'The children will not leave the house," a mother of four recently told a reporter from USA Today. "They just sit at home all day watching satellite TV." Coming from Chicago or Tallahassee or Duluth, this slice of life wouldn't be noteworthy. But it comes from Baghdad, on a week when, according to the newspaper, most of Iraq had power for four consecutive days for the first time since Baghdad fell in April.
If you didn't see this story, or hear that the sabotage and looting that were panicking so many commentators not long ago are now down, that factories are running again, schools and cafes and banks are reopening and "normal" life is returning, you're not alone. The headlines are dominated by the piecemeal violence designed to thwart U.S. plans to bring stability and democracy to Iraqi, to sap our strength and will -- and to thwart the spread of positive news about the progress being made. Without minimizing the loss of life suffered in recent car bombings, ambushes and other terrorist acts, we can understand the Bush administration's dismay with the negative news coming out of Iraq overshadowing the positive.
Whether that will change now that Bush and members of his power trust have launched a publicity offensive to promote the strides they are making remains to be seen. It is the nature of PR that once it is identified as such, much of the message is lost to the medium. As a result, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's report on the new vitality in Iraq during her appearance in Chicago this week may not have come across as strongly as it should have. Nor may some of the powerful points she made pertaining to the recent report of chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay. His acknowledgement of not finding stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has gotten plenty of play. But his uncovering of solid evidence of Saddam Hussein's intentions and systematic efforts to manufacture the weapons -- including "significant amounts of equipment" concealed from United Nations inspectors -- has gone underreported. As Bush said Wednesday, it is now "undeniable -- undeniable" that Saddam violated U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441, which threatened "serious consequences" if Iraq failed to disarm. And as Rice told the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, the "terrible prospect" of Iraq giving weapons to terrorists "could not be ignored or wished away." Not after September 11.
Rice called for patience. That's reasonable. It has been only six months since the statue of Saddam was pulled down. As was seen in Germany and Japan, rebuilding a country takes a lot longer than that. In Iraq, ethnic and religious differences make unification -- or mutual tolerance -- an even more extraordinarily complicated challenge. There are strong signs, though, that good things are happening -- signs that can't and shouldn't be ignored.
http://www.suntimes.com/output/commentary/cst-edt-edits10.htmlLooks like the Sun-Times has crawled onto the Bush PR bandwagon.
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