Thomas Mott Osborne: “this past weekend, several of my colleagues and I journeyed to Baghdad and returned, and I would just like to make a few…”

“this past weekend, several of my colleagues and I journeyed to Baghdad and returned, and I would just like to make a few observations. Obviously, this is a very intense time in Iraq as the elections approaches, but I had three observations that I think were somewhat meaningful. Number one, we were tremendously impressed by the morale and the attitude of our soldiers. One would say, well, how in the world could that be? It is 110, 115 degrees every day, body armor, helmets, very difficult work, some danger, considerable distance from family. I guess the main reason that we felt we were observing this was there seemed to be a very strong sense of mission, a very strong sense of purpose and accomplishment. One thing that I often heard from the soldiers was this: they said, you know, it seems like there are two wars over here. There is the one that we see on CNN: we see the IEDs, individual explosive devices; we see the car bombs; we see the beheadings. But the part of the story that we think is meaningful is not being told. They said, the thing that we see is that in education, 2,500 schools have been renovated, 30,000 teachers have been trained, there is an 80 percent increase in attendance in schools, and most of that is girls who have not been going to school at all under Saddam Hussein. Health care, 240 hospitals operating, 1,000 clinics, 90 percent of the children are currently vaccinated, and this again is something that had not occurred before.…”