http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3395977/
July 1, 2004 | 11:58 AM ET
MORE NEWS ABOUT THE WAR
If you want good news about the war, you might have trouble finding it. In part, that's because, as Tom Fenton of CBS notes, it doesn't get reported much:
You know the old saying: No news is good news. But in the news business, it is just the opposite: Good news is no news – which is why you have been hearing so little from Afghanistan recently.
Arthur Chrenkoff offers a roundup of news from Afghanistan that, in keeping with Fenton's observation, you probably won't find elsewhere.
Meanwhile, Warrant Officer Paul Holton, who blogs from Iraq under the name "Chief Wiggles," has comments on the handover of sovereignty:
Most Iraqis are not fundamentalists, not extremists, not religious fanatics, and not American haters. Most of them are just average good hearted people interested in pursuing a career enabling them to provide for their families, securing their children’s future and enjoying their own degree of freedom, with free agency to make choices. Most of them dress just like we do, desire what we desire, wish for what we wish for, and hope for what we hope for.
Military blogger Scott Koenig, who got back from Iraq last year has some thoughts. So does Rich Galen, who got back from Iraq last month.
If, in March of 2003 -- when people were talking about thousands of American combat deaths, months of streetfighting, and hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis -- we had looked to today and seen Iraq taken in three weeks, and turned over, in not much more than a year, to a free Iraqi government, exactly as has happened, it would have counted as a huge success. And it looks even better when you compare it with bad news from the United Nations' stewardship of Kosovo, where, as Alissa Rubin of the Los Angeles Times reports, things remain a mess after five years:
Burned houses line the road that cuts through rolling potato fields and meadows of wildflowers. Some of the buildings are so damaged, their roofs have collapsed — stark testament to an ethnic struggle that is far from over in this corner of Kosovo.
Five years ago, ethnic Albanians' houses were being destroyed. Now, the victims are Serbs.
. . .
The incidents have precipitated a review by the United Nations of its policies in the province, which have done little so far to create either jobs or an effective police force despite millions of dollars spent. The March violence showed that neither the local police nor the international police, brought by the U.N. from member countries, were able to maintain control. In most cases, authorities helped Serbs evacuate their homes but then stood by while ethnic Albanian mobs set the houses ablaze.
As Ed Morrissey comments:
Five years after international armed intervention and U.N. administration, Kosovo doesn't even have an effective police force, and no one wants to speculate on its "final status."
. . .
When people demand U.N. command over places like Iraq, Kosovo provides the ready-made rebuttal. The U.N. continues to display its arrogant incompetence while Kosovars of all ethnicities pay the price for its aimlessness and lack of urgency.
Every occupation has problems, and so do ordinary governments. Though things haven't always gone smoothly in Iraq, the attention those problems have received has obscured the progress we've made there.



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