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| Iraq-Jordan |
| 101st's daily trials in Mosul |
| 2004-03-17 |
| Excerpts... Read it all. Pretty interesting. ... Mosul has become a true model. Only six days after the city was taken on April 22, the Americans held their first conference with local leaders to discuss communal elections, which in fact took place two weeks later. In addition, the soldiers distributed fistfuls of the Saddam regime's money and new dollars from America, totaling more than a million a week. The 101st Airborne's books currently show funding for 4722 projects. Shop owners were given startup capital and school principals received envelopes containing 5,000 dollars in cash and instructions to whitewash their classrooms. The Americans gave money to vegetable stand owners, taxicab companies and small-scale farmers. They helped former members of the military by sending them to vocational training courses, and they helped launch bigger projects such as the renovation of hotels that had been devastated by looters. Dollars went to sheiks to help them repair grain silos, to attorneys for photocopiers, to hospitals for syringes and blood bags. The army put the kinds of things into practice that the UN is still talking about in theory. They practiced "nation building." One year after the war, Mosul, a city of two million inhabitants where Kurds, Sunnis, Shiites and Christians have been living together in harmony for eons, is now full of life. Shop windows are full of goods, flames shoot from grills in hundreds of kebab restaurants, and the clogged alleys of the bazaar in the city's old section are filled with refrigerators from Thailand, microwave ovens from China, and fan heaters from England. One should never think of post-war Iraq as a third world country where people get into fistfights over sacks of flour handed out by aid organizations. Even before the war, Mosul was a modern city of the orient, and now it is opening up to Syria, to Turkey, to the world at large, a world people only knew through hearsay during the Saddam era. Now there are internet cafés on every corner, and the streets are filled with men waving mobile phones under billboards advertising products by Panasonic, Samsung and Siemens. The city's constant traffic jams are filled with fleets of foreign cars brought in through Syrian ports: Dutch used cars, German mini-trucks with expired license plates from Braunschweig, Miesbach and Stuttgart, some still displaying stickers in their windows such as "Wichert Carpentry." The soldiers distributed fistfuls of new dollars from America, totaling more than a million a week. 160 youth teams go to soccer practice, there are music contests and contests, and 230 satellite programs are available on television, including Japanese game shows, German network ARD's "Tagesschau," and now even local programs. If the nights were not filled with gunshots and the occasional boom of heavy artillery, and if the skies over the city were not filled with the rattling sound of Kiowa Warrior helicopters and the distant roar of fighter jets, the city would feel like any other city somewhere in the Middle East, a city with the same worries and poverty as any other. It would also feel as if the Americans had prevailed in the daily front. But the gunshots are still there. So are the helicopters, the explosions, the war... |
| Posted by:Dar |
| #2 I did the same thing myself this morning... Fixed. |
| Posted by: Fred 2004-3-17 4:19:04 PM |
| #1 D'oh--switched the URL and the title. Time for more caffeine... |
| Posted by: Dar 2004-3-17 3:03:23 PM |