Independent Voices

Sometimes it takes someone from the outside, with no formal training or experience to demonstrate that a discipline has lost its way. Michael Yon has done that for journalism.

If you haven’t been to his website, go now. Especially if you have heard the chorus of voices calling for us to cut and run from Iraq, look at these pictures and get to know the faces of the people that some want to abandon to the terrorists. Read some of his dispatches from the archive and get a better understanding of what is going on over there

Via Michelle Malkin comes news that Bruce Willis is planning to make a pro-American movie about Deuce Four, the unit in which Yon has been embedded. Yon also posted about Bruce Willis speaking with the unit recently:

Bruce [Willis] had taken the time to fly in as a guest speaker to thank the members of the Deuce Four. He gave the most impassioned speech I can remember, using clear terms—including some well-selected profanities to describe terrorists—to express his admiration and support for the troops. Bruce’s speech was so accurate in his description of the war, and so charged with emotion, that he seemed ready to lead the troops himself back to Iraq; and they were ready to go.

When stars are big enough, like Mel Gibson and Bruce Willis, they get to make first-rate movies that the Hollywood establishment would never have made. I don’t know which will be more entertaining, the film itself or the hysteria its likely to create on the left.

RELATED: Senator Joe Lieberman provides another independent perspective this morning on Iraq. Being an independent voice in the Democratic Party means being consistently in favor of liberating Iraq, rather than first supporting it and then opposing it. Lieberman, having just returned from his fourth trip there in 17 months, is more optimistic than most:

Here is an ironic finding I brought back from Iraq. While U.S. public opinion polls show serious declines in support for the war and increasing pessimism about how it will end, polls conducted by Iraqis for Iraqi universities show increasing optimism. Two-thirds say they are better off than they were under Saddam, and a resounding 82% are confident their lives in Iraq will be better a year from now than they are today. What a colossal mistake it would be for America’s bipartisan political leadership to choose this moment in history to lose its will and, in the famous phrase, to seize defeat from the jaws of the coming victory.

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After a Thanksgiving meal with a great group of Marines at Camp Fallujah in western Iraq, I asked their commander whether the morale of his troops had been hurt by the growing public dissent in America over the war in Iraq. His answer was insightful, instructive and inspirational: “I would guess that if the opposition and division at home go on a lot longer and get a lot deeper it might have some effect, but, Senator, my Marines are motivated by their devotion to each other and the cause, not by political debates.”

Thank you, General. That is a powerful, needed message for the rest of America and its political leadership at this critical moment in our nation’s history. Semper Fi.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 29th, 2005 at 8:03 am and is filed under The Media, The Culture, Global War on Terror. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.