Letter from a Marine

This was recently the "Email of the Day over at Andrew Sullivan's blog, posted by one of his guest bloggers, David Weigel. Sullivan was an ardent advocate of the liberation of Iraq, and used to publish this sort of letter from troops in the field quite frequently. In fact, with his permission I even incorporated some of them into Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz's Senate testimony when I was at the Pentagon. Unfortunately, after Abu Ghraib Sullivan became hysterically anti-war, seeing that incident as epitomizing the war rather than the disgusting aberration that it was, and began ignoring the voices of soldiers that he had promoted against the media. Pity.

Wonder why the press is ignoring what has been going with operations in Baghdad? There were literally thousands dying there in June and July, but almost none now. If you read the New York Times or Washington Post and even the WSJ, you would think your experience here in Iraq is all an illusion.

I don't want to paint any overly rosy picture of things here as I never have indulged in that practice before, but we have control everywhere now (up to a point). They are still capable of launching small attacks against our forces, still able to blow up Iraqi Police in large numbers sometimes, and yes, they can still murder each other in Baghdad in sectarian violence. But, we are waging our war right now almost completely on our terms.

Where are Thomas Ricks and Max Boot on these events? Even if short-lived and part of an ever changing chain of events in Iraq, news-worthy events are happening that are not all blood and guts.