Michael Yon is a writer/photographer who reports on what’s actually happening in Iraq, as opposed to the Bu$hCo version of reality stage-managed by CENTCOM. He’s got an article in the October 30 edition of The Weekly Standard and while we are more than loathe to actually link to anything connected with the evil and odious Likudnik agent William Kristol, this article is interesting enough to warrant breaking our self-imposed rule.

A tip of the too-small Kevlar helmet to War and Piece for the recommendation.

In a counterinsurgency, the media battlespace is critical. When it comes to mustering public opinion, rallying support, and forcing opponents to shift tactics and timetables to better suit the home team, our terrorist enemies are destroying us. Al Qaeda's media arm is called al Sahab: the cloud. It feels more like a hurricane. While our enemies have "journalists" crawling all over battlefields to chronicle their successes and our failures, we have an "embed" media system that is so ineptly managed that earlier this fall there were only 9 reporters embedded with 150,000 American troops in Iraq. There were about 770 during the initial invasion.

Many blame the media for the estrangement, but part of the blame rests squarely on the chip-laden shoulders of key military officers and on the often clueless Combined Press Information Center in Baghdad, which doesn't manage the media so much as manhandle them. Most military public affairs officers are professionals dedicated to their jobs, but it takes only a few well-placed incompetents to cripple our ability to match and trump al Sahab. By enabling incompetence, the Pentagon has allowed the problem to fester to the point of censorship.

Any of our 25 or so readers who are grey enough to remember the media in Nam will understand this problem immediately. The military doesn’t have professional PIO staff. Some young stud arrives in the combat zone, expecting to get a glamorous and career-enhancing command assignment, or some sweet staff job and encounters the S1. “Oh, you took an English Lit major in school? Great. You can be our new PIO. Don’t let those reporters dick you around.”

The lack of a professional PIO branch may be a hidden benefit, though, in the Bu$h malAdministration where lying is deliberate policy, and denying the lie when caught is just daily business. In Mr Rumsfeld’s space cadet DoD money is considered better spent bribing Iraqi newspapers for good war news than buying better armor for the troops.

I believe now as I did then: The government of the United States has no right to send our people off to war and keep secret that which it has no plausible military reason to keep secret. After all, American blood and treasure is being spent. Americans should know how our soldiers are doing, and what they are doing while wearing our flag. The government has no right to withhold information or to deny access to our combat forces just because that information might anger, frighten, or disturb us.

By allowing only a trickle of news to come out of Iraq, when all involved parties know the flow could be more robust, the Pentagon is doing just that. Although the conspicuous media vacuum can be partly explained by the danger--Iraq is arguably more dangerous for journalists than Vietnam or even World War II, when reporters were allowed to land on D-Day--some of the few who will risk it all are denied access for no good reason.

It’s quite an enlightening article and we heartily recommend reading all of it.

Michael Yon maintains his own website and it’s also illuminating.