Michael Yon obtained his “rockstar” status in milblogging circles the old fashioned way:  He earned it.  He was among the first milbloggers to embed with the American military early in the Iraq War, and he basically hasn’t left the country since.  As a result, his take on the situation over there is worth noting, if not ground truth, IMO.  Here’s an except from an interview Mike recently did with Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review Online:

LOPEZ: How has the Internet changed war reporting?

YON: It means that instead of getting paid to go to Iraq and get shot, I can do it for free. It also means the sky is the limit on reaching readers worldwide. People from approximately 100 countries come to my site each day. 

LOPEZ: What is al-Qaeda’s view of masculinity and how does it differ from the American military’s?

YON:  Al-Qaeda models a street gang notion of masculinity in which the cruelest, most destructive and bullying are seen as the toughest and most admired. Raping children and murdering their parents is a gang-banger’s way of asserting his masculinity. And a lot of al-Qaeda recruits are young gang members who join up for the money, the drugs, and the guns.

For the American soldier the ideal of masculinity is “protect and serve,” especially the weak, and women and kids. It means killing the bad guys.  When al-Qaeda murderers detonate a bomb in the middle of a crowd of school children, our guys rush the kids to the medics. Then they go kill the terrorists. They are really good at both. They may enjoy hanging out with kids more than killing terrorists, but it’s a close call. Our guys really like killing terrorists. 

LOPEZ: My impression is you did not go over as a Bush/McCain foot-solider saying “No surrender,” now I’ll slant the story to make sure we don’t. You went there wanting to tell what was going on. What brought you to “no surrender” mode?

YON: We made horrible mistakes in 2004 and 2005.  It is true that al-Qaeda funded and tried to control the Sunni insurgency and use it to start a civil war. But al-Qaeda never would have had such a big chance if we hadn’t given it to them.  Al-Qaeda exploited the insurgency, but we helped create it. The extent of the Sunni insurgency was not inevitable. Much of it was a reaction — and in some ways a rational reaction — to American policies approved by the Bush administration and enforced by Ambassador Bremer.

General Petraeus proved that the insurgency was not inevitable by what he achieved while in command of Nineveh province in 2003. He was able to restore civil order, rebuild security, even hold local elections and see the economy start coming back to life. He held local elections in Nineveh before Bremer was on the ground in Baghdad.

Part of the reason it worked was that Petraeus got temporary exemptions from the policies that excluded former Ba’ath party members from any role in post-Saddam Iraq. Nineveh for some reason happens to be a big retirement area for Iraqi army officers. Petraeus used to have tea once a week with dozens of former Generals, many of whom were helpful in restoring order. A year later, when Petraeus was gone and the Bremer policies were fully enforced many of those same men, or their protégés, were in the field against us.

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