Tuesday, July 05, 2005
Life On The Front Lines
Semper Gumby had a great post yesterday describing his weekend in Iraq.
Here is an analogy that might help. Remember the Northridge earthquake here in Southern California back in the early '90's? If you wantched the news you would have thought the whole town fell down. Don't get me wrong, there was a lot of damage from the quake, a lot of shattered lives, but my overwhelming impression just the next day, was how normal everything was. I spent the day visiting clients to make sure their businesses were OK, and there were no grand environmental disasters I had to attend to. There weren't. I drove through far more areas without damage than with. Things were tough, but things weren't BAD.
When I hear from guys like Gumby, that's what I figure it is like over there. Things are tough, but they aren't BAD, and they are getting better.
Late Friday evening we, the Automedics, rolled out with the engineers to start the cordon and search. The commander of the 2nd battalion 2nd Iraqi Army had organized a March against Terror along with all the locals shieks, muktars and the governor. He asked our unit to assist him in making it a safe demonstration. I KNOW the citizens in Baghdad did their march on 12 May and the American Muslims did their marches back on 14 May. It is great that less than 2 months later the citizens of Ninevah feel safe enough to do their own march.Everytime I read stuff like this, I am astonished at how, absent the filter of the legacy media, things are really going very well there.
Here is an analogy that might help. Remember the Northridge earthquake here in Southern California back in the early '90's? If you wantched the news you would have thought the whole town fell down. Don't get me wrong, there was a lot of damage from the quake, a lot of shattered lives, but my overwhelming impression just the next day, was how normal everything was. I spent the day visiting clients to make sure their businesses were OK, and there were no grand environmental disasters I had to attend to. There weren't. I drove through far more areas without damage than with. Things were tough, but things weren't BAD.
When I hear from guys like Gumby, that's what I figure it is like over there. Things are tough, but they aren't BAD, and they are getting better.
