McClatchy Newspapers departing Iraq correspondent is asked: "Are we winning or aren't we?"

[sabra]

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/57209.html

Reporter reflects: 'Their grief is my last remembrance of Iraq'
By Corinne Reilly | McClatchy Newspapers


<snip>

On my flight back to California, the man sitting next to me wanted to know whether the U.S. is winning.

"No one in the media will just call it like they see it," he complained. "Are we winning or aren't we?" Both his question and his insistence annoyed me. I tried to explain that the yes-or-no answer he wanted doesn't exist.

Has violence dropped dramatically across Iraq? Yes, by at least 75 percent since the height of the bloodshed in 2007, according to most estimates. Is the U.S. moving closer to a time when it can safely exit Iraq? Most agree that it is. But is Iraq a stable democracy? Or stable at all? No. Will it be someday? Maybe.

And within those battles, there are other struggles to consider. Roughly half of Iraqis who want to work can't find jobs. About as many don't have reliable access to safe drinking water. Millions of children don't attend school.

Millions of families who fled their neighborhoods because of violence still haven't gone home; much of Iraq remains segregated, with Sunni and Shiite Muslims still hesitant to mix. Poverty and electricity shortages are widespread, health care is out of reach for many, and corruption and incompetence are rampant in the government ministries that are supposed to be remedying all these problems.

One Iraqi lawmaker, Mahdi al Hafedh, explained it to me this way: "With many of the problems facing our people, we don't even know how bad they are because the government lacks the capacity to properly assess and measure them. So it's hard to imagine how we will begin to fix it all."

[SpiralHawk]

1. "I am a war President...I am The Decider." - Commander AWOL (R)

Bush on NBC TV: ‘I am a war president’
(front page)

BY SAM MANUEL
WASHINGTON, D.C.—“I’m a war president,” declared George W. Bush in a TV interview at the White House aired February 8 on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday morning show. “I make decisions here in the Oval Office on foreign policy matters with war on my mind,” he continued. “And the American people need to know they got a president who sees the world the way it is.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4179618/

[Atman]

2. Fucking Bush thought setting up a democracy was like opening a Wal Mart

He never understood any of what Cheney and Rummy and Kristol were telling him to do. He was just an affable buffoon to sell their bullshit. But their long range plans were well established before they even took office. That's indisputable fact (PNAC, etc). It's also indisputable that the media helped them get away with it every step of the way. I don't buy for a minute that the didn't have all the intel the needed from the very beginning that Iraq would erupt into total chaos.

They not only expected it, they gave it a nickname early on..."The long war." They planned on being there for a long time, not so much for the fighting, but for protecting all the greedy opportunistic war profiteering Western contractors who were to make brazillions of dollars building the fantastical "DemocracyMart" of the Neocon's dreams.

Only...it didn't quite work out that way. Or...maybe it will. Yeah. That's it.

.