What Civil War?
That’s the question that I can’t help asking in light of yet another article that trashes the reporting from Iraq. Let’s take a look at Miranda Devine’s article:
A soldier friend stationed in Baghdad for the past two months has been sending me emails with such arresting lines as: “It’s late here and I [have] to get the Chief of Staff back to the Palace.”
From his office in the fortified military and government area, the Green Zone, he scans the web for news about Iraq and compares it with his reality. “Baghdad is not burning down around my ears,” he wrote last week. “Things were tense a while back, but violence was within limits. Callous thing to say, but that is the reality around here.”
Let’s keep perspective on this. We’ll have violence and intimidations because groups of thugs don’t want to be marginalized. It’s a power struggle of a coalition of Saddam’s loyalists and international terrorists vs. Iraqi, American and Coalition forces.
What’s most encouraging to me is the fact that various religious groups haven’t taken up arms. Think about that. The goal of AQ terrorists, not to mention Iran, is to foment violence between the Sunnis and Shia. That isn’t happening.
But with the third anniversary of the Iraq invasion tomorrow, he says, “the only people who seem to have lost both their grip on reality and their nerve are the western media”. His reality is quite different: “I am more and more impressed with the Iraqis every day. There are problems, to be sure, but I do not know of any country that has gone through the sorts of upheavals that this one has without any problems. “One just has to remember the catastrophes of the French Reign of Terror, or the Russian and Chinese revolutions, not to mention the disasters that were Vietnam and Cambodia.”
“I am more and more impressed with the Iraqis every day.”
Those words should resound throughout the world.
He also sent me a letter which has been circulating among soldiers for a month, from the mayor of Tal’Afar, near the Syrian border, praising the “lion hearts” of the US 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment who have changed the city from “ghost town in which terrorists spread death and destruction to a secure city flourishing with life”.
Does that sound like spreading unrest and civil war to you?
Cross-post at LetFreedomRing