The Lies in Your Head, More Powerful than All Facts

[zonmoy]

Michael Ledeen offers yet another of his many posts lauding the reports by Michael Yon, embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq, and joyously greeting the news of impending victory that Yon provides the war propagandists, year after bloody year after carnage-drenched year. Ledeen, of course, is one of the most sickeningly awful of the war lovers, and let us never forget the Ledeen Doctrine: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." Many of the war lovers cite Yon's work frequently; Glenn Reynolds often does, encouraging readers to donate to support Yon's ongoing reporting, reminding us that Reynolds himself makes such contributions.

I find it close to impossible to read Yon's dispatches: they are frequently the length of novellas, they are overwhelmed by a level of detail and specificity that I find mind-numbing, and Yon's perspective is saturated with a reverence, even a celebration, of the chaos and murderous destructiveness of war that sickens me. But I don't want to focus on Yon's reports -- and at least he is willing to put his life on the line, which is considerably more than can be said of the propagandists who so eagerly use his work for their own ends. That is not to say that I view Yon's presence in Iraq as a "good" thing, which I most assuredly do not, since no American has ever had the right to be in Iraq at all. Yet from the perspective of the values that Yon and the war propagandists say they hold in common, I suppose it might be said that Yon's actions are "braver" in one sense.

Note what Ledeen excerpts from Yon's latest dispatch:
Combat is likely to heat up in Mosul and western Nineveh by about May. There likely will be some reports of increased US and Iraqi casualties up here, but this does not mean that we are losing ground or that al Qaeda is resurging – though clearly they are trying. If there is an increase in casualties here as we go into the summer of 2008, it is because our people and the Iraqi forces are closing in. We have seen just how deadly al Qaeda can be at the last steps. This enemy is desperate. They know they are losing. They are not likely to go out easy.

http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2008/03/lies-in-your-head-more-powerful-than.html

[zanne]

1. "The enemy is desperate".

Gee--Where have we heard this before? (In their last "gasp')?

[zonmoy]

2. sure it isnt our last gasp.

[islandmkl]

3. they are in the 'last throes'.....

for the fourth straight year...

[zanne]

4. That's the one! nt