"He helped to convert Ramadi from one of Iraq’s deadliest cities into arguably the safest outside the semi-autonomous Kurdish north. This graveyard for hundreds of American soldiers, which a Marine Corps intelligence report wrote off as a lost cause just a year ago, is where the US military now takes visiting senators, and journalists such as myself, to show the progress it is making. Ramadi will be Exhibit A when General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, appears before Congress in two weeks’ time to argue that the country as a whole should not be written off.
In Ramadi last weekend I did things unthinkable almost anywhere else in this violent country. I walked through the main souk without body armour, talking to ordinary Iraqis. Late one evening I strolled into the brightly lit Jamiah district of the city with Lieutenant-Colonel Roger Turner, the tobacco-chewing US marine in charge of central Ramadi, to buy kebabs from an outdoor restaurant – “It’s safer than London or New York,” Colonel Turner assured me. "
Yeah, that Ramadi. Read the whole thing and send a copy to a Democrat.
More here.
Think about that last one for a minute. Here's a report from a blogger embedded with the Marines. He's a civilian and paid his own way with donations from the public. Ask yourself then, why can't the BBC, with its 2 billion pound a year budget, do as well? On the other hand, maybe we should be thankful that the BBC stays put in a hotel given the BBC's track record.
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