Letter From Iraq: The Good America Is Doing
Military analyst and former Green Beret Lonnie Shoultz forwarded us a letter
from a physician friend of a friend in Iraq who operated on the councilor who
died from her gunshot wounds last week.
"This is a fascinating story and demonstrates how much our money is going
to build Iraq - not rebuild it," Shoultz writes in a forward. "Saddam Hussein
allowed his people to exist in the conditions of the 19th Century while he
surrounded himself and his family with opalescence. Read on and see what a
difference your money is making in the lives of people who have never known
something we take for granted - like a hospital surgical suite. Then there are
the other things they are getting for the first time such as sewage treatment,
water on tap, electricity, telephones in their homes, schools, books, storm
drains to stop flooding and the things you grew up expecting to have outside
of your door have not been built in Iraq in the last 35 years. We didn't break
them in the war - they just were not ever there."
Excerpts from the letter, after a lengthy description of the heroic but doomed
effort to save the councilwoman in appalling conditions:
Just the same, in spite of everything we have seen and heard about, I have
high hopes for the future here. Every so often I get a chance to watch CNN
and its continued "reporting" of only the negative comments has turned my
stomach. Clearly many in the press have forgotten the age-old adage coined
by a famous and very well respected journalist; in essence, he said that
journalists were supposed to report the news and not make the news. That
implies an honest effort to see and report both sides of the story, something
that is sorely lacking, as I see it. I am just one man, but I have heard nothing
but happiness expressed by the Iraqis that I have come in contact with.
Case in point; I was walking to the CPA late this afternoon with one of the
soldiers from the unit, and this gaggle of kids (probably 10 of them) was
walking towards us. All of a sudden, one of them broke from the pack and ran
over to me. He couldn't have been any more than 10 or 11, and he came up
to me and gave me a "high five," which I returned. He then grabbed my hand,
kissed it, and said, "I love you, thank you, thank you very much." And the
rest of the kids chimed in with their, "thanks to the Americans."
Where the hell was CNN for that? Where was CNN when I was eating lunch
the other day at the newly opened "Cofe Shoppe" - a local restaurant
operating in what used to be a gas station about 500 yards from the CSH -
and the locals were coming up to us and thanking us for freeing their beloved
Iraq from the hands of the madman Saddam. "No other country could have
done this," they said. "We waited for the Americans to come, because no
other country cared about us, and no other country could have done this as
the Americans did."
Where was CNN then? I really doubt that I am the only person that has heard
these sentiments, and I would be willing to bet my entire paycheck for my
three months here that at least one reporter has heard this exact sort of
thinking and has failed to print or broadcast it because it didn't fit that
reporter's agenda. Where are the stories of terror that these folks are
recounting? How come no one has published the accounts of brutality and
killing that are commonly heard here and have been substantiated by
investigators? If you want to know what is REALLY going on, you are going to
have to ignore what our informative reporters are telling you and start talking
to the soldiers and public health workers and CPA employees that are here,
working long hours for one reason - because they are helping a nation
emerge from its own ashes.
And they are seeing thankful people, and they are seeing progress. Nothing
this big is going to happen in a couple of months. Patience is the operative
word here, as I see it. But then again, what do I know - I am just some dumb
soldier surgeon who was actually only here for a few months. |
