Great Strides in Iraq

After reading the ABC News article about Iraq one year after the United States began the march to Baghdad, I would be hard pressed to think of it as anything other than a success. The situation is far from perfect (and nearly as far from over). Still, the coalition military toppled a government faster than anyone might have expected, and is now moving Iraq in a positive direction.

Some choice quotes from the ABC article:

1. By nearly every quantifiable measure, the situation has improved since before the war — and also since our last effort.
   
2. However, the one exception — security — also happens to be the yardstick that Iraqis say matters most.
   

And the situation continues to improve. While every loss of life, both civilian and military, is painful, the fact is that the rate of violent attacks has slowed. While it is the one area of the ABC survey that the respondents say is not improving, I don't see a cause for worry. This was always the area that rational people realized would take the longest to complete, but the fact that improvement is seen in all of the other areas that have the potential to be effected by security concerns (electricity, health care, and education, for instance) suggests that the security situation may be improving more quickly than the respondents believe.

Iraqis often say they do not like seeing U.S. soldiers on their streets — but many would also agree with the crude assessment a 66-year-old tailor in Kut gave to Time magazine's Terry McCarthy: "If the Americans leave now, everyone will start eating each other."

That's fine. To be completely honest, I don't like seeing US Soldiers on their streets, either. Let's all just recognize the necessity of the event and keep building the systems that will allow us to bring the troops home having completed their goal: a free Iraq with a government that respects individual rights.

The ABC survey reports improvements in education, health care, electricity, water supply, local governments, commerce, and jobs.

One year later, I believe it's easy to say that coalition policies have made a positive impact in a region of the world that is resistant to change and to outside interference in local politics. While the journey is nowhere near complete, these first steps have gone well.

Read the story.

Posted by zombyboy at March 16, 2004 03:23 PM | TrackBack