California Conservative

Ralph Peters has another installment on the mythology created by the Agenda Media. Here’s some of his observations:

One of the most persistent myths about Iraq is that our efforts to improve the electrical system failed. That’s just plain wrong. The country’s in far better shape than it was under Saddam. But freedom always has a cost: In this case, the demand for power soared after Saddam fell, and crashed the grid. It’s been a long, hard fight to get it back up. Iraq never had an adequate power grid. Under the Ba’athist regime, Baghdad might have enjoyed power 18 or 20 hours a day, but other cities got three or four. One of the first things we did was to distribute power more equitably. Baghdad gets less, so its residents complain, but if you’re in almost any other Iraqi city, you’re far better off today than you were three years ago.

TRANSLATION: Everything that the Agenda Media has told you is 95% bull. When Michael Moore portrays Saddam’s Iraq as a heaven on earth, it’s 100% bull. When Ted Kennedy sticks with the “Iraq is a quagmire” meme, it’s a lie.

When I post the things I get in CentCom’s weekly newsletter, trust them. When Col. Peters or people of his stature report from Iraq, trust them.

In the wake of the war, we faced two immediate problems:

• First: The grid was even more decrepit than the worst pessimists had suspected. Saddam never funded electrification adequately; spare-parts money from the Oil-For-Food program went to build palaces and monuments instead.
• Second: As soon as the borders opened, appliances flowed in, from refrigerators to air-conditioners to satellite dishes (the dishes are everywhere). Money came out from under a few million beds and the country went on a massive shopping spree that hasn’t ended. As soon as the Saddam-era system was exposed to “normal” demands, it crashed.

Nonetheless, power generation last July averaged 5,300 megawatts; the top pre-war peak was 4,300. Just now, output’s down to 3,900 to 4,200 megawatts, because the system’s being serviced and upgraded to meet this summer’s demands.

In other words, because, in Michael Isikoff’s words, “We don’t cover hospital and school openings. We cover bombings.”, rest assured of the fact that we aren’t getting the full story. (Follow this link to view the video.)

The truth is that the old saying still applies “If it bleeds, it leads.” That might make for a splashy lead-in to the newscast but it isn’t a way to keep us informed properly.

Cross-post at LetFreedomRing

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 2nd, 2006 at 10:40 am and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Iraq, Media, Military. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.