Who Can Really Say?

Today, three different views of the US military experience in Iraq.

First, via Instapundit, a returned Marine shines some light on the experience and journalistic stylings of the WaPo's Baghdad Bureau Chief.

Before major combat operations were over, Chandrasekaran was already quoting Iraqis proclaiming the American operation a failure. Reading his dispatches from April 2003, you can already see his meta-narrative take shape: basically, that the Americans are clumsy fools who don?t know what they?re doing, and Iraqis hate them. This meta-narrative informs his coverage and the coverage of the reporters he supervises, who rotate in and out of Iraq.

How do I know this? Because my fellow Marines and I witnessed it with our own eyes. Chandrasekaran showed up in the city of Al Kut last April, talked to a few of our officers, and toured the city for a few hours. He then got back into his air-conditioned car and drove back to Baghdad to write about the local unrest.

"The Untouchable 'Mayor' of Kut," his article's headline blared the next day. It described a local, Iranian-backed troublemaker named Abbas Fadhil, who was squatting in the provincial government headquarters. He had gathered a mob of people with nothing better to do, told them to camp out in the headquarters compound, and there they sat, defying the Marines of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade.

What utter rubbish.

Next up, (via VodkaPundit) a returning Marine who'd been there from the start in the Winter of 2003, has something to say about WMD's, Bush Lied, and all that other good stuff:

I can speak with authority on the opinions of both British and American infantry in that place and at that time. Let me make this clear: at no time did anyone say or imply to any of us that we were invading Iraq to rid the country of weapons of mass destruction, nor were we there to avenge 9/11. We knew we were there for one reason: to rid the world of a tyrant, and to give Iraq back to Iraqis.

None of us had even heard those arguments for going to war until we returned, and we still don't understand the confusion. To us, it was simple. The world needed to be rid of a man who committed mass murder of an entire people, and our country was the only one that could project that much power that far and with that kind of precision. We don't make policy decisions: we carry them out. And none of us had the slightest doubt about how right and good our actions were.

The war was the right thing to do then, and in hindsight it was still the right thing to do. We can't overthrow every murderous tyrant in the world, but when we can, we should. Take it from someone who was there, and who stood to lose everything. We must, and will, stay the course. We owe it to the Iraqis, and to the world.

Both of these are worth a full read. The last bit (from Belmont Club) has a twist to it I suppose, in that it's written not by a soldier but by Michael Tucker, a documentary filmmaker who was embedded with the troops early last year and who returned for a second month with them over the winter. His tale is also enlightening and in some ways the most personal. The name of the movie is Gunner Palace. And definately check out this fine rendition, nay Hendrixesqe rendition, of the Star Spangled Banner played in Iraq by a US soldier, in a clip from Tucker's film.

A film site has this about the film clips:

The clips are also indicative of what sets Gunner Palace apart. The US now has around 140,000 troops in Iraq. Since President Bush declared their mission accomplished, nearly 800 have been killed and thousands more wounded. Regardless of where you stand on the war, you've got to wonder what life for these men and women is like day by day - and that's precisely what goes missing on the news and very much what this film goes a long way towards showing us. All politics aside. "I don't even know what my bias is anymore," says Tucker. "My bias has completely changed. I think that sometimes I sound like a raving right-wing lunatic and other times I sound like a raving socialist or something. But I'm trying to make something that's honest. And soldiers have a huge hang-up about it. All they want is for someone to tell the truth. Not embellish it."