Our Accomplishments in Iraq
Good article in the NY Post
by Andrew Natsios, the administrator for US-AID on the accomplishments in Iraq:
* We have rehabilitated eight power plants and are installing three new ones. We are also replacing towers, stringing wires, rebuilding lines and installing new generators.
* We have played a key role in restoring Iraq's transport and communication systems. Among other things, we have repaired the Baghdad airport and the country's deep-water port. We have rebuilt bridges, improved rail service and repaired the fiber optic network.
* We expect child mortality and water-borne disease to drop sharply as a result of our commitment to repair and rehabilitate the water and sewerage system throughout the whole of the country. We are in the process of vaccinating 3 million Iraqi children. We are reequipping 600 health-care clinics, training doctors and nurses and distributing high-protein supplementary food rations to hundreds of thousands of pregnant and nursing mothers.
* USAID has also helped uncover mass graves where as many as 400,000 Iraqi victims of Saddam's genocide campaigns lie buried. Hundreds of thousands of others, including untold numbers of children, died from deliberate neglect, indifference and politically motivated deprivation.
And we're helping the Iraqi Human Rights Association inventory the mass murder that took place under Saddam. A spokesman of the group put things very well when he said that what Iraq needs most of all is "not technicians and engineers" - "but someone to rebuild our souls."
* Which brings us to USAID's efforts to rehabilitate and restructure the Iraqi educational system so that it can shed the legacy of four decades of totalitarian rule and enter the ranks of the civilized world as a fully modern and productive nation.
* We're also working to build democracy at the grassroots, empowering the many enlightened and talented people of Iraq, men and women, who were repressed and silenced under Ba'athist rule.
