Iraq Without Ideological Blinders: Michael Yon's "Moment of Truth"

I've been picking up my book reading of late.

I've finished Matthew Yglesias' Heads in the Sand, which is practically a primer for Democratic Party soft-and-squishy foreign policy this year.

Readers know I have problems with Yglesias' project, which can be seen, for example, in my post from last night, "Liberal Internationalism and Regime Change Myanmar." I'll have more on Yglesias later, but see his hot-off-the-press article on Barack Obama's foreign policy at the Atlantic, "The Accidental Foreign Policy."

I'm also a couple of chapters into David Horowitz's, Party of Defeat, which is a must-read treatise on Democratic Party foreign policy appeasement since the Carter administration.

I've also picked up Andrew McCarthey's, Willful Blindness: Memoir of the Jihad. McCarthy's been doing some great writing recently at National Review, so I'm looking to get into that one.

How soon remains to be seen, because I've committed myself to reading the second volume in Saul Friedlander's majesterial history of the Holocaust, The Years of Extermination Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945. I read Friedlander's original volume in grad school (Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939).

Sometimes, amid all the politics and political polarization, it's essential to take a step back and read some deep history, which in Friedlander's case is unsurpassed in quality and scholarship.

Note too that I picked up a copy of Michael Yon's, Moment of Truth in Iraq, which is reviewed at City Journal by Micael Totten, who says:

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.

And the reality is that the war's been a difficult, terrible conflict in many ways, but not a lost cause, nor an ignoble one.

Yon's message is not likely to sit well with the denialist, post-modern antiwar left, as Totten notes:

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.

Well, I better get to reading, because I've got some great stuff on my plate!