Across Ministries

Good News from a War Zone - The Facts the Networks Miss

by Chuck Colson

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of the steady drumbeat of bad news and defeatism from Iraq. 
The truth of the matter is that this has never been justified, and it’s certainly not justified this week.

On Tuesday the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed a resolution supporting the 
end of the occupation of Iraq on June 30, transferring sovereignty to the Iraqi interim government, 
and authorizing the U.S.role providing security—a huge victory. This vote came on the heels of 
Monday’s announcement that nine of the independent Iraqi militias agreed to disband. This is 
good news, but just part of a pattern of good news that simply hasn’t been prominently reported.

The press coverage of Iraq reminds me of when I was a kid during World War II. The Allied campaign 
in Italy, for example, was going off the track, and everybody was wringing their hands that we were 
losing the war. And after D-Day, sixty years ago this month, American forces were bogged down 
at the Battle of the Bulge during the winter of 1944. Remember the American general’s famous 
response when the Nazis told him to surrender? One word: “Nuts.” Sure, things were uncertain 
and messy, and there was plenty of talk about the gloomy state of the war.

The fact is, you see, that uncertainty and mess are unavoidable elements of war, but if that’s all 
you hear, you begin to think the sky is falling. And that’s what has been happening in Iraq. But as 
Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard writes, “To share the Iraq-is-lost sentiment, one must ignore 
a spate of good news.”

For example, while there is trouble in the Sunni Triangle, Victor Davis Hanson notes that in Kurdistan, 
the northern third of Iraq, “seven million people live under humane government with less than 300 
American troops.”

Add to that the interim government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. It’s a balance between the ethnic, 
regional, and tribal groups—a balance many thought would be impossible to achieve.

As the interim government takes control on June 30, Iraq gets a bill of rights, and the first Arab 
democracy in the Middle East  will be born with elections seven months later. 

Addressing the Iraqi people, Allawi said, “Targeting the multinational forces, led by the United States, 
to force them out of Iraq, would be a catastrophe for Iraq. . . ”

And there’s more. First, in Iran an emerging middle class is becoming increasingly restless and wants 
democracy. Pressures will build for democracy with our successes in Iraq. Second, apart from Spain, 
major terrorist attacks have been confined to the Middle East . Third, Libyahas discontinued its nuclear 
program. To sum it up, when I had lunch with Ehud Olmert, Deputy Prime Minister of Israel, he told me 
that things were changing dramatically throughout the region precisely because of the U.S. presence in 
Iraq.

Will things continue to be uncertain and messy? Sure—this is war. As Hanson writes,  “Anyone who 

thinks thousands of Islamic fascists and out-of-work Baathists won’t want to stop the region’s first
consensual government is unhinged. But, again,” he adds, “for all our mistakes of omission there was
and is a plan—and it is now slowly coming to messy fruition.”

But the big question is: Is our effort in Iraq morally justified? Indeed it is. And it’s the front line of our 
war against terror.


BreakPoint
Cultural commentary with Prison Fellowship's Chuck Colson
Visit the Breakpoint website at http://www.breakpoint.org
* Copyright © 2004 Salem Web Network and its Content Providers. All rights reserved.