The Most Under-Reported Story of the Iraq War

Dymphna at Gates of Vienna links to a long blogpost by a woman who calls herself Kat and who spent two full years working as a reconstruction contractor in war-torn Iraq. The article is a cry of heartfelt and justified outrage regarding the abject failure of the MSM to report this massive effort. All we have heard about it so far are stories based on the adage "If It Bleeds, It Leads," plus the inevitable exposure of the occasional misdeeds or failures of the contracting companies. Dymphna recommends reading at least the sections headed HALLIBURTON and THE BIG STORY. Excerpts from both appear in the sequel. As is so often the case, Read The Whole Thing .

Kat's section on HALLIBURTON begins like this:

There are probably only three to maybe five companies in the world with the types of expertise and experience necessary to take up this type of work. The scope of Halliburton's work in Iraq was far more extensive than the US government could readily oversee on its own. It would be monetarily impractical if not physically impossible for the government to plan and put into place overnight the kind of business structure Halliburton has taken years to build.

This is no coat of whitewash slapped on to cover the blackwash [apologies to Del] one finds in the media, ranging from the Daily Kos on up to the NYT and Wapo. Kat covers in detail the logistic, political and security concerns that render the task of firms such as Halliburton fiendishy difficult. And she treats us to some notable successes, for example--

Part of the irrigation systems we worked with was literally responsible for providing the restoration of thousands of square kilometers of marshlands in southern Iraq, which in turn has restored an ancient way of life to thousands of people. When that’s considered, you’d think it might be worth making a bit of a fuss about.

But that's not what happened. Instead, out of the more than 200 project completions and section completions we and government sources reported to the press, only two that I know of ever reached outside the country in the MSM, and those two were buried in a report about an increase in oil production. That's it. That’s the whole show. That's all of the reporting anyone ever got from four major irrigation systems, twelve major water supply systems, and twelve major oil and natural gas systems.