Frustration

[From Katrina, working with a company doing oversight work for US infrastructure contractors and the Iraqi interim government in Iraq and Turkey.]

9/23/04

Months ago, when I first realized just how much was not being covered in the media about Iraq, when I realized how impossible it was becoming for anything positive to come out of Iraq and be shared with the world, when the Democratic party continued to Monday morning quarterback this effort, I knew this would happen. We now have people in the US who have stretched all the way to the point of actually proposing a total breakdown of society in Iraq and letting lose a civil war upon the country.

Well, prepare yourselves to be disappointed. We have a very hard fight ahead of us, but no matter which candidate is elected, cutting and running is not an option for the future of either Iraq or the US.

I can think of no foreign policy that would be more foolish or damaging to both countries than to do so. While I believe Kerry to be somewhat spineless, certainly without any compass, and completely unsuitable to hold the highest office in the US government, I believe that even he is not moronic enough to actually pursue such a policy if he were to gain that office.

All your media has supplied to you is the absolute negative. Every single problem in Iraq has been presented, expounded, and when possible, amplified for absolute maximum effect. It has put joy in the hearts of those who would love civil war, or a return to dictatorship, or the establishment of religious domination. And it has put fear into the hearts of average Iraqis, outside contractors and aid workers, coalition soldiers and the Iraqi interim government and their security forces.

Many times I have seen anti-war people in the U.S. going on and on about the bias of media from the time of the Civil War to the present. Yet on the subject of Iraq, they consistently have chosen to believe the mass media at every turn without any consideration of what are obviously huge chunks of ANY society that go missing from the daily reports they produce.

You will not find anything positive on the work of those Iraqi police and security forces already in place, though there are indeed several thousand of them working each day and making huge positive impacts though out the country. There is no news of the expansion of water and power services everywhere, or the training of government workers, or the formation of city and provincial government structures which have been constructed at an alarming rate of speed.

You'll get ten reports of bombs exploding at police and army recruiting centers, but you won't get a second of reporting on the hopefuls who line right back up again just as soon as the cleanup is done. I never seem to see Americans question that.

You'll read every day about Fallujah or Sadr City, but you won't see anything about Iraqi security and residents who have teamed together to boot out extremists from their communities and set up their own government structures with the help of the coalition and government forces.

Iraq is a pretty big country, much larger than just Sadr City or Fallujah, or any thousand protesters in Basra. And there are villages and cities all over Iraq that have managed to do this. But presenting these places is something the media never does, and something I never see most Americans at home question. In the media and in the anti-war talk, the whole land is Fallujah, every corner a car bombing, every patrol a dead soldier, and every Iraqi citizen a terrorist.

On the other hand, those of us working in Iraq completely understand. Because it has been done with such consistency here that we fully expect nothing else. We don't expect to find media coming to us to discuss what we're doing or accomplishing, because they simply aren't interested in telling the world what is positive about our work or Iraq. It simply isn't done, period.

Are there problems in Iraq? Undoubtedly there are. Certainly more problems than I could quickly list, and they are altering daily, because the situation is fluid, and those who oppose what the coalition is doing have the ability to think and revise their methods for hurting our efforts.

But the media has been consistent. It has been able to find every negative occurrence, find every person who has experienced difficulty or can see problems, and no matter what these people say about the positives here, they seldom can read about or hear of them later in the US media.

And yet we are still there. We cannot get a moment's attention unless we are kidnapped, beheaded, shot, or blown up. Two Italian women about my age, working on projects affiliated with those we supply with oversight, are taken from their offices, similar to the one I was working from until just days ago. If this hadn't happened, they would have never found even a moment in the media, and even after this tragedy, their work goes neglected. Their impact of their lives in Iraq has been profound, but that's not what you'll read or hear of.

Here, that gets pretty frustrating, because we know what this kind of exposure breeds back in our homelands, and amongst many Iraqis.

I certainly understand frustrations in the US. It is frustrating enough in Iraq, and sometimes dangerous as well. But I also understand what is helping drive that frustration at home, and how the situation in Iraq has been politicized and cheapened.

Now we are all the way up to the point of Americans actually looking forward to packing up and running, and civil war. God, Goddess, Allah or the Great Blank in The Nothing, help all of you back there.