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Strategy is working, says Howard, but the work isn’t done yet

A retired Marine Corps Colonel and the mother of a Navy Seal killed in Iraq brought a seldom seen message to a group of listeners at The Dalles High School Auditorium Sunday afternoon.
That message is that the mission in Iraq is working, something they say is not seen or heard in the mainstream media.
Col. Mike Howard backed up his message with a series of slides, about 100 picked from more than 4,000 he took during two tours in Iraq. Debbie Lee, the mother of Marc Allen Lee, who was the first Navy Seal to die in that war and whom she calls her hero, backed it up with what she had seen on a trip to Iraq in December.
At one point in his hour-and-a-half presentation, Howard, said the mission there is working but is not over yet and said the U.S. military “needs to stay there until the children in Iraq have the same opportunities as our kids do.”
Howard said the children in Iraq are part of the reason why things are going better and the number of military casualties are dropping. He said about 60 percent of the IED’s placed by insurgents are found and neutralized before they can do any harm, and in many of these cases it is because the children there are telling the troops where they are.
He said most people in Iraq realize that we are there to help them and that we are not the bad guys. The young people in Iraq are embracing democracy and he noted that in their election they turned out at a higher percentage than some American elections draw.
Howard said most of the people there realize the Americans are there to help while the bad guys are only there to kill, destroy and create anarchy.
One of the pictures he showed was of Iraqi women holding up “thank you” signs during election day in that country and said they stood out there all day.
A film clip showed an actual IED attack, when a convoy passed by three children walking along the road. The device went off, killing all of them. Howard said the person setting it off realized it would kill the children and “he didn’t care.”
He said the people there appreciate that Saddam Hussein is gone and one picture showed some of them dancing with bare feet on his picture, which is a sign of their humiliation of him.
Another picture was of the familiar scene of U.S. forces tipping over a statue of the former dictator, but Howard said something that a lot of people don’t know is that the Iraqis tried to do that themselves but were not able to without the help of military equipment.
Howard called Hussein a “weapon of mass destruction” himself and said he had a history of using chemical and biological weapons against his own people and against the Iranians. His slides included ones of bodies recovered from mass graves. He said 270 of these were found, one with more than 15,000 bodies.
One word to describe Hussein, Howard said, was “vanity” — everything was about him. He said that it will take 10 years to destroy all of the ammunition found. One ammo dump that was found was the size of greater Milwaukee, Wis.
Howard reminded his audience that it took years from the time of the start of the American revolution to the time the American constitution was adopted, yet some people expect to mission to bring democracy to Iraq to be over quickly.
He said the Iraqis feel they will be able to handle their own internal security by the end of this year, but feel they will need help with external security for years to come, possibly as long as 2018. He reminded his audience that after World War II, U.S. troops remained in those countries for many years.
He also defended the often maligned contractors who he said are working hard in rebuilding that country and noted many of the people working for the contractors are ex-military.
Even before the invasion, Howard said, the infrastructure in Iraq was not good and even in the ornate places, the imported Italian marble was just a facade that covers shoddy work.
He recalled that one of the oddest things he observed while there in his second mission (he was also there when Baghdad fell) was a Jewish army officer leading a group of Gentile troops rebuilding an Islamic mosque.
He said the Iraq army can’t be held to the same standards as U.S. troops as they were trained in a different way with few career officers who had spent years in the military being led by officers who were cronies of Saddam Hussein. Much of the Iraq army simply faced away when the invasion came and he said he became friends with one former Iraq commander who, when the invasion came, simply told his men to lay down their arms and go home. They did.
He showed pictures taken in schools that have been established there, as well as other signs of progress. He said in one school where little English was spoken the first word they learned to spell was “freedom.”
Howard said the real battle there is not Sunni’s vs. Shia, but moderates against extremists.
Allen’s son Marc died in Iraq on Aug. 2, 2006 when he was shot by a sniper while routing suspected insurgents in a house to house campaign.
She said her son grew up in Hood River and she now travels the country with a group called Move America Forward, the largest grass roots organization in the U.S. working to support the troops.
She said when he died her son still believed in what he was doing in the military and she said she feels the same way and feels our presence there is making a huge difference.
She said that on her last visit to Baghdad she felt safer there than she did in Washington D.C., surrounded by a group of war protesters.
She also showed some pictures she had taken titled “I Saw It For Myself: It’s for Real.”
She said the troops there know the war is the right thing to do and believe they need to be there to finish the job.
Asked in a question-and-answer period that followed their presentation, Howard said he doesn’t think the war on terror would be won until Bin Laden is captured.
Howard also did his presentation in Hood River on Saturday and that drew about 150. About half that were at the high school Sunday.
Howard concluded his remarks by telling the crowd to pray for the troops over there and show them appreciation when you see them, singularly or in groups. Several times he referred to them as the “New Greatest Generation.” He said “Iraq is a small issue, terrorism is the big issue.”
On the Net: www.iraqtherestofthestory.com.