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Mike Yon: "But by my estimation, the Iraq War is over. We won."
I can't recall if I discussed that with Mike when he was in the States. We might have, I honestly don't remember. There's a reason Mike didn't realize until now that we had won the war, and it's a pretty good one. Mike likes to be where the fighting is, and throughout his last visit to Iraq there was fighting, and he could find it. This time last year he was reporting from Baqubah where intense battles were ongoing - but had he wanted he could have been telling the same stories from many other locations, especially the neighborhoods of Baghdad and points south that were then referred to as "the belts".
Or, from a different angle, as I wrote as the surge was barely beginning, there were a lot of missed opportunities for news media to get stories (instead of just death tolls) from Iraq:
I'm not addressing that failure here - that's a given. I actually want to point out the magnitude of the failure. Over the past week I've collected not a handful, not a dozen, but 55 such press releases here - and there are others I simply didn't have time to add. Fifty-five stories that could have been told in the way Mike did; unembellished, un-hyped, and simply factual, but with the level of detail that a press release can't provide. Fifty-five stories lacking only the teller to be told.Too late now - they blew it. (Or perhaps they didn't blow it. America is generally ignorant of Iraq, if that's what they wanted they were wildly successful.)
I wrote the piece that included the above excerpt as I was preparing to deploy myself. As we went from the hospital to the dentist to finance to all the other fine locations you must clear in order to prove that you really really want to go to Iraq we noticed every television in every waiting room tuned to the news story of the century: Anna Nicole Smith. Meanwhile, the initial briefings on the surge were delivered to empty seats.
But I was successfully poked, prodded, and stamped a-ok, and I got to go to Iraq - for my second tour. While I was there I had a different perspective than Mike Yon. I had a view of the bigger picture, knew how many missions were ongoing, knew where the fighting was, and knew how fierce it was. But a funny thing happened through the summer of '07: all the right numbers fell. Casualties - down, attacks of every sort - down, violence - down. And the right numbers rose: tips from citizens - up, trained Iraqi soldiers - up, and on and on. Amazingly, a much expected "Tet Offensive" immediately prior to General Petraeus' September briefing to Congress didn't happen. More amazingly, "violence" didn't return to high levels during Ramadan (a month that began with the General's briefing and had many folks "in the know" questioning the sanity of those who timed it) either.
"We've won the war" - I said back then. I even explained how we did it - and the shift in the narrative that was about to follow:
The narrative on Iraq - the one you see in the media, that is - is changing. Claims that "we've lost" and that American soldiers have been beaten by opponents who are righteous heroes or nine-foot tall and bullet proof are being quite subtly shifted to arguments that no potential victory (if even grudgingly acknowledged) could be worth the price. This argument may prove irresistible to those who've invested heavily in defeat.It's obvious now, of course. In fact, apparently we all knew all along, etc. etc. etc... but I suppose to really get it back then - in September, in October - when it actually happened - you had to be there.
Battles went on - and still do. "We've won" doesn't mean "it's over". And Mike Yon went where the action was, and might or might not have noticed that his options were dwindling rapidly. (Though by the end of his last visit he was writing camera reviews...) Until now, when I can imagine him asking - in advance of returning to Iraq - where the action is.
And getting the obvious answer: Not here.
(But part two is here.)
