Michael Yon represents the best of the reporting going on about our troops in Iraq. If I had the power, I would put him in charge of running the war.
A general emailed in the past 24 hours threatening to kick me out. The first time the Army threatened to kick me out was in late 2005, just after I published a dispatch called “Gates of Fire.†Some of the senior level public affairs people who’d been upset by “Proximity Delays†were looking ever since for a reason to kick me out and they wanted to use “Gates of Fire†as a catapult. In the events described in that dispatch, I broke some rules by, for instance, firing a weapon during combat when some of our soldiers were fighting fairly close quarters and one was wounded and still under enemy fire. That’s right. I’m not sure what message the senior level public affairs people thought that would convey had they succeeded, (which they didn’t) but it was clear to me what they valued most. They want the press on a short leash, even at the expense of the life of a soldier.
Some readers might recall that LTC Barry Johnson denied my embed requests in 2006, but after I wrote “Censoring Iraq,†somehow the door opened up. Strangely, a couple days ago, LTC Barry Johnson invited me to be a panelist at a symposium in Washington D.C. on â€the role of blogs and bloggers in the news environment today. The intent is to help PAOs better understand the issues involved.†Call me suspicious, but my whiskers tingled on that one.
If you wonder why we are losing in Iraq, and we are, I can tell you the reason in one word: bureaucrats. Bureaucrats are killing our chances of winning more surely than any other single factor. They are a worse enemy than the insurgents. Want to do something that makes sense and would help us win? Submit your application through the proper channels and wait two years. By then, you’ll have rotated home and stopped caring. I’m not exaggerating.
Yon brings up the salient point that the U.S. military does a piss poor job of accommodating the press trying to report on the war. I know this first hand. We were too busy micromanaging our troops in my unit to really focus on the mission of taking care of reporters. And the politics of who got the embeds and why would make you sick were privy to them. I’ll go into details after I’m safely out of uniform, thanks. No need to expose myself to retribution now.
So anyway, Yon gets it, and the brass, as usual, don’t. Why in the hell are we selling big-screen TVs in our combat zone PX facilities?
But considering all the planning, organization, logistics and resources that went in to putting up what amounts to a food court in a surburban mall, how hard would it be, really, for there to be a clean, well-lit press trailer, open 24-7, with some desks, chairs and lockers, wired for the internet? Not on every base, but on enough of them so that stories from everywhere else could get out on a regular basis. For a military that is the first to gripe about not getting enough press–in a kind of war where the press can determine the outcome–it seems fairly obvious that the first step would be to at least make sure there is a place for the press to work. If this were a few months into this war, I could understand it, but to not even be at square one this far in?
Mike, keep killing the bureaucrats with your pen. I’m in your corner.