Say Anything Blog

...what I think merits attention is the sudden concern of those on the left and in the media about what the troops think.

I don't recall a poll taken of the troops during the Clinton administration to find out how they felt about the operation in Mogadishu. Maybe somebody did take one, but the 99.999 percent disapproval number they got was just more than the media could stand to report. I don't recall a bunch of polls being touted loudly by the media in the Clinton years letting us know how many of the troops respected their commander-in-chief. Certainly polls of the military were done during the Clinton years, but if they were, they were not featured prominently on my nightly newscast. I wonder why that is.

I asked Matt of the excellent military blog Blackfive for his take on the recent efforts of those in the media to determine how the troops feel (Military blogs, referred to as milblogs, are the weblogs maintained by individual members of the military and often include their personal accounts of their experiences in the field, sometimes even including pictures from war zones).

Matt had this to say about the sudden interest in polling the troops, “No one polled my troops about doing a tour in Bosnia or whether we supported the mission. No one asked me if I thought my unit should be involved in El Salvador in the 80s or Iraq in 1991. Would I rather have been drinking a beer, sitting in the bleachers of Wrigley Field? Of course. But there was a job to do and it was mine to complete.” He went on to say that instead of polling the troops on their feelings about Iraq, the media would do better to focus on providing more complete and truthful reporting of what the military is doing there.