Who is at fault for what?
BY NANCY COTTEN HIRST
DBJ Contributing Editor
I could easily subtitle this column, “I hate the media,
the United Nations, and a whole bunch of countries with
weird agendas.” I am sick to death of listening to
the media lambaste the United States, or giving ridiculous
amounts of air time to those who do, about the United States
being at fault for everything in Iraq that has not been
perfect since our little war there began.
Let’s have some straight talk here. There seems to
be an American habit developing for never holding anyone
responsible for individual behavior–for excusing any
criminal behavior as a problem of “society.”
We have gone too far with this domestically, but when we
blame problems in Iraq on U.S. military planning, we have
gone way too far.
It seems that every NGO bleeding heart representative in
the world has blamed the U.S. for the deplorable conditions
in the hospitals throughout Iraq. These are the same people
who were lamenting these conditions for the last twelve
years, but then they were blaming the problem on sanctions.
How is it then, that our troops recently found stored in
one of Saddam’s zillion hiding places enough medical
equipment and supplies to service all the hospitals for
six months?
The fact that the supplies were there but not getting to
the people was the fault neither of the sanctions nor the
U.S. I’ll give you one guess whose fault this was.
And a big clue is it was the regime that used these same
hospitals as military staging areas and ammunition depots.
Whose fault is it that looting has been so out of hand throughout
Iraq? According to the media, it was again our military
plan. I don’t think so. Were our forces, or were they
not, told to avoid as much loss of Iraqi life as possible?
We could have ended the looting with a few well-placed blasts
from our automatic weapons, but we’re the nice guys.
When people steal, they are thieves. There have always been
thieves, but until the age of excuses, they were punished.
The Iraqi citizens knew perfectly well that the U.S. soldiers
weren’t going to shoot them and the Saddamist police
force had wisely vanished. So the hooligans went berserk.
They do it here after ball games, they do it all over Europe,
Asia, and Africa (except where they will indeed be shot).
They are just hooligans. It isn’t our fault. We were
too busy saving both Iraqi lives and those of our troops
to stop in the middle of a war and play security guard.
Oh, and then there’s the museum issue. Much gnashing
of teeth over the loss of historic treasures. Even after
learning that the pillaging there had been the work of professionals
and had probably taken place before our troops even arrived
in Baghdad and Mosul, it was still our fault. Were we supposed
to send museum police ahead of our troops? That might have
proved tricky and I don’t know even a drama queen
archeologist who would have accepted the job. Most of them
had probably already read the December article that asserted
that most of the “treasures” in Iraqi museums
were replicas of the originals, indicating that Saddam’s
regime had looted the treasures years ago. Whether they
have already been sold or are stashed in Switzerland is
anybody’s guess, but archeological preservation has
never been the forte’ of any military I’ve ever
heard of.
Then there’s the water and electricity problem. The
world has been told on good, Iraqi authority that the fedayeen
and the Baathists turned all of these facilities off for
the very purpose of causing havoc, therefore delaying the
fall of the regime. The troops have restored it in all of
the smaller towns, but the technologies involved in large
cities are not as easily restored. Here again, our troops
are not electrical engineers nor sanitation engineers. These
are complicated systems. One would think, from hearing the
howls, that the city of Baghdad was controlled by one breaker
switch.
I’m not certain whether the media is really as ignorant
as they sound or not. I do understand the frustration of
the Iraqi people. I also understand the agendas of the countries
who are bellyaching. If the media’s job, as they so
self-righteously proclaim, is to bring us the truth, then
why are they not explaining the difficulty of the task at
hand instead of adding to the frenzy. I frankly don’t
believe they give a hoot about truth, since truth rarely
makes headlines or draws crowds. DBJ
