Some Added Perspective on Iraq

Callimachus both at his own blog, and at Winds of Change posts an excellent interview with Katrina, who works for a firm doing the hard work of rebuilding, and in most cases just plain building given the utter lack of working infrastructure throughout most of the country, Iraq. Hopefully this piece will get the attention it deserves. Pajamas Media included a link to it in their Middle East round up for today which is nice, but I'm hoping as many eyeballs get drawn to this story as possible, and I'm also hoping that some legacy media outfits feel a bit ashamed that this story that they refuse to tell is being spread by bloggers instead of within their own organizations.

This story should transcend ideology. Whether you are left or right, were for or against the Iraq War before or after it happened, it's in everybody's best interest to understand what's going on over there as thoroughly as possible.

Here's a small bit to whet your appetite

I managed the hub. What started for me as a Girl-Friday job in the U.S. making travel arrangements and applying a few reports to contracts and data sheets with chat help from my boss turned into being the managerial hub in a foreign country, responsible for the schedules of two bosses, the engineers who worked under them, and the legal and accounting facilities we had expand back in the USA. I had been in college when I started, finished with a management degree in the medical field, and found myself in Iraq working between structural and civil engineers, government agencies and the legal and accounting sections back home.

If this is giving you a headache, you're not alone. It is impossible for me to express the strain of the workload taken on by my company and the many contractors and government agents we reported to. Factor in supply difficulties found in any large-scale job, add to that the fact that they were being performed in a war-torn country poor on finished resources, then add ongoing security problems to top it off, and you've got a work load of breath-taking proportions.

The contractors and government agency employees also often confronted major changes in requirements or massive amounts of recorded information they had no familiarity with whatsoever. It wasn’t any easier for them than it was for us.

This is stuff that needs to be understood to put the progress, or lack of progress, in perspective.

Why can't the Atlantic Monthly, or Newsweek or the New York Times or CNN find the time, screen time or column inches to do this kind of reporting?