This e-mail has been making the rounds lately, and it’s worth posting as it puts the conflict in Iraq in better perspective.
Subject: Our Accomplishments
Marines and Sailors,
As we approach the end of the year I think it is important to share a few thoughts about what you’ve accomplished directly, in some cases, and indirectly in many others. I am speaking about what the Bush Administration and each of you has contributed by wearing the uniform, because the fact that you wear the uniform contributes 100% to the capability of the nation to send a few onto the field to execute national policy. As you read about these achievements, I would call your attention to two things:
1. This is good news that hasn’t been fit to print or report on TV.
2. It is much easier to point out the errors a man makes when he makes the tough decisions, rarely is the positive as aggressively pursued.
Since President Bush declared an end to major combat on May 1….
… the first battalion of the new Iraqi Army has graduated and is on active duty
… over 60,000 Iraqis now provide security to their fellow citizens.
… nearly all of Iraq’s 400 courts are functioning.
… the Iraqi judiciary is fully independent.
… on Monday, October 6 power generation hit 4,518 megawatts-exceeding the prewar average.
… all 22 universities and 43 technical institutes and colleges are open, as are nearly all primary and secondary schools.
… by October 1, Coalition forces had rehab-ed over 1,500 schools – 500 more than scheduled.
… teachers earn from 12 to 25 times their former salaries.
… all 240 hospitals and more than 1200 clinics are open.
… doctors salaries are at least eight times what they were under Saddam.
… pharmaceutical distribution has gone from essentially nothing to 700 tons in May to a current total of 12,000 tons.
… the Coalition has helped administer over 22 million vaccinations to Iraq’s children.
… a Coalition program has cleared over 14,000 kilometers of Iraq’s 27,000 kilometers of weed-choked canals which now irrigate tens of thousands of farms. This project has created jobs for more than 100,000 Iraqi men and women.
… we have restored over three-quarters of prewar telephone services and over two-thirds of the potable water production.
… there are 4,900 full-service telephone connections. We expect 50,000 by year-end.
… the wheels of commerce are turning. From bicycles to satellite dishes to cars and trucks, businesses are coming to life in all major cities and towns.
… 95 percent of all prewar bank customers have service and first-time customers are opening accounts daily.
… Iraqi banks are making loans to finance businesses.
… the central bank is fully independent.
… Iraq has one of the worlds most growth-oriented investment and banking laws.
… Iraq has a single, unified currency for the first time in 15 years.
… satellite TV dishes are legal.
… foreign journalists aren’t on 10-day visas paying mandatory and extortionate fees to the Ministry of Information for “minders” and other government spies.
… there is no Ministry of Information.
… there are more than 170 newspapers.
… you can buy satellite dishes on what seems like every street corner.
… foreign journalists (and everyone else) are free to come and go.
… a nation that had not one single element – legislative, judicial or executive – of a representative government, now does.
… in Baghdad alone residents have selected 88 advisory councils. Baghdad’s first democratic transfer of power in 35 years happened when the city council elected its new chairman.
… today in Iraq chambers of commerce, business, school and professional organizations are electing their leaders all over the country.
… 25 ministers, selected by the most representative governing body in Iraq’s history, run the day-to-day business of government.
… the Iraqi government regularly participates in international events. Since July the Iraqi government has been represented in over two dozen international meetings, including those of the UN General Assembly, the Arab League, the World Bank and IMF and, today, the Islamic Conference Summit. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs today announced that it is reopening over 30 Iraqi embassies around the world.
… Shia religious festivals that were all but banned, aren’t.
… for the first time in 35 years, in Karbala thousands of Shiites celebrate the pilgrimage of the 12th Imam.
… the Coalition has completed over 13,000 reconstruction projects, large and small, as part of a strategic plan for the reconstruction of Iraq.
… Uday and Qusay are dead – and no longer feeding innocent Iraqis to the zoo lions, raping the young daughters of local leaders to force cooperation, torturing Iraq’s soccer players for losing games, or murdering critics.
… children aren’t imprisoned or murdered when their parents disagree with the government.
… political opponents aren’t imprisoned, tortured, executed, maimed, or are forced to watch their families die for disagreeing with Saddam.
… millions of longsuffering Iraqis no longer live in perpetual terror.
… Saudis will hold municipal elections.
… Qatar is reforming education to give more choices to parents.
… Jordan is accelerating market economic reforms.
… the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded for the first time to an Iranian — a Muslim woman who speaks out with courage for human rights, for democracy and for peace.
… Saddam is gone.
… Iraq is free.
… President Bush has not faltered or failed.
… Yet, little or none of this information has been published by the Press corps that prides itself on bringing you all the news that’s important.
Iraq under US lead control has come further in six months than Germany did in seven years or Japan did in nine years following WWII. Military deaths from fanatic Nazi’s, and Japanese numbered in the thousands and continued for over three years after WWII victory was declared.
It took the US over four months to clear away the twin tower debris, let alone attempt to build something else in its place.
Now, take into account that Congress fought President Bush on every aspect of his handling of this country’s war and the post-war reconstruction; and that they continue to claim on a daily basis on national TV that this conflict has been a failure.
Taking everything into consideration, even the unfortunate loss of our brothers and sisters in this conflict, do you think anyone else in the world could have accomplished as much as the United States and the Bush administration in so short a period of time?
These are things worth writing about. Get the word out. Write to someone you think may be able to influence our Congress or the press to tell the story.
Above all, be proud that you are a part of this historical precedent.
God Bless you all. Have a great Holiday.
Semper Fidelis
Right, because the media NEVER reported Uday and Qusay being killed,
or that schools were reopened (many never closed during the war, but cling to your illusions, I guess),
or that there is now an Iraqi security force (which our forces have a disturbing tendency to either arrest or accientally shoot),
or that water production was being restored (wow, up to 2/3rds! So when it was 115 degrees, I’m sure that other 1/3rd didn’t mind too much),
or that Iraqis are now buying cars that we’re importing (despite the fact that there aren’t anywhere near enough gas stations to accomodate the massive influx of cars, and how much is Halliburton paying per gallon to import gasoline again?).
Should I go through and list all of the attacks on our troops that failed to make the 6 o’clock news? Or all of the overruns that our contractors have experienced (remember a time when the military performed most of these essential services themselves)?
But then, those don’t matter, do they? I mean, after all, now a person in Iraq can get DirectTV and drive a Buick before getting killed by a roadside bomb, sniper, disease, unexploded ordinance or nervous and homesick soldier.
Considering that there have only been a few of those types of incidents in a heavily militarized country when there are over 60,000 Iraqi police running around, your argument is a slur. It’s another case of the Fallacy of Composition, in which you assume that a handful of isolated cases comprises the totality of the situation.
Except for the part where we’re not importing cars to Iraq. In fact, by far the most common vehicle in the Mid East are Toyotas imported from Kuwait by the al-Sayer Group. In fact, that entire argument is a non-sequitur which has no relation to the truth.
They’re contracted to provide gas for the Coalition, not Iraqi civilians. Furthermore, the reason why they paid what they did for gas is because they had to go with a specific supplier thanks to a series of Clinton-administration rules for contracting. Several news organizations have already investigated this charge and found that the problem wasn’t with Halliburton, it was with the contracting procedures they had to follow.
Considering the number of troops killed in Germany and Japan after World War II, Iraq hardly qualifies as a quagmire. The media rarely reports the attacks that failed or resulted in the capture of insurgents, nor do they report an accurate appraisal of the situation, as the article notes.
Furthermore, the military has never done this kind of reconstruction themselves. It has always been done by outside contractors. The military doesn’t have technicians who can rebuild a broken refinery. They’re job is more along the lines of blowing them up then putting them back together.
Also, there is a program that gives field commanders money to help do smaller reconstruction projects. This program has been a runaway success, not that you’d hear of it from the media.
DirecTV doesn’t do business in Iraq, another non-sequitur argument. Furtermore, most Iraqis aren’t under threat. The north and south of the country are exceptionally stable and secure. The main areas of the country with security problems are in the Sunni Triangle where the Ba’athists still have a presence. Again, you’re making an argument based on the fallacy of composition and skewed evidence. If you want to know what Iraq is really like, you can read what they’re saying themselves. You’ll find their view of Iraq is very different from the bias and fear-mongering of the media and the Nine Doomed To Die.
Or maybe your desperate attempt to find fault with my statement is causing you to be too damn literal. Do you think I particularly care if DirecTV or DishNetwork or Comcast is providing satellite service? I really don’t, but I mentioned DirecTV only as a reference to the two listings for “satellite dishes” in the email you posted. In any case, mentioning the brand name would be an ad homenim argument (if that was my point, which it wasn’t, but you do seem in an unnatural hurry to defend a Rupert Murdoch enterprise there…), and since it was directly tied to the primary document, it should not be considered a non sequitor.
And just how many troops WERE killed during the occupation of Germany and Japan, Jay? (Secondary question: did I SAY Iraq was a quagmire?)
I have yet to see a major news organization report that the reason Halliburton goes through Kuwait is a Clinton-era regulation. I’d appreciate it if you could cite that for me.
And I’d appreciate it if you’d hold off on the “Fallacy of Composition” thing when the document I’m criticizing is a list of items that you claim better represents the “totality of the situation.”
The insinuation is that somehow American companies are somehow profiting from satellite dishes in Iraq, and that insinuation has no basis in fact. In fact, in most of these cases no one is providing service, they’re simply taking the feed for whatever station they want directly from the satellite. Those feeds are usually al-Arabiya, al-Jazeera or some other Arab network that are either loosely encrypted or not encrypted at all. The satellite dishes used in Iraq are not like the kind of small dishes and services used in the US.
It’s hard to tell as there weren’t definitive nummbers kept. However, the occupation of those countries lasted for years and did not have the problems of outside forces sneaking in as Iraq did. Furthermore, as the post notes, we’ve made considerably more progress in Iraq in a short time than we did in either Germany or Japan in the same amount of time.
Actually, it was both that and the desire to do a political favor for Kuwait that forced them to buy the more expensive gas.
There’s also a few pragmatic reasons for the cost. Iraq may have millions of barrels of oil, but oil is not gas. Almost none of it was usable at the time. Importing cheaper gas from Turkey would be more difficult as the Iraq/Turkey border is almost entirely mountainous and hazardous to cross. Kuwait would have been the logical choice in any event.
“The insinuation is that somehow American companies are somehow profiting from satellite dishes in Iraq, and that insinuation has no basis in fact.”
No, seriously, the only insinuation I’m aiming for is that the guy who wrote the letter you posted puts an abnormally high value on the presence of satellite dishes. Look:
“From bicycles to satellite dishes to cars and trucks, businesses are coming to life in all major cities and towns.”
AND
“satellite TV dishes are legal.”
AND
“you can buy satellite dishes on what seems like every street corner.”
But onto more substantitive issues. Like the number of Allied troops killed in postwar Germany and Japan, which the letter claims to be in the “thousands.”
Please tell me you didn’t believe that, did you? Ah well….
This one comes from Slate:
“The Army history records that while there were the occasional anti-occupation leaflets and graffiti, the GIs had reason to feel safe. When an officer in Hesse was asked to investigate rumors that troops were being attacked and castrated, he reported back that there had not been a single attack against an American soldier in four months of occupation. As the distinguished German historian Golo Mann summed it up in The History of Germany Since 1789, ‘The [Germans’] readiness to work with the victors, to carry out their orders, to accept their advice and their help was genuine; of the resistance which the Allies had expected in the way of ‘werewolf’ units and nocturnal guerrilla activities, there was no sign. …'”
http://slate.msn.com/id/2087768/ if you want to read the whole thing. The fact is that following the surrender of Japan and Germany, the total number of combat deaths for US forces was…ZERO by most standards, BUT, granting a conspiracy theorist his moment in the sun, it should be pointed out that a 1953 Pentagon document said there were 45 deaths because of “enemy action” (a different distinction than “combat deaths”) between the surrender of Germany in May of ’45 and the end of 1946. The idea that there were “thousands” of soldiers killed following the conflicts is laughable. The only possible way this statement could be considered even remotely accurate is if you consider the time when the war was still going on after Allies had entered Germany as part of the “occupation.” It isn’t an occupation if the war hasn’t ended, and even if it was that would negate the value of the comparison between the two conflicts.