Here are a couple of images from Iraq that you are not likely to find on the television news.
I have dozens of pictures like this that the lying media won't have on "their" programs.
Posted on 03/13/2006 9:35:40 PM PST by smoothsailing
March 14, 2006
Myths of Iraq
By Ralph Peters
During a recent visit to Baghdad, I saw an enormous failure. On the part of our media. The reality in the streets, day after day, bore little resemblance to the sensational claims of civil war and disaster in the headlines.
No one with first-hand experience of Iraq would claim the country's in rosy condition, but the situation on the ground is considerably more promising than the American public has been led to believe. Lurid exaggerations and instant myths obscure real, if difficult, progress.
I left Baghdad more optimistic than I was before this visit. While cynicism, political bias and the pressure of a 24/7 news cycle accelerate a race to the bottom in reporting, there are good reasons to be soberly hopeful about Iraq's future.
Much could still go wrong. The Arab genius for failure could still spoil everything. We've made grave mistakes.
Still, it's difficult to understand how any first-hand observer could declare that Iraq's been irrevocably "lost."
Consider just a few of the inaccuracies served up by the media:
Claims of civil war.
In the wake of the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, a flurry of sectarian attacks inspired wild media claims of a collapse into civil war. It didn't happen. Driving and walking the streets of Baghdad, I found children playing and, in most neighborhoods, business as usual. Iraq can be deadly, but, more often, it's just dreary.
Iraqi disunity.
Factional differences are real, but overblown in the reporting. Few Iraqis support calls for religious violence. After the Samarra bombing, only rogue militias and criminals responded to the demagogues' calls for vengeance. Iraqis refused to play along, staging an unrecognized triumph of passive resistance.
Expanding terrorism.
On the contrary, foreign terrorists, such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, have lost ground. They've alienated Iraqis of every stripe. Iraqis regard the foreigners as murderers, wreckers and blasphemers, and they want them gone. The Samarra attack may, indeed, have been a tipping point--against the terrorists.
Hatred of the U.S. military.
If anything surprised me in the streets of Baghdad, it was the surge in the popularity of U.S. troops among both Shias and Sunnis. In one slum, amid friendly adult waves, children and teenagers cheered a U.S. Army patrol as we passed. Instead of being viewed as occupiers, we're increasingly seen as impartial and well-intentioned.
The appeal of the religious militias.
They're viewed as mafias. Iraqis want them disarmed and disbanded. Just ask the average citizen.
The failure of the Iraqi army.
Instead, the past month saw a major milestone in the maturation of Iraq's military. During the mini-crisis that followed the Samarra bombing, the Iraqi army put over 100,000 soldiers into the country's streets. They defused budding confrontations and calmed the situation without killing a single civilian. And Iraqis were proud to have their own army protecting them. The Iraqi army's morale soared as a result of its success.
Reconstruction efforts have failed.
Just not true. The American goal was never to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure in its entirety. Iraqis have to do that. Meanwhile, slum-dwellers utterly neglected by Saddam Hussein's regime are getting running water and sewage systems for the first time. The Baathist regime left the country in a desolate state while Saddam built palaces. The squalor has to be seen to be believed. But the hopeless now have hope.
The electricity system is worse than before the war.
Untrue again. The condition of the electric grid under the old regime was appalling. Yet, despite insurgent attacks, the newly revamped system produced 5,300 megawatts last summer--a full thousand megawatts more than the peak under Saddam Hussein. Shortages continue because demand soared--newly free Iraqis went on a buying spree, filling their homes with air conditioners, appliances and the new national symbol, the satellite dish. Nonetheless, satellite photos taken during the hours of darkness show Baghdad as bright as Damascus.
Plenty of serious problems remain in Iraq, from bloodthirsty terrorism to the unreliability of the police. Iran and Syria indulge in deadly mischief. The infrastructure lags generations behind the country's needs. Corruption is widespread. Tribal culture is pernicious. Women’s rights are threatened. And there's no shortage of trouble-making demagogues.
Nonetheless, the real story of the civil-war-that-wasn't is one of the dog that didn't bark. Iraqis resisted the summons to retributive violence. Mundane life prevailed. After a day and a half of squabbling, the political factions returned to the negotiating table. Iraqis increasingly take responsibility for their own security, easing the burden on U.S. forces. And the people of Iraq want peace, not a reign of terror.
But the foreign media have become a destructive factor, extrapolating daily crises from minor incidents. Part of this is ignorance. Some of it is willful. None of it is helpful.
The dangerous nature of journalism in Iraq has created a new phenomenon, the all-powerful local stringer.
Unwilling to stray too far from secure facilities and their bodyguards, reporters rely heavily on Iraqi assistance in gathering news. And Iraqi stringers, some of whom have their own political agendas, long ago figured out that Americans prefer bad news to good news.
The Iraqi leg-men earn blood money for unbalanced, often-hysterical claims, while the Journalism 101 rule of seeking confirmation from a second source has been discarded in the pathetic race for headlines.
To enhance their own indispensability, Iraqi stringers exaggerate the danger to Western journalists (which is real enough, but need not paralyze a determined reporter). Dependence on the unverified reports of local hires has become the dirty secret of semi-celebrity journalism in Iraq as Western journalists succumb to a version of Stockholm Syndrome in which they convince themselves that their Iraqi sources and stringers are exceptions to every failing and foible in the Middle East. The mindset resembles the old colonialist conviction that, while other "boys" might lie and steal, our house-boy's a faithful servant.
The result is that we're being told what Iraqi stringers know they can sell and what distant editors crave, not what's actually happening.
While there are and have been any number of courageous, ethical journalists reporting from Iraq, others know little more of the reality of the streets than you do. They report what they are told by others, not what they have seen themselves. The result is a distorted, unfair and disheartening picture of a country struggling to rise above its miserable history.
......................
Ralph Peters is a retired U.S. Army officer and the author of 20 books, including the recent New Glory: Expanding America's Global Supremacy.
© 2000-2006 RealClearPolitics.com All Rights Reserved
My, My, that did sound very officious. :-)
Am I to assume that that's the only thing you would like to see the MSM pick up?
Awwww, how cute! Your snappy rejoinders always seem to include everything BUT an actual response to others' comments.
[Pats li'l smoothsailing on the head paternally]
One day you'll grow up and then you may try to get off the porch again. Until then, you should probably confine your posts to "!@#$!@#$ the Clintons!" and "BUMP!"
I choose not to bathe in the glow of your self-assumed superiority.You'll have to enjoy the view alone from that high horse of yours.
I may well have been eager to correct, and it's obvious that the recipient was unwilling to listen to it. But I have remained silent and continued to bear mute witness to illogic and insult passing for debate long enough.
If you find that correction of your childish attempts at logic is exhibiting 'superiority,' at some level you're simply subsuming your acceptance of the correction and chafing at being called on it. Knowing you're going to recognize your error next time and refrain from it, even if you can't accept it now or state so publicly here, is all I need to read. I'll simply let your silly insults slide off. They're just the defensive statements of someone caught in improper behavior and trying to distract.
Whatever, have a nice day.
Here are a couple of images from Iraq that you are not likely to find on the television news.
I have dozens of pictures like this that the lying media won't have on "their" programs.
Those are wonderful, and quite heartwarming.
To know that those kids have a decent chance at a rewarding future must really help boost the morale of our guys.
The electricity system is worse than before the war.
Untrue again. The condition of the electric grid under the old regime was appalling. Yet, despite insurgent attacks, the newly revamped system produced 5,300 megawatts last summer--a full thousand megawatts more than the peak under Saddam Hussein. Shortages continue because demand soared--newly free Iraqis went on a buying spree, filling their homes with air conditioners, appliances and the new national symbol, the satellite dish. Nonetheless, satellite photos taken during the hours of darkness show Baghdad as bright as Damascus.
@@@@
Ping
The ping at #50 was meant for you.
The alternative to a small cheap light force that will probably be optimized for "small" wars against second or third rate opponents is pretty obviously a larger better armored, more capable, and thus more expensive force. We had such a force the last time we went against Iraq, thanks to Ronald Reagan's build up.
President G.H.W Bush had a plan to downsize the military to account for the fall of the Soviet Union. Clinton implemented that plan, and about 2X more in reductions. Surely we don't need to cut any more, although we have since Clinton strutted off to Chapaqua, and we are planning to cut even more. We are grounding more than a third of the B-52 fleet, even though it was programmed to keep flying through 2040, we'd already slashed the B-1 fleet by about the same. We're going to reduce the number of aircraft carriers by one, IIRC. We've cut and stretched all kinds of R&D projects, so we are eating our seed corn too. We can't handle a pipsqueak country like Iraq without calling up the National Guard and Reserve. I think we've cut enough, but we are talking of cutting those reserve forces even as we use them.
Maintaining the mixed, heavy and light, force that we, IMHO, need won't come cheap. Heck we might have to devote the same fraction of the GDP to defense that we did at the low point of the Carter years. (4.7% in '78 and '79), now we are spending less than 4.0% of the GDP on the military. Where would the money come from? Well at that same time we were spending 9.9% of GDP on entitlements, in FY 2004 it was 11.6%, and has likely gone up since then. At the peak of the Reagan buildup we were spending 6.2% of GDP on defense and 10.5% on entitlements. In 1962, before the Cuban missile crises and the Vietnam war, IOW, a time of relative peace, we where spending 9.3% on the military and 6.1% on entitlements.
There's nothing in the Constitution on entitlements, there is something in there about Congress having the power to raise Armies, and a Navy. There is a requirement that the federal government protect the states from attack. I'd say we, and that includes President "W" Bush, have our priorities out of whack.
"Well at that same time we were spending 9.9% of GDP on entitlements, in FY 2004 it was 11.6%, and has likely gone up since then."
Yep, since Johnson nobody needs to sacrifice for a war--it's now guns AND butter. God forbid people work to buy their own $#@!$#@!$ butter.
5.56mm
If the MSM picked up that whole story, complete with the unbelievable human toll DU has had on our soldiers (& their families) plus the environmental damage it's done to Iraq and publicized it to the degree that they've done with other "alleged" news stories some of these other issues would pale in comparison.
Ah, war is easy in a book...
Clearly you haven't looked at the numbers. The guns get whatever is left over after we've doled out the butter, and the pork.
"Clearly you haven't looked at the numbers. The guns get whatever is left over after we've doled out the butter, and the pork."
Agreed 100%. I stand corrected.
The military force you describe, is pretty much what existed during my service time starting back in the 60's.I certainly agree with your assessment of "eating our seed corn" and streching the guard and reserve.
Since 9-11 I've wondered what it will have to take for our government and our citizens to realize that entitlements are an unsustainable luxury that weakens us, and that the time has come to put far more resources in to the larger force you speak of.
As I mentioned further up the thread, given what he has to work with, Rumsfeld has done well,IMO.
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