Senator Reid:
When you say we’ve lost in Iraq, I don’t think you understand the effect of your words. The Iraqis I speak with are the good guys here, fighting to build a stable government. They hear what you say, but they don’t understand it. They don’t know about the political game, they don’t know about a Presidential veto, and they don’t know about party politics.

But they do know that if they help us, they are noticed by terrorists and extremists. They decide to help us if they think we can protect them from those terrorists. They tell us where caches of weapons are hidden. They call and report small groups of men who are strangers to the neighborhood, men that look the same to us, but are obvious to them as a foreign suicide cell.

To be brief, your words are killing us. Your statements make the Iraqis afraid to help us for fear we’ll leave them unprotected in the future. They don’t report a cache, and its weapons blow up my friends in a convoy. They don’t report a foreign fighter, and that fighter sends a mortar onto my base. Your statements are noticed, and they have an effect.

Finally, you are mistaken when you say we are losing. We are winning, I see it every day. However, we will win with fewer casualties if you help us. Will you?

Respectfully,
LT Jason Nichols, USN MNF-I, Baghdad

We’ve lost? By what measure? It seems as though we are measuring our losses through the terrorist’s eyes and those of Al Quaida and not our own. As someone who knows many people actively involved in the war, I am not hearing about our loss. On the contrary, I hear of hospitals and schools being built, about capacity building, about smiles on children’s faces, about how we are getting Bagdhad back since the surge started. Though we mourn the loss of every troop who has died, our losses don’t even compare with ANY previous major war, especially when you consider the amount gained. Do you know how many Iraqi doctors have received training in Western medicine because of our presence? What about Iraqi engineers, economists? We CAN win this war, but only with your support. If we lose this war, and I mean IF, it will be the fault of those who have pre-declared our loss, and you seem to be their flag bearer.

The reporting your compaining about comes from the fact that there is no real enemy to speak of, no opposing governement troops or organized military resistance. We are fighting the wind… and everything our military does is creating more resentment and resistence. There are no “battles” to report on… only chaos and random skermishes.

The problem today is that we are in an occupation of a forign country, and that occupation has not been going well for almost 4 years. The US civilian administrators have made a ton of stupid mistakes that have created the situation in Iraq (firing of the military, debathification, abu grabe, not securing weapons stocks, etc.).

Its time to admit the truth. We won the war. But we have lost the occpation and there is nothing left to do but withdraw our troops as orderly as possible.

War reprting hstorically has ALWAYS been biased, but never ever in the past has there ever been the wealth of coverage that we have now.

Our freedom is expressed in a multitude of viewpoints on conflicts that people can read for themselves, or, as you are doing, cherry picking to make your point.

More on this artle here
http://xmb.stuffucanuse.com/xmb/viewthread.php?tid=3894&page=1#pid11527

Today I picked up the May edition of the Birmingham Christian Family publication at our local WalMart. While thumbing through it’s pages, I found a faith-based networking site created by two Chattanooga residents. Greg Thomas and Ralph Russ wanted to…