"Tribe America"

I don't write about the Iraq war as too many other people both for and against seem to write about it all the time.    Except that I never get a sense of what it's like for the Iraqi people on the ground. 

Michael Yon is the only writer on the ground there and he's doing extraordinary dispatches that give me a sense of being there He is completely independent and entirely supported by readers.

When you read Baqubah Update, you learn that the Americans have become Tribe America, one you can rely on
The big news on the streets today is that the people of Baqubah are generally ecstatic, although many hold in reserve a serious concern that we will abandon them again. For many Iraqis, we have morphed from being invaders to occupiers to members of a tribe. I call it the “al Ameriki tribe,” or “tribe America.”

They hate the terrorists, the formerly criminal gangs, now loosely connected Al Qaeda,  because of their atrocious tactics of harnessing  young boys of 12 and 13.

These boys were used for kidnapping, torturing and murdering people.
At first, he said, they would only target Shia, but over time the new al Qaeda directed attacks against Sunni, and then anyone who thought differently. The official reported that on a couple of occasions in Baqubah, al Qaeda invited to lunch families they wanted to convert to their way of thinking. In each instance, the family had a boy, he said, who was about 11 years old. As LT David Wallach interpreted the man’s words, I saw Wallach go blank and silent. He stopped interpreting for a moment. I asked Wallach, “What did he say?” Wallach said that at these luncheons, the families were sat down to eat. And then their boy was brought in with his mouth stuffed. The boy had been baked. Al Qaeda served the boy to his family.

When you read Bless the Beasts and Children, you can begin to understand how terrifying these al Qaeda gangs were and are.  You have only to look at  Yon's photos of  a whole simple village of men, women, children and beasts slaughtered and left to rot in the sun.

So seeing them now jubilant makes you wonder why aren't these stories being told by the mainstream media?