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.
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.
