Michael Yon: Moment of Truth in Iraq
Michael Yon was somehow coaxed out of the same mold from which Ernie Pyle was cast, long after it was assumed to have stopped working. A former green beret, the fearless photographer has been in and out of Iraq since late 2004, determined to tell the story of the war as it really is for the troops on the ground. No matter the situation, he’s tagged along with our boys through patrols, ambushes, firefights, and…tea?
Moment of Truth in Iraq is more than just an account of the trials and triumphs of the U.S. “surge” in 2007. Yon breaks down the nuts and bolts of counterinsurgency—why winning “hearts and minds” isn’t the fruitless effort it would seem in retrospect to Vietnam; why winning the media “battle space” is crucial, and misunderstood; why values—and the moral high ground—are not weakness, but the key to victory; and why convincing a timid mayor to stick around for a food shipment can be more important than leveling a hundred terrorist hideouts. General David Petraeus’ strategy has met with dramatic success, and here’s why—and also why these gains must be jealously defended. Yon also understandably has a great deal of respect and admiration for the American fighting man (and woman), and shows us why, despite blunders such as Abu Ghraib, our soldiers in Iraq are admired, respected, and loved by the Iraqi people.
Yon also pulls no punches. To understand how impressive our gains in Iraq in the last year have been, he insists, we must first acknowledge how dire the situation was. Our execution of the war, our decisions, our comportment all have not been the best. Mistakes have been made. “[C]ritics were often right,” he says: right about force strength, right about the insurgency, right about civil war. But in admitting how bad it was, Yon vets his current assertion that victory is attainable. You can trust him not to candy coat the situation, that his conclusion is honest and not political. “Maybe creating a powerful democracy in the Middle East was a foolish reason to go to war. Maybe it was never the r