Good News is No News in Iraq & Afghanistan

RUSH: I have a story here that you’re not going to see in the drive-by media, and it’s from the Cybercast News Service. “Water Purifying Projects Completed Near Baghdad — Soldiers in Iraq last week completed a water treatment and storage project that provides purified water to residents of four communities north of Baghdad, according to the Department of Defense. Soldiers from the 7th Squadron, 10th Cavalry Regiments and Company A, 490th Civil Affairs Battalion tested and approved storage containers, finalizing a project that purifies water from local canals. The new storage tanks feature faucets that allow residents to fill their own containers to transport water to their homes.
“‘We are happy,’ Sheik Modar Thamir, a leader in one of the affected communities… The Army Corps of Engineers, which is working to rebuild public services in Iraq and Afghanistan, reports on its website that 243 public water projects have been completed in Iraq since 2004. Another 144 projects are underway. The ACE consists mostly of civilian engineers, scientists and other specialists who work with the military at home and abroad. Most of its work is done in the United States, but it established a provisional division in January 2004 to assist with the rebuilding of Iraq. The water treatment projects are aimed at repairing water purification systems that operated ‘at a fraction of their pre-war capacity due to years of neglect, electricity shortages and post-war looting.'”
Now, I gotta tell you something. When I went to Afghanistan a year ago last February, one of the things that amazed me — folks, the place looked like it had been bombed back to the Stone Age. They had the war with the Soviets in the 80s, and after that, there was sort of… They had seven different Mujahideen tribes, and there was a vacuum. There was no central leadership that popped up. The Taliban went in there and totally took over; another civil war erupted, and the place was just left in a shambles. The Taliban was a pure terrorist organization, pure totalitarian, and nothing got rebuilt.
It was just stunning to see.
I’m never going to have the same reaction when I hear people complain about “poverty,” particularly in this country after what I saw there. Here’s the point. I went to a number of US military installations, and I was stunned at the cities for military that the military had set up to house the troops. They had literally built little villages and cities with water treatment centers. It’s amazing to see what they do — and they were helping one of the plans that was being implemented then was the same type of thing that you just heard about here with water purifying projects in Iraq, the civilian military authority was working with the Iraqis to rebuild the country and establish sanitary water systems and sanitary disposal systems and so forth.

The contrast! Here you had the US. We went into Afghanistan in 2001. I’m over there in 2005. In less than three years I saw a bunch of more modern standard-of-living establishments that the military had set up for itself in the remote part of the world, essentially building little cities — housing units and water purification, game rooms, rec rooms, communication centers — and it was just stunning. Here we are, a culture able to go into a place like this and build housing and all the necessary infrastructure for our troops in a matter of months, in a country that hasn’t been able to do it in I don’t know how many thousands of years, and now we’re doing the same thing in Iraq.
This is the kind of good news, this is the kind of progress, this is the kind of story that does not get reported. It really doesn’t. I’ve made mention of the fact: I’ve traveled a lot of places in the world, and I’m sure a lot of you have, too, and one of the things that you can’t help but notice when you travel in a foreign country, and I don’t care what it is, one of the things you can to appreciate most is the water system that we have in this country. You can go coast to coast in this country, and you don’t have to worry about drinking the water in a home, in the city, or out in the country, hotels or gas stations.
Some people have problems with it so they drink bottled water, but the fact remains you can turn on the faucet anywhere in this country, in an actively maintained establishment, and be totally safe drinking the water. You don’t have to pack up bottled water from Missouri when you travel to California so you don’t get a stomach disease, is the point — and we take this all for granted. When you travel around the world, if you’re in some places, toilets will not even flush toilet paper — and these countries and civilizations have been around far longer than we have. Our military engineers, in Iraq and Afghanistan, are setting things up on the same model that we set up in our whole country.
Before it’s over with, Iraq is going to have a water system that will be better than a lot of European countries’ existing water system. I’m talking about sanitary and waste removal, drinking water, the whole thing — and the drive-by media will never tell you about this story. They will never discuss this with you. In fact, even in this story they went out and had to go find some anti-war people to say, “Well, yeah, this is all well and good, but why did it happen in the first place? The United States has to rebuild this because they destroyed it!” It’s just absurd. Even in a story which focuses on good news “for the sake of journalistic balance,” you have to go out and find some detractor, some critic (it doesn’t matter who) just to “balance” the story so that nobody thinks the journalists are being biased or unfair.
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