Building Victory

Fallujah, Iraq – Critics of the attack on Fallujah last November often invoked the damning (and mythical) utterance from Vietnam: "We had to destroy the village to save it." Never mind that the alternative to the massive assault on the city backed by artillery, tanks, and aircraft would either be a huge loss of American lives or simply allowing the al-Qaeda cut-throat al-Zarqawi to keep it as the terrorist headquarters for all of Iraq. Forget that the city was already crumbling from the neglect of Saddam Hussein's regime. Today Fallujah is on the mend and then some, a symbol of renewal and American-Iraqi cooperation.

…Restoring and expanding access to electricity is top priority here, more so than access to running water because Iraqis pump water up from the mains to tanks on their roof. No electricity, no working pumps.
Williams and his counterpart at the Corp of Engineers, Maj. Daniel Hibner, don't have the simple goal of restoring pre-war Iraq. "The baseline is crappy so why go back to that?" says Williams. "We did do some damage but the repairs are taking these people far beyond where they were."

…"We're certainly not trying to turn this into the equivalent of an American city," says Williams. "But it will be first class for an Iraqi one and that's going to win the hearts and minds of the people." From the smiles, the thumbs up, the waves, and the cries of "Hello!" in Arabic I got from the children in even the worst parts of the city, I'd say they're being won.

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds we get to see a perspective of the Iraqi War that the news media seems all too willing to ignore, that of an Iraq literally rising from the ashes of Saddam's neglect and al-Zarqawi's hatred. Terror will lose in Iraq. It has no choice, for while al Qaeda can threaten and kill, it can offer no hope and build no future.