If You Show Up in Baghdad

Michael J. Totten. Embedded in Baghdad:

Children ran up to me.

“Mister, mister, mister!” they said and pantomimed the snapping of photos. I lifted my camera to my face and they nodded excitedly.

Read on. Here's another excerpt:

“This is not what I expected in Baghdad,” I said.

“Most of what we’re doing doesn’t get reported in the media,” he said. “We’re not fighting a war here anymore, not in this area. We’ve moved way beyond that stage. We built a soccer field for the kids, bought all kinds of equipment, bought them school books and even chalk. Soon we’re installing 1,500 solar street lamps so they have light at night and can take some of the load off the power grid. The media only covers the gruesome stuff. We go to the sheiks and say hey man, what kind of projects do you want in this area? They give us a list and we submit the paperwork. When the projects get approved, we give them the money and help them buy stuff.”

Not everything they do is humanitarian work, unless you consider counter-terrorism humanitarian work. In my view, you should. Few Westerners think of personal security as a human right, but if you show up in Baghdad I’ll bet you will. Personal security may, in fact, be the most important human right. Without it the others mean little. People aren’t free if they have to hide in their homes from death squads and car bombs.

Day by Day.

Background on the questionable Baghdad Diaries and Shock Troops.

UPDATE: Democrats in Denial. Thomas Joscelyn, TWS:

The leading Democratic presidential contenders have voiced a new conventional wisdom in recent weeks: The war in Iraq has little or nothing to do with defeating al Qaeda. Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have embraced this view, as has the New York Times. It is dangerously wrong. At the very time it is being propounded, al Qaeda continues to fight fiercely to expel U.S. forces from Iraq in pursuit of its long-announced objective of establishing a safe haven there. It is contradicted by U.S. intelligence and by the repeated pronouncements of al Qaeda's top leaders going back years.

Oblivious to these facts, the Democrats insist: "This is not our fight."

UPDATE: American public opinion shift on the war. NY Post.

UPDATE: Kathleen Parker on the anonymous smear of the troops.

Related posts: Terror Dry Runs, Obama Not the Right Stuff, AP, Stringing us Along