Iraq Reviews > The Best Book on Iraq Yet: Dexter Filkins' The Forever War, by ...

[Dandelion Salad] Any explanation of the wars we are fighting that overlooks how the locals there see things is every bit as incomplete as those Confederate-ocentric Civil War explanations that overlooked the Yankees.  We don’t hardly ever make any efforts to factor in the people in the countries we now war in.  Same thing happened in the Vietnam War.  You can look high and low through Ricks’ book to find a single word from a single Iraqi in his or her own voice.  We are so instinctively blind and self-centered that we quite completely overlook most all of the people’s there, the there where we squander billions of our treasure, thousands of American lives, and inflict monstrous tolls of death and destruction on the inhabitants therein that exceeds our own Civil War’s.  Ricks and most all his colleagues report official Washington’s statements, be they press releases or behind-the-scenes gossipy backstabbing.  Out in the field, they report American voices, whether press releases or some conversation or interview with some grunt.  (Some officer, usually.  Class differences between the reportorial corps and the NCO ranks make officer voices the predominant American voices from the field.)  Ricks et al in the American news corps in their doing this are unwittingly being a perfect reflection of how most Americans, certainly how all of official America, sees the world. Not a very wise way to see things.

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