Posted on 04/11/2004 1:43:40 PM PDT by knak
Since the American media is having a hard time reporting on the good news that is coming from Iraq, I think I will be nice enough to report on what they are not sharing. Here is the good news that you probably have not been hearing:
--------------- Email Message Below ---------------
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 d uty (~60,000 Iraqis providing security to citizens).
- Nearly all of Iraq's 400 courts are functioning.
- The Iraqi judiciary is fully independent.
- Power generation hit 4,518 megawatts (Oct), exceeding prewar output.
- All 22 Universities & 43 technical institutes/colleges are open.
- Nearly all primary and secondary schools are open. - Coalition has "rehabbed" 1,500+ schools (500 ahead of schedule).
- Teachers earn from 12-25 times their former salaries.
- All 240 hospitals and more than 1200 clinics are open.
- Doctors salaries are at least 8 times what they were under Saddam.
- Pharmaceutical distribution has gone from almost zero to 12,000 tons.
- Coalition has helped administer 22 million+ vaccinations to children.
- Coalition has cleared 14,000+km of Iraq's 27,000km of weed-choked canals which now irrigate tens of thousands of farms. This project has created 100, 000+ jobs for Iraqi men & women.
- Coalition has restored over 3/4 of prewar telephone services and 2/3+ of p otable water production.
- 4,900+ full-service telephone connections (~50,000 by year-end).
- Commerce is expanding rapidly (bicycles, satellite dishes, cars, trucks, e tc) in all major cities and towns.
- 95% 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 world's most growth-oriented investment and banking la ws.
- Iraq has a single, unified currency for the first time in 15 years.
- Satellite TV dishes are legal.
- Foreign journalists are not on "10-day visas" paying mandatory fees to the Ministry of Information for minders. There is no such Ministry.
- There are 170+ newspapers.
- Foreign journalists (and everyone else) are free to come and go.
- A nation that had not one single element legislative, judicial o r executive of a representative government, now does.
- In Baghdad alone, residents have selected 88 advisory councils.
- Baghdad's democratic transfer of power (1st in 35 years); city council ele cted its new chairman.
- Iraqi Chambers of commerce, businesses, schools and professional organizat ions 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 gov't regularly participates in international events.
- Since July the Iraqi gov't has been represented in 24+ international meeti ngs, including UN General Assembly, the Arab League, the World Bank, IMF and the Islamic Conference Summit.
- The Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that it is reopening 30+ Iraqi e mbassies worldwide.
- Shia religious festivals (all but banned) are no longer illegal.
- For the first time in 35 years, in Karbala, thousands of Shiites celebrate the pilgrimage of the 12th Imam.
- The Coalition has completed 13,000+ reconstruction projects, large and sma ll, as part of a strategic plan for the reconstruction of Iraq.
- Uday and Queasy are dead, and no longer feeding 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 th e government.
- Political opponents aren't imprisoned, tortured, executed, maimed, or forc ed to watch their families die for disagreeing with Saddam.
- Millions of long-suffering Iraqis no longer live in perpetual terror.
- As a side effect, in neighboring countries,
(1) Saudis will hold municipal elections,
(2) Qatar is reforming education to give more choices to parents,
(3) Jordan is accelerating market economic reforms,
(4) The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded (first time) to an Iranian (Muslim wom an) who speaks out for human rights/democracy & peace.
- Saddam is gone.
- Iraq is free.
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 a nd 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 many people in our government and media continue to claim on a daily basis on national TV that this conflict has been a failure.
Taking everything into co nsideration, even the unfortunate loss of our sons and daughters in this conflict, do you think any other country in the world could have accomplished as much as the United States and its coalition partners have in so short a period of time?
Karl Nielson LT, CHC, USNR 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) Chaplain
Handwritten letter dated Feb. 19, 1998 linking bin Laden and Saddam Hussein
discussing arrival of a secret envoy sent by bin Laden to Iraq.
The signature beneath the letter is a codename, "MDA" - the Mukhabarat.
========= Chemical Warhead found in Kirkuk =============
Chemical warhead found at an Iraqi air base, marked with a green band,
the symbol for chemical weaponry. Trace amounts of a nerve agent were found
at two spots along the ~meter-long warhead. These amounts are consistent with
leakage from the chemically armed weapon. A 13-foot missile was found next to it.
========= Halabja =========
Dead children, previously playing in Halabja
Victims of Saddams' WMD in March 1988.
=========== French missiles FIRST given to Iraq to be USED Against US and Coalition Heroes =========
French missiles found by the Poles, and to protect France, blown up.
Froggies said they did not say "2003". LOL. Decide for yourself.
Iraqi missiles given to, and now located in, Syria:
========= RUSSIAN MISSILES AND DIRTY BOMBS FOUND IN IRAQ =========
Russian-made R-60, NATO AA-8 Aphid, air-to-air missiles were found..
The Russian-made missiles are >6 feet long. Each carries 3.5 pounds of uranium.
wrapped around a high explosive warhead (13.2-pound) making a "dirty bomb".
Also found in Iraq:
* A clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service
that contained equipment subject to UN monitoring and suitable for continuing CBW research.
* A prison laboratory complex, possibly used in human testing of BW agents, that Iraqi officials
working to prepare for UN inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the UN.
* Reference strains of biological organisms concealed in a scientist's home,
one of which can be used to produce biological weapons.
* New research on BW-applicable agents, Brucella and Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF),
and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin were not declared to the UN.
* Documents and equipment, hidden in scientists' homes, that would have been useful in
resuming uranium enrichment by centrifuge and electromagnetic isotope separation (EMIS).
* A line of UAVs not fully declared at an undeclared production facility and an admission
that they had tested one of their declared UAVs out to a range of 500 km, 350 km beyond the permissible limit.
* Continuing covert capability to manufacture fuel propellant useful only for prohibited SCUD variant missiles,
a capability that was maintained at least until the end of 2001 and that cooperating Iraqi scientists
have said they were told to conceal from the UN.
* Plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1000 km -
well beyond the 150 km range limit imposed by the UN. Missiles of a 1000 km range would have allowed
Iraq to threaten targets through out the Middle East, including Ankara, Cairo, and Abu Dhabi.
* Clandestine attempts between late-1999 and 2002 to obtain from North Korea technology
related to 1,300 km range ballistic missiles --probably the No Dong -- 300 km range anti-ship cruise missiles,
and other prohibited military equipment.
Still missing based on the UNSCOM report to the UN Security Council in January 1999,
when the UN inspectors left Iraq in 1998, they had been unable to account for:
up to 360 tons of bulk chemical warfare agents, including 1.5 tons of VX nerve agent;
up to 3,000 tons of precursor chemicals, including approximately 300 tons which,
in the Iraqi chemical warfare program, were unique to the production of VX;
growth media procured for biological agent production (enough to produce
over three times the 8,500 litres of anthrax spores Iraq admitted to UN inspectors to having manufactured);
over 30,000 special munitions for delivery of chemical and biological agents;
20 al-Hussein missles with a range of 650 km, in violation
of UN Security Council Resolution 687 (Iraq had told UNSCOM that it filled these warheads with anthrax and botulinum);
2,850 tons of mustard gas, 210 tons of tabun, and 795 tons of sarin and cyclosarin;
development of the Al-Samoud short-range missle (which had the capability to fly beyond the 150 km allowed by UN resolutions)
Iraqis captured
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