THE WASHINGTON POST STRIKES OUT AGAIN

On Friday March 17, 2006 the Washington Post editorial page printed an article by David Ignatius, titled “Fighting Smarter In Iraq”. The negative spin in the first paragraph of this article really made me angry! According to Mr. Ignatius “Three years on, the U.S. military is finally becoming adept at fighting a counterinsurgency war in Iraq. Sadly, these are precisely the skills that should have been mastered before America launched its invasion in March 2003. It may prove one of the costliest lessons in the history of modern warfare.”

David Ignatius totally ignores what is required to build a new Iraqi army, including recruitment, manpower training, leadership training, equipping, and field-testing. We totally dismantled Saddam Hussein’s army; it takes time to rebuild a military force that has the trust of the Iraqi people. There were those who argued that we should not have disbanded the existing army, but kept much of it intact and used it as the core of the new one. The trouble with that approach was that: 1) neither we nor the Iraqi people were willing to trust the ex-leaders of Saddam Hussein’s army in leadership positions in the new army, and 2) almost as much time-consuming training would still have been required. And, once we started putting Iraqi’s new military in place, it took time to get enough of a force up and running for it to be recognized by the Iraqi people and thereby become effective. I believe the goal is eventually to train 225,000 Iraqi soldiers and police officers. This is a major undertaking, and not one accomplished quickly.

Mr. Ignatius implies that the Multinational Force has only recently started to make progress. Untrue! The civilian death rate in Iraq since January 2003, just before the war started, has dropped from 70-125 per day under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship to 25-28 per day. U.S. military casualties dropped 27 % between 2004 and 2005, and so far in 2006 our casualties are running 62% lower than in 2005. This is a tremendous improvement that the mainstream (read liberal) press does not make known to the public.

The rest of Mr. Ignatius’s article has positive things to say about the transfer of responsibility over to the Iraqi security forces, so why did he have to start with the negative comment about Operation Iraqi Freedom? There is only one answer, and that is the political agenda of the Washington Post. This is just another example of how the press in the United States likes to distort the truth and mislead the public. We are winning on the ground in Iraq, but the terrorists seem to be winning in the liberal press!