Seeing Iraq Through a Glass, Darkly

Michael Yon, long an embed with our troops in the warzone, reports on his recent trip to the US and his view of Iraq war reporting:

I was at home in the United States just one day before the magnitude hit me like vertigo: America seems to be under a glass dome which allows few hard facts from the field to filter in unless they are attached to a string of false assumptions. Considering that my trip home coincided with General Petraeus’ testimony before the US Congress, when media interest in the war was (I’m told) unusually concentrated, it’s a wonder my eardrums didn’t burst on the trip back to Iraq. In places like Singapore, Indonesia, and Britain people hardly seemed to notice that success is being achieved in Iraq, while in the United States, Britney was competing for airtime with O.J. in one of the saddest sideshows on Earth.

I've given up on the Mainstream Media a long time ago to get the truth of our ongoing wars against the terrorists. This is why I view every Haditha, Gitmo, and other exaggerated tales of atrocities by our troops with a major grain of salt, until I get all the facts. It's no longer about headlines, which the old print and TV journalists still thrive on, but a desire for the "rest of the story", which I gt via the Milbloggers on the Internet.