diverse backgrounds. ... We can win this war, and if we do it will be a victory of the same magnitude as the fall of the Soviet Union. ... But we can still lose."
Trenchant, honest, intelligent and optimistic, there is no political agenda here. No cheerleading or carping. Just straight talk on a complicated and profoundly important subject.
Tags: AL QAEDA, Iraq War, Michael Yon, Soldiers
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