This post will be the second in a row concerning issues of the Iraq War. I am not meaning to be a war blogger, but I have found that much of my thinking has be molded by my time in the Middle East. I assure ya'll that I will try to not post another war post the next time. RGB

BRIAN’S E-MAIL

I have a colleague who was with me in Iraq. He was SSgt Brian M. (I’ll keep his last name a secret for his privacy). He’s from a little town in South Carolina. An excellent NCO, a good father and husband, I enjoy working with him, as do nearly all his other colleagues.

He went home on his R&R (Rest and Relaxation) leave from Operation Iraqi Freedom III just before the school year was out. While at home he went to his daughter’s school to have lunch with her. She insisted he wear his uniform, so he did. Fathers do that kind of stuff, you know. He was, for all intents and purposes, mobbed by all his daughter’s classmates who wanted to meet a “real” soldier. He was then invited to give a talk to the class about his time in Iraq. This then led to a talk to his son’s class, too.

When he arrived back in Iraq he received an e-mail from a classmate of his daughter. It lamented the lack of coverage given to the good works we Americans, and people and soldiers from dozens of other nations are doing over in that country, and how the horrors of the Saddam Hussein regime are being downplayed, glossed over, or just ignored by the American media in its (still ongoing) feeding frenzy to destroy the military and the Bush administration. Of course, her words weren’t as condensed as mine, but it was nonetheless the gist of her e-mail.

Those are huge concepts for a little girl just short of middle school, but even she noticed the manner that the news is being delivered. That is an amazing thing. More amazing to me was that when Brian showed me this e-mail about a week after he received it I had already read it.

“Brian, she sent this to you?”

“Yeah, Rupe, why?”

“Man, I got a forwarded copy of this exact same e-mail from a friend of mine two days ago!”

Yes, the world is a wired one and my copy of this e-mail was word-for-word the same as the one he received, except that the names were removed! I am told that this young student also forwarded this message to CNN. I’ll never know if it was ever read in Atlanta.

So, why is this important? For me, it is that you, John & Jane Q. Public, are not being told the whole truth. Like Sarumen in J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings who could not alter the scenes in the magic crystal by the regent in Gondor, he could control what images were seen. Selective editing made the leader of Middle Earth’s Gondor believe they were doomed. Likewise, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, NPR, et al, don’t lie, they just simply control the truth you see and hear and can make it all seem to be rosy or catastrophic.

Case in point – I was out of South Carolina when Hurricane Hugo roared through in the Fall of 1989. I got back in early December, less than three months later, timidly wondering how badly my hometown would look. All I had seen were the pictures in the papers and on TV. I couldn’t have been blamed had I thought that Hugo wiped out the whole state and killed every living being here. What surprised me was not so much what was damaged and destroyed, but rather what was not.

The same applies in Iraq. Most of the damage inflicted upon Iraq was mostly done by the Hussein regime well before the invasion. Instead of maintaining roads, oil production, railways, and water and sewer systems, the Ba’athist regime ratcheted up the terror, denied certain areas and industries funds derived from the incredibly corrupt UN Oil-For-Food Program, and took the money to rebuild the army and build numerous incredible palaces and facilities for the military and the government.

The Coalition Forces in Iraq today are fighting the remnants of a mostly-foreign-led insurgency, an ingrained culture of corruption and deceit, and cultural and religious distrust that was cultivated in order to keep Saddam Hussein in power. Throw in a decade-and-a-half of willful neglect for the people and institutions, and you see just what we are up against. And yet, by mid-June 2005, the Coalition announced the completion of the first 1000 infrastructure projects to be performed there. The particular project that was counted as #1000 was a small eight-room school house in a small village that replaced a mud-and-thatch single-room hut that was being used to teach the local children. I feel certain that most of you heard nothing of that milestone, nor most of the other that have followed. Imagine what we’ve done in the past three years since!

That is but one of the myriad projects completed to date. Others include the upgrading of the Baghdad water and sewage systems, the rebuilding and upgrading of numerous electrical plants and lines, the nearly total rebuilding of the Iraqi rail system, the building of soccer fields in neighborhoods, not to mention the numerous efforts to take shoes and clothes, books and school supplies, and medical aid to outlying areas and villages.

And that is why I feel compelled to write this column. You need to know that what you may be seeing is filtered through human eyes and hands. ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ is as true today as it was when the term was coined. Moving pictures are even more so. When you see those pictures and hear the words that come to you every day through the television, over the radio, and on the computer, you might ask “is this the whole story.” I can tell you that nearly every time, it isn’t.

The little girl in that classroom in northern South Carolina was “dead-on bullseye” with what she wrote. I see that every day the insurgency becomes more desperate, while becoming more organized. At the same time, I see an Iraqi army building from the ashes of a force of a police state that was used to subjugate, torture and murder tens of thousands of Iraqis, and to wage unjust and inept wars on Iran and Kuwait. It is a slow process, but it is happening. Don’t be fooled.

Iraq, as one of my superiors so aptly stated, “is doable.” He served in Vietnam and served as the First Sergeant of a sister unit that served in Iraq. The only stipulation: The nation must have the political and moral will to finish the job. Despite what you see and hear in the media, all is not all gloom and doom in Iraq. The terrorists and insurgents are being pushed to the limit, the people are willing and able to rebuild Iraq, and we can help them to do it.

Hopefully, the media will listen to a little girl and you’ll begin to hear the whole truth of the struggle in Iraq.

I won’t hold my breath waiting for it, though.

IF YOU DON’T FIGHT YOU LOSE

I originally penned this during the time I was in Iraq (2004-2005 for Operation Iraqi Freedom III), but it is still a valid piece. So I present it here now.

I’ve been reading in the papers both in Iraq and here at home a lot of things about the Iraq war. The one thing that jumps out is the effort to set a hard timetable for withdrawal, or even to simply get out now. Surprisingly, especially when it comes to the politicos taking up this mantle, these people should know better.

Now, I understand that Americans hate war. I hate war. I, my brother and father, my grandfather and his grandfather have all been to war. We all hated war. It is an ugly, nasty, terrible thing. I didn’t want to go and I don’t want to go to another. But, if I am told to do so I will. I do know one thing that is certain in this world – If you don’t fight you lose. And if you lose, the people who beat you TELL you how to live. No, they FORCE you. This really is a bad thing. Just ask the Czechs, Slovakians, Poles, Jews, Gypsies, Dutch, Belgians, French, Danes, Norwegians, Yugoslavians, Albanians, Greeks, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Ukrainians, and Russians who fell to the might of the Nazi juggernaut in World War II. If it weren’t for an overzealous Japan forcing the American sleeping giant into the war, all of Europe and Asia could quite well be under Fascist control today. It took a destructive sneak attack at Pearl Harbor to bring America to reality.

Then ask the Czechs, Slovakians, Poles, Yugoslavians, Albanians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and Ukrainians (again) who felt the weight of Soviet oppression. It took the fear of nuclear attack, a slow economic war, and some hot wars – the Greek Civil War, Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Nicaragua, El Salvador and others - to finally destroy the Evil Empire. It will take at least another generation for Russia, the other former Soviet republics, and Eastern Europe to overcome the social, economic and political stagnation and destruction wrought upon them.
I can also tell you that the Ba’athist regime of Saddam Hussein was as much a Fascist regime as any that was bred in Europe. It is said by some that Hussein admired both Hitler and the late Soviet leader Josef Stalin. Like Hitler and Stalin, Hussein attacked his neighbors, murdered ethnic and religious opponents, and systematically murdered thousands of citizens of his own country – even going so far as to gas Kurds much as Hitler gassed Jews.

America’s greatest military and foreign policy problems stem directly from the legacy of the war in Vietnam. A military success for much of the sixties, and a political disaster for much of the war, Vietnam established the American reputation to the world as the greatest world power ever known, and that we, incidentally, will cut and run.

We have a unique opportunity in Iraq. We can place power in the hands of the Iraqi people, and with that show the rest of the Middle East’s people that they can have a say in what happens in their nations. That’s a radical concept everywhere there, except in Israel and perhaps Lebanon. The stabilizing effect of the democratization of Iraq on the region could have long-lasting implications in an area of the planet second only to Africa in the corruption and mismanagement of their governments.

Or, we Americans can do what we have done for the past thirty-five years. Pack up and go home with our metaphorical tails between our legs, leaving the death of every American who has died in Lebanon, Somalia and Haiti, and now here in Iraq, in vain. Nothing, in the eyes of this soldier, is more cruel, destructive, and unjust than sacrificing our troops to a cause that we are unwilling to complete. Today Lebanon is struggling to reestablish a national identity after a long and destructive civil war and Somalia is a basket case. We left before the mission was complete. It is the same in Haiti where we did even worse by turning over the nation and its people to the most corrupt international entity on earth – the United Nations. Haiti is quite arguably worse off today than it was when we ousted the military junta that had overthrown President Jean Bertrand Aristide.

As a soldier, I must ask the nation, “Are you willing to throw away the sacrifices and efforts of brave, dedicated troops who have given their lives for the cause of justice?” Every war that the United States has fought and won in the last seven-plus decades has ended with the stabilization of the country, the rebuilding of its government along democratic lines, and the rebuilding of the nation and its infrastructure. This model has led to the most peaceful periods that Europe and the Far East have ever experienced. This can’t be coincidental and it’s not.

The United States has established a standard for the world from which we cannot back down. The people of the world expect America to rebuild Iraq and leave it better than we found it. Why? Because it is what America does and has done for around a century. We are a stronger and better nation, and so too the world, for our post-war efforts in Japan, Europe, Korea, and even El Salvador and Bosnia. Peace and democracy are flourishing there. Those nations where we allowed our troops to die vainly, failing to follow through - Somalia, Haiti and Lebanon - continue to struggle politically, socially and economically. We and the world continue to spend time, effort and money to fix the problems we sent our men and women to fix too long ago. These problems would very probably have been dealt with had the USA the wherewithal to finish the job we started.

So, again, are we willing to allow the deaths of American troops to be in vain, or will we finish the job that we’ve set out to do? The cause there is just. The Iraqi people are as deserving as any in the world. By what moral compass should we leave this nation to terrorists, thugs and murderers?

America, don’t allow my brothers and sisters - soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen and coast guardsmen all - to die in vain. We must finish this task. It is morally, politically, financially and militarily right. And we must prove to these terrorists – and the rest of the world – that we can STILL finish a fight. They won’t believe it unless we do.

AMERICA’S GREATEST EXPORT

I realize that many in America, filmmaker Michael Moore, actress Jane Fonda and politician Dennis Kucinich among them, believe that America is the root of all evil in the world.

Now, those three people above will explain that America is raping the world by using over a quarter of the world's energy and that we are just energy gluttons. They will also argue that our greed is the reason for so much death, destruction and war in the world.

But, by analyzing those very same statistics that they cite, it actually shows that America produces more than we use! Only about two dozen of the 200-or-so nations on this planet can say that. But I can think of no nation on this earth that has done more for peace and justice in the world today than the United States of America. America, with just four-and-half percent (about 300,000,000) of the World's population of around 6,650,000,000, produces over one-fourth of the World's wealth! And we do it with less than a quarter of the world's resource! Most take more than they give back to this earth. That is what productivity is truly about and we lead the world in it! To paraphrase a famous quote - No other nation on earth produces so much for so many with so little!

And on top of that, we have given back nearly every piece of territory we have ever conquered. No empire in the history of the planet has ever allowed a conquered people the luxury of actually peacefully gaining back their nation, or as often as we. We have beaten or conquered nations as diverse as those of North Africa (the Barbary Wars and World War II), Cuba and (twice) the Philippines (the Spanish-American War and World War II), most of Central America (the Banana Wars and the invasion of Panama), Belgium, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, nearly all of the Pacific, and Japan and Papua New Guinea (World War II), Korea (the Korean War), Grenada (Grenada Invasion), Kuwait (Operation Desert Storm), Bosnia (the Implementation and Stabilization Forces), and most recently Afghanistan and Iraq. You will note, however, that even with all that territory conquered, we do NOT have eighty-eight or more states. There are still only fifty despite the fact that we have actually, physically, militarily conquered at least thirty-eight other nations.

You may also notice that of those thirty-eight nations, all but two are free and open democracies. Those other two are works-in-progress. Interesting how that works.

My point? Despite what certain people will say, and despite the fact that America's media will not only listen to them on their soap box, they GIVE them the soap box, the United States of American have to date proven to be the single most prolific purveyor of freedom and justice throughout the history of the world. Our conquests in the world do not lead to empire, they lead to freedom. This DESPITE the fact that we are supposedly the world's greediest nation, and we are certainly the world's most powerful! We could easily destroy and conquer most nations on this earth, some with but a single nuclear weapon. And if this was the Middle Ages we probably would. But, we don't. THAT is an amazing record, especially when held up to the prism of World history. Can I be the only the only one who sees the obvious historical inconsistency here?

What this nation exports to the world is not only over one-quarter of the earth's wealth, but also the vast majority of freedom, democracy and justice. Americans are not conquerors, and we don't want what we haven't earned. If we have twenty-six percent of the world's wealth and use twenty-four percent of the world's energy, and have conquered huge chunks of the earth only to give it back to the true owners, then we deserve all we have. No one gave it to us. We have earned it.

And that is the way it should be.