Flagging Hopes

My blogmate fits well it would seem in the group so ably described by Michael Yon here:

This war is strange. I never hear soldiers worried about their own morale sagging. Contrary, the war-fighters here are more concerned to bolster the morale of the people at home. Here in Kuwait, where the dining facilities are bedecked in Christmas decorations, soldiers stream in from Iraq on convoys and stream back north along those bomb-laden roads. The service members here are not all rear-echelon people who never see fighting or blood. Yet their overall morale obviously is high. Few of them know I am a writer, and so they speak freely at the tables around me. In Qatar, from which I’d just departed, I spoke with troops taking four-day R&R passes, some having just returned from the most dangerous parts of Iraq, and others heading straight back, and their overall morale was also very high. The morale at war is higher than I have ever seen it at home; makes me wonder what they know that most Americans seem to be missing.

Strange indeed. I don't know that Yon is right, likewise I don't know that the sum of mainstream reporting is correct about Iraq and the War at-large. Yet I'm amazed having listened last week to interviews with a number of milbloggers at the disconnect between what many on the ground see and interpret and what the rest of us are getting.

Yon hits it on the head with that close. What exactly accounts for such a difference? The perception of many who are daily dealing with Iraqi's and the myriad number of challenges there are far different than that from those who report about it and those who consume the reporting and those who make policy decisions. Why?

Meanwhile, Michael Ledeen offered this observation of Sadaam's hanging today:

I agree with Rich that the Iraqis botched the execution of Saddam. It was not the American way, it was the traditional way. In the course of writing a book about Naples, I read scores of accounts of hangings, and there's a copious English-language literature on such things as well, from which it emerges that Saddam's treatment—the insults, the jibes, the jokes, all those things that offend us—have long been part of the ritual. Remember the final scene in "Braveheart"? When the torturer has the crowd laughing with him about the agonies to which Mel Gibson is about to be subjected?

Not the American way...