What Iraq Looks Like On The Ground

image credit: U.S. Army

The image caption reads:

A Baloor resident talks with Soldiers from 6-9 Armored Reconnaissance Squadron, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, at a temporary checkpoint after a concerned local citizen stronghold was shot during a drive-by shooting in Baloor, Iraq, Oct. 6.

It seems like there's been a succession of right-wing morons proclaiming recently that the people who oppose the Iraq war aren't the ones fighting it. As with just about everything they say, this is about 180 degrees away from being true. Another case in point surfaced today as an op-ed in the Washington Post:

As Army captains who served in Baghdad and beyond, we've seen the corruption and the sectarian division. We understand what it's like to be stretched too thin. And we know when it's time to get out'

What does Iraq look like on the ground? It's certainly far from being a modern, self-sustaining country. Many roads, bridges, schools and hospitals are in deplorable condition. Fewer people have access to drinking water or sewage systems than before the war. And Baghdad is averaging less than eight hours of electricity a day.

Iraq's institutional infrastructure, too, is sorely wanting. Even if the Iraqis wanted to work together and accept the national identity foisted upon them in 1920s, the ministries do not have enough trained administrators or technicians to coordinate themselves. At the local level, most communities are still controlled by the same autocratic sheiks that ruled under Saddam. There is no reliable postal system. No effective banking system. No registration system to monitor the population and its needs.

The Real Iraq We Knew

One of the reasons it's been hard for Americans to understand what's going on in Iraq is their lack of access to real information. Covering the war is dangerous, and so the main view we get of the war is from the soldiers (and Marines) who are involved in it, and the journalists who are embedded with them. The real lives of ordinary Iraqis are largely hidden from view. As the preceding quote shows, things haven't been getting any better there since Saddam fell.

For readers of this blog, and other progressive blogs that cover defense issues, this should be no surprise. The first article I wrote dealt with the incredible increase in mortality since the war began. The Johns Hopkins study published in The Lancet in late 2006 indicated that perhaps 650,000 people had died in Iraq due to the changes brought on by the war. Needless to say, this study has been pooh-poohed by the war's apologists, mostly because it doesn't agree with other studies that either gather data differently or don't count the same kinds of casualties.

Yet we hear very little about this on television news, which is what most Americans depend on to keep them informed. While we can deplore this choice of news sources, the fact remains that the people who like this war are the ones largely in control of what we see of it. The Defense Department is protecting the journalists who are embedded with our troops, and the rest of the Administration has a great deal of regulatory power over broadcasters. They call the shots. This isn't how it's supposed to work, but it's how it is.

So you can add those twelve former Army captains to the long list of current and former soldiers who think this war is a mistake. As far as I'm concerned, the people who call them "phony soldiers" can go fight the war themselves.

Just remember to take plenty of seat cushions and water purification kits.

(h/t to Christy Hardin Smith at Firedoglake.)