Ralph Peters (retire…

Ralph Peters (retired Army officer) had a great editorial in the NY Post yesterday dealing with sensationalism winning the day on reports coming out of Iraq.

Our troops are doing remarkably well – but the headlines make it sound like a disaster. Last weekend, almost as many Americans died in a residential balcony collapse in Chicago as have been killed by hostile fire in “postwar” Iraq.

As a former soldier, I don’t discount any American casualties as unimportant. But the fact is that, despite real errors and miscues, reconstruction efforts in Iraq are going surprisingly well.

How bad is it in Iraq? It’s terrible – if you’re a former Saddam loyalist, ex-secret policeman or Ba’ath Party muckety-muck on the wrong end of Operation Sidewinder. The party’s over for Baghdad’s bully-boys, and they don’t much like it.

For perspective…

On our worst day last week, when two convoys came under attack, more than 600 other U.S. convoys didn’t hear a single shot. Two patrols got into firefights. The other 500 patrols didn’t even get hit with a water balloon.

Of course the same folks who predicted massive military and civilian casualties are the same folks predicting we’ll lose the peace. The same ones who didn’t blink at the long periods of time we took for nation-building in Somalia and Haiti are carping already at the short time we’ve been working on rebuilding what we had to break in Iraq getting rid of Saddam. You don’t suppose that it’s all a matter of who’s sitting in the Oval Office, do ya’?

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