Baghdads untold story

[Drywall]

From the March or April American Legion Magazine






Baghdad?s Untold Story
Postwar Iraq?s successes in reconstruction get no salute from media.


The fruits of America?s efforts in Iraq are not just words written
on paper and promises made behind podiums, but tangible signs of
progress ? if only the press and politicians cared enough to read
the whole story.

Can you imagine half of Doolittle?s squadron dropping K-rations on
Tokyo while the other half dropped incendiaries, or Eisenhower
drawing up an exit strategy in the autumn of 1945?

By Alan W. Dowd

Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq for almost 24 years ? longer than Hitler
controlled Germany, longer than Tojo dominated Japan. During that
quarter-century, neither the Iraqi people nor their neighbors knew a
day of peace. Saddam?s wars scarred Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and
Israel. His internal terror decimated the Kurdish minority in
northern Iraq and the Shiite majority in southern Iraq, transforming
the cradle of civilization into a giant torture chamber.

Yet less than a year after the liberation of Iraq, the U.S.-led
coalition has come under heavy fire ?literally and figuratively ?
for its inability to fix all the problems and purge all the evils
unleashed between July 1979 and May 2003. The impatience and fury of
the Iraqi people is understandable, even predictable, given the hell
they have endured. What is not understandable is the impatience and
doom-saying of American pundits and politicians.

?If it bleeds, it leads,? the time-honored media maxim declares. So,
our newspapers and newscasts are full of stories about car bombings
and quagmires rather than the impressive milestones of Iraq?s
reconstruction.

Some perspective is in order. As the hole in the Manhattan skyline
reminds us, it is far easier to destroy something than to repair it.


The Whole Story. Playing every role from detective to diplomat to de
facto mayor, U.S. forces are carrying out a multifaceted mission of
staggering scope: they search for weapons of mass destruction, seal
the borders, provide basic public services, prevent civil war,
apprehend regime leaders, protect diplomats, hunt al-Qaida and
Saddam?s leftovers, rebuild roads and bridges. And as if that
weren?t enough, they are laying the foundations for something truly
revolutionary: the first democracy in the Arab world.

Toward that end, the Iraqi Governing Council has sketched the
outlines of a ?Fundamental Law.? It includes a bill of rights
protecting freedom of speech and religion and guaranteeing due
process. It balances the power of the central government with
regional governorates, or provinces. It ensures civilian control
over the Iraqi armed forces. And it envisions an independent
judiciary. Already, 95 percent of Iraqi courts are functioning. In
fact, the coalition has approved more than 600 Iraqi judges who are
presiding over 500 different courts.

By summer, each of Iraq?s 18 governorates will elect representatives
for a transitional assembly to carry Iraq from allied stewardship to
full independence. As postwar Iraq moves through these phases of
maturity and sovereignty, the Iraqis will develop a permanent
constitution that will be an outgrowth of the Fundamental Law. The
new constitution will be presented to the Iraqi people in a
referendum sometime in 2005.

However, the fruits of America?s efforts in Iraq are not just words
written on paper and promises made behind podiums, but tangible
signs of progress, as the Coalition Provisional Authority, Pentagon
and State Department detail every day in print and on the Web ? if
only the press and politicians cared enough to read the whole story:


- On a fast track to representative government, the Iraqi people
have created neighborhood and city councils all across the country.
The city council in Baghdad, for example, reflects the full
cross-section of the Iraqi populace: Sunnis and Shias, Arabs and
Kurds, men and women, even Christians.

- Since November, Iraq?s vital port at Umm Qasr has been receiving
grain-laden cargo ships.

- More than 240 hospitals and 1,200 clinics have reopened. They have
administered more than 22 million vaccinations to Iraqi children.
U.S. and coalition military units work with local physicians and
nurses to set up clinics that provide health care even in Iraq?s
most backwater villages and neighborhoods.

- Iraq?s 22 universities and 43 technical institutes have been
de-Baathified and reopened, as have 1,500 elementary schools. Some
64,000 teachers and 5,000 principals have been vetted, retrained and
put to work in Iraq?s schools. A ?teach-the-teacher? program has
recruited hundreds of Iraqis to train another 81,000 educators in
post-Baathist teaching methods. And by the end of Iraq?s first
school year after Saddam, the coalition will have distributed 72
million new textbooks.

- Iraq now has 150 independent newspapers and counting.

- Iraq is now generating enough oil to meet its own domestic
consumption and is exporting 1.5 million barrels a day. In the span
of a few months, a free Iraq generated $2 billion from oil sales.

- Electrical power generation is now well above prewar levels, and
Iraqi personnel are guarding the power plants.

- Indeed, U.S. forces have retrained and deployed more than 48,000
Iraqis to protect the power grid and water supply, 60,000 new Iraqi
security personnel, 12,000 border-patrol guards and a full battalion
of soldiers. In fact, Iraq now accounts for the second-largest
contingent of security forces in the coalition and will likely
surpass the United States as the largest sometime this year.

- Working together, U.S. and Iraqi forces have seized tons of
weapons, arrested hundreds of regime loyalists, thwarted several
terror attacks, and killed or captured 40 of the 55 most-wanted
regime leaders. Although Iraqi forces were not involved in the raid
that netted Saddam Hussein, Iraqi sources were key pieces of the
intelligence puzzle that led the 4th Infantry Division and Task
Force 121 to Saddam?s hiding hole.

Worth It. None of this comes without a price. Hundreds of U.S.
troops have been killed, and more than 1,000 have been wounded. For
those Americans too young to remember World War II, Korea or
Vietnam, this is something new. In the shadow of Vietnam, America
prosecuted its wars quickly and almost bloodlessly. They were
measured in days or weeks, not years. They were quarantined within
clear geographic boundaries. And they began and ended at a time of
America?s choosing.

That military calculus worked as the Cold War thawed, but in an age
of terror ? as mass murderers scramble to build weapons of mass
destruction to maim U.S. cities ? the American people have
reluctantly concluded that their troops must risk life and limb in
faraway lands to ensure that civilians aren?t evaporated at home.
That may sound unfeeling, but every soldier, sailor, airman and
Marine I know agrees. They must not fight and die in vain, but they
must fight.

They are winning this fight. Surprisingly to some, especially given
the bloody nature of postwar Iraq, almost two-thirds of Iraqis say
liberation from Saddam?s rule is worth the temporary privations of
the U.S.-led occupation, according to a Gallup poll.

An American Enterprise Institute-Zogby poll conducted in four
different Iraqi cities unearthed even more good news: 71 percent of
Iraqis believe their lives will be better in five years, and 70
percent believe their country will be in better shape in five years.
Almost three in four Iraqis want Baath Party leaders punished; fully
60 percent oppose an Islamic government in Iraq; and 57 percent have
an unfavorable view of Osama bin Laden. When asked which country
Iraq should model itself after, Iraqis chose the United States over
Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt and Iran.

In fact, 59 percent of Iraqis want coalition forces to stay for more
than a year. Without question, some of what the U.S. occupation
forces have to do angers locals, but as one member of the Mosul City
Council told The New York Times, ?They work hard to do the right
thing.?

Indeed they do. War correspondent Jim Lacey reported in National
Review that when soldiers from the 101st Airborne were ordered to
guard the Mosque of Ali in Najaf, a mob of angry Iraqis, under the
impression that the GIs were going to storm the holy site, blocked
the Americans. But instead of retreating or opening fire, their
commanding officer, Lt. Col. Chris Hughes, told them to point their
guns into the ground, take a knee and grin. That?s right ? grin.
Within minutes, American troops and Iraqi civilians were shaking
hands. Lacey marveled at ?an army of men who could fight with
ruthless savagery all night and then respond so easily to an order
to ?smile? while under impending threat.?

After fighting their way from Kuwait to the northern third of Iraq,
another brigade of the 101st Airborne was ordered to reopen trade
flows between the border towns of Iraq and Syria. The unit discussed
the problem with Iraqi customs officers and those with goods to
trade, decided on a per-vehicle toll and reopened the commercial
route. The humming trade activity has generated enough revenue to
hire additional customs officials, fund other municipal projects and
reconstitute local institutions of governance. One might call Iraq?s
northwestern borderlands the ?101st Airborne Enterprise Zone.?

Different Standards. This is nothing new for Americans. In the
creativity and ambidexterity of a military that uses commerce to
open up borders and revive villages, drops JDAMs on the guilty and
MREs on the innocent, and lays foundations for new roads and new
governments alike, we catch a glimpse of the stuff that transformed
Japan and Germany after World War II.

What is new, what is a challenge for the U.S. military, is the
impatience of the American people and the unblinking eye of the
modern media. The U.S. military of today is simply held to a
different standard than its enemies and forebears alike.

Recall that the enemy began this war by using civilian airliners as
guided missiles. When the U.S. military struck back, the world was
watching. The world demanded that civilian casualties be avoided,
that U.S. forces feed the war-weary innocents, that bombing missions
be scrubbed if sand obscured the targets, that America respect the
sovereignty of Afghanistan?s neighbors.

Cribbing his battle plan from al-Qaida, Saddam marched noncombatants
in front of tanks, used school buses as time bombs, converted holy
sites into missile sites and executed prisoners of war. And since
the fall of Baghdad, his henchmen have capitalized on the protection
of civilian population centers and the good will of the American
military to wage a guerrilla war.

American troops have always tried to avoid civilian casualties, and
they have always displayed humanity in battle. But can you imagine
half of Doolittle?s squadron dropping K-rations on Tokyo while the
other half dropped incendiaries, the 8th Air Force steering clear of
dams or divisions located near cathedrals, Patton reining in his
tanks at this border or that for fear of violating the sovereignty
of a pro-Nazi government, MacArthur ordering his troops to smile
when Japanese villagers started to get agitated, Eisenhower drawing
up an exit strategy in the autumn of 1945?

To be sure, the world is very different than the one my grandfathers
fought to save in the 1940s, and that?s precisely the point. The
American people and global media demand near-perfection from U.S.
forces; the enemy knows this and thus wages war according to a far
different set of standards, making the American military?s
achievements in Iraq to date all the more impressive.

Politicians and the press have a right and, indeed, a duty to report
bad news and ask hard questions, especially in wartime. But they
also have a responsibility to tell the whole story. And the whole
story is that the mission in Iraq is succeeding. Baghdad is rising.

Alan W. Dowd is director of the Hudson Institute in Indianapolis.

[catman]

Good article Drywall, thanks for posting!

Trav