Of Words

"More than a year ago, I wrote from the “Sunni Triangle” that Iraq was in the midst of a civil war, words that received little attention then. I had published that dispatch about three weeks after the unexpected but overwhelming success of the first Iraqi elections. People were understandably distracted by the post-vote euphoria, while the media was largely busy explaining how they so misjudged the mood of the Iraqi people. Nearly all their pundits predicted a gloomy, violence-ridden election day with poor turnout. Instead, the day was relatively peaceful and Iraqi voter turnout was nothing less than stunning. Looking ahead from that moment, knowing that planning for the future is best done with a clear memory, I wrote on 23 February 2005:

“Nobody knows what the future will bring for Iraq. In my opinion, it’s already in a civil war, though many people seem afraid to say it. Actually, the reluctance is more likely ordinal in nature—no one wants to be the first to say what many know to be true Many now-stable democracies have suffered civil wars. Democracy, despite its inherent nobility, is seldom easy or pretty. At its best, democracy is a reflection of the “people,” and we all know what “they” are like.”

The topic of the dispatch, entitled “Mission Impossible: Mission Accomplished,” was not the question of whether Iraq’s growing turmoil fell into any particular academic definition of “civil war.” The piece was a collection of my thoughts and observations on the occasion of the departure of the 1st Infantry Division from Iraq. In late February 2005, as I was interviewing the combat soldiers with whom I’d spent an intense seven weeks, I was struck by a question I was asked over and over again.

“How much,” soldiers from 1st ID wondered aloud to me, “do the people at home know about the progress we have made over here?”

As I consider this whole manufactured controversy about my intentions in saying, then and now, that Iraq is in a civil war, and whether or not I used the right definition, and even, ridiculous as it seems, whether I have been hijacked by forces that oppose this war, what strikes me as most telling, and truly as most sad, is that, still, more than a year later, almost every soldier I’ve met in Iraq and most recently Afghanistan, still has to ask that same question: Do the people at home know about the progress we have made over here?"
Michael Yon