Letter From Iraq: The Good America Is Doing
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.
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10-04-2003, 05:45 PM
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