Iraq Now

I got an email from my astrophysics friend, who is pro-choice, but conservative on all the rest. AP has a Left-wing friend (LF) who enjoys goading AP (and me, when we're in the same room) on politics. In the past, AP has calmly explained to LF that when it comes to politics, she defers to my judgment, since studying astrophysics doesn't leave her any time to keep current on the political/world situation (just as she defers to her M.D. sister on medical things and to her history-buff dad on historical subjects). LF still tries to get AP to comment on his Lefty stuff.

OK. That's the background. Today AP forwarded me the email that LF sent her about how horrible things are in Iraq, since the US went to war there. Here are some excerpts from the email, which looks like it's a big quote of an article by David Cortright in The Nation.

Living conditions for the people of Iraq, already poor before the war, have deteriorated significantly since the US invasion. This is confirmed in a new report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Iraqi Ministry of Planning and Development Cooperation. Based on a survey of 21,000 households conducted in 2004, the study shows that the Iraqi people are suffering widespread death and war-related injury, high rates of infant and child mortality, chronic malnutrition and illness among children, low rates of life expectancy and significant setbacks with regard to the role of women in society.

Malnutrition among small children in Iraq is widespread. Nearly one-quarter of Iraqi children now suffer chronic malnutrition, and 8 percent suffer acute malnutrition. Illness levels among Iraqi children are also high, which is partly the result of unsafe drinking water and poor sanitation. According to the report, "compared to other countries in the region and to the earlier data from Iraq...the supply of safe and stable water...has deteriorated." There has also been "a steep deterioration in the sanitary situation." Forty percent of urban households report sewage in the streets of their neighborhoods.

The UNDP study found that infant and child mortality rates remain high, although there is much uncertainty about the exact numbers. The evidence "indicates a progressive worsening of the situation for children." High infant mortality rates in Iraq contrast with declining infant mortality rates in neighboring countries. In most of the world, including the surrounding countries, mortality rates for children have steadily fallen over the decades. In Iraq, however, child mortality rates have climbed. This translates into thousands of "excess" infant deaths every year. These are the quiet, unseen victims of the continuing tragedy in Iraq.

The new report sheds light on the total number of Iraqi deaths directly attributable to the war. As of mid-2004, according to the survey, the war had caused approximately 24,000 Iraqi deaths. The death toll in Iraq has continued to climb, so these numbers are larger now than when the survey was conducted. At the time of the UNDP survey, the Iraqi Body Count website estimated total deaths at 14,000-16,000. In May of this year the Body Count website estimate stood at 21,000-24,000. This would suggest that the comparable figure for war-related deaths using the UNDP methodology is more than 30,000. Many of the victims in the current war are women and children. The number of children injured since the US invasion is higher than the number of military-age men. The report said that in the ongoing war, it is members of "the civilian population that are most affected."

Well, that gives you the basics of the email. The rest is along the same lines. AP asked me for my input, so she could reply to LF. Here's my reply to AP that she passed along to LF (I haven't heard back yet about any response from LF):

Tell him to do a little fact-checking. I did a simple google search on "United Nations Development Programme Iraq" (without the quotes) and got the official website for that organization (http://www.iq.undp.org/), which links to an Iraq-specific program (http://www.uniraq.org/). They talk about their success in cleaning up after the mess that SADDAM left behind. LF can read the Development Update reports (http://www.uniraq.org/library/rd.asp). There's one for April 2005 and another for May 2005 that discuss different areas of redevelopment efforts by the UN. None of the stuff I see there makes any slams on the US, other than mentioning the heavy bombing of Baghdad at the beginning of the war.

I found a news item that isn't the one LF quoted but looks very similar (http://ipsnews.net/new_notan.asp?idnews=28665). Here's a quote that LF (or his source) neglected to include:

''After a 10-year period during which the living conditions of the Iraqi individuals and families could not be statistically monitored, the Iraqi government and its U.N. partner has finally taken a large survey of living conditions in Iraq,'' he said. ''Despite the difficult security situation in the country, COSIT was determined to implement the survey.''

A UNDP spokesman said it was stunning that the report was even completed.

''The most noteworthy thing about the survey is that it was done,'' said the spokesman, Dan Shepard. ''Iraq has not been listed in UNDP reports in some 15 years because there is no reliable data. That they were even able to do this with the security situation, it's quite an undertaking.''

We've been in Iraq for just over 2 years. There have not been ANY reports of living conditions in Iraq for 10 - 15 years, so there's NO BASELINE for determining whether Iraq's current conditions are the result of US policy, or whether they're actually an improvement over conditions under Saddam. If you read down in the April 2005 report I mentioned above, they talk about connecting a new water network in southern Iraq. That's in the marshlands, where the Marshland Arabs live. Saddam drained the marshlands as an attempted genocide. Once we took Iraq in 2003, we got to work getting the marshlands back to their former state, so the Marshland Arabs could survive.

Tell LF to do his homework and stop blindly accepting the Left's talking points as gospel. We're not the bad guys.

I made sure to only reference UN websites and that ipsnews.net site, which looked like a human rights or environmental kind of news source. Nothing right-wing that LF could dismiss out of hand for being in the pocket of the Bush Administration.

That was enough to get me stirred up. Then I randomly came across this post (here) by Michael Yon while I was following other posts reviewing the new "Over There" show on FX (the milbloggers weren't impressed with the show).

Michael Yon is a strong writer, and his post is excellent and well worth reading the whole thing (it's long). Here are some excerpts:

The enemy in Iraq does not appear to be weakening; if anything, they are becoming smarter, more complicated and deadlier. But this does not mean they are winning; to imply that getting smarter and deadlier equates to winning, is fallacious. Most accounts of the situation in Iraq focus on enemy "successes" (if success is re-defined as annihiliation of civility), while redacting the increasing viability and strength of the Iraqi government, which clearly is outpacing the insurgency.

The Mosul police are now strong enough to launch successful undercover operations, and have been fanning out across Mosul and surrounding villages, snooping and listening for snippets. On July 15th, police working undercover in a village Northwest of Mosul heard a group of villagers talking about a weapons cache, but the location was not mentioned. Iraqi forces locked down the village, searched and found a weapons depot from Syria into Mosul. Iraqi police also found and rescued the 28 year-old woman I mentioned briefly in the last dispatch. She was the wife of a Mosul journalist, and had been kidnapped and held for ransom by members of a beheading cell. After the village search, police hauled four men to a Mosul station for interrogation, and alerted the Americans.

Many of the "fighters" here emerged and filled the vacuum following the fall of Saddam. In Tombstone, they'd be guns for hire; in Bogota, they'd be kidnappers without a cause. Here, they do not equate so much to organized resistance as to organized crime.

They get lumped in with the "resistance," but this is not entirely accurate. They do business with it, and they exploit it for personal gains like money, possessions and power. Today, the terrorists and their more populous criminal cousins in Iraq have a great deal in common, including the goal of forcing the new government to fail in its mission to secure the borders and restore and maintain order.

The terrorists have been trying to--with good success--cripple the macro-economy by destroying pipelines and infrastructure, and these attacks help the criminals. Attacks on gas stations, for instance, disaffect the citizenry from the government, while giving black-marketers transient fuel monopolies.

Read the whole thing. It doesn't paint the situation in Iraq with a whitewash, rather it gives the feel of realism that that conveys a deserved hope.

Iraq has not become a clone of American infrastructure and prosperity. The job there isn't done, not by a long shot. But Iraq is making progress in significant ways that UN surveys and reports can't convey, and that Lefties like LF seem incapable of seeing.