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Originally Posted by scaeagles
First, there was no way we'd hand the government function over to the Iraqis by the June 30, 2004 deadline. We did.
There was no way they'd have an election. They did.
There was no way we could clean out Fallujah. It was. And the terrorists that fled to the Syrian border have recently been decimated again.
There was no was the Iraqi factions could sit down together and work toward a common government and constitution. They are.
Yes. It is certainly going better than the left would have us remember or believe.
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First, are these the examples of the good news that the media doesn't report? I've seen every one of them get major coverage. It would seem that even the liberal media is willing to report anything positive that occurs in Iraq.
But...
As GD attests, there are also major problems with the Iraqi police force.
From September:
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Pentagon documents and Democratic congressional sources dispute President Bush's claim, made Saturday, that nearly 100,000 "fully trained and equipped" Iraqi soldiers, police officers and other security personnel are at work, Reuters said yesterday. The Pentagon documents show that of the nearly 90,000 people now in the police force, only 8,169 have had the full eight-week academy training. Another 46,176 are listed as "untrained," and it will be July 2006 before the administration reaches its goal of a 135,000-strong, fully trained police force.
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And yet, just 3 months earlier, Rumsfield stated that there were 206,000 security forces at work.
Furthermore, we are no closer to pulling out and turning over control to the Iraqi people. Hundreds of Iraqis are being killed every month, 400 in the past month from 127 car bombings. Our soldiers are still dying there, at least 10 in the last two weeks. And a recent report by the UN and Iraqi government shows that the living conditions of the Iraqi people has significantly deteriorated since the US invasion. More than half still have no access to clean drinking water, money is running out in the the hospitals, contributing to a rising infant mortality rate, more than half of the people surveyed reported that they could see sewage in the streets where they live, and 23% of the children suffer from malnutrition. These are all conditions that have worsened since the US invasion.
You paint a optimistic picture of the progress in Iraq but I don't think the Iraqi people would agree that things are going well.