Milbloggers and the Lonely War
I was getting up to date on current events before I head back down to MCHENRY when I came across an article about an interesting concept: a “cold civil war” in America. The article is pretty good in my opinion, this quote in particular struck me:
“The domestic political debate has nothing to do with what we’re doing here,” one U.S. officer in Iraq told the National Review’s Rich Lowry this week, in a representative comment offered not in a spirit of bitterness, but of cold fact. As Lowry remarked, “This is the lonely war” — its actual progress all but irrelevant to the pseudo combat on the home front.
It’s an interesting point and given the reporting many of the traditional (print and broadcast) major news organizations produce it does feel that way sometimes. Of course, in accordance with Newton’s Third Law (OK, yes I know, this isn’t physics, but bear with me) and with the help of the internet all sorts of alternate sources of reporting have sprung up. In this instance I’m refering specifically to Milbloggers like Blackfive and Michael Yon who go out with troops and report back the situation as it is, not as some news outlets might want it to appear. So next time you hear on the news about a car bomb in Baghdad, or the daily death toll, or how everybody in Iraq hates everybody else, spin up your ‘puter, hop on the interwebs and check these guys out for the view from our side, it’s actual fairly sunny over here.
Sorry about the pun, I couldn’t help myself…
October 25th, 2007 at 10:14 pm
The one I read is A*W*A*C (Afghanistan Without a Clue). Some of Doug Traversa’s posts have even been included in the new Sandbox book that Garry Trudeau put together.
http://traversa.typepad.com/afghanistan_without_a_clu/
October 29th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
Cool, thanks, I’ll check that one out, another good one is the Mudville Gazette.