I checked Snopes.com but they have no reference to it.
Subject: What the media don’t want you to know
OK, apart from obviously not being from a soldier:
Questionable. Most had it anyway.
Quite possibly true. But it was sanctions for years before the war that destroyed the medical system.
No doubt true…
Bullshit. Maybe some were taken over as frontline defence. But there’s no way that every school was used as a weapons dump.
Again, years of sanctions and days of bombing caused the port’s decline.
I find that impossible to believe
Quite possible true. Again, sanctions prevented it exporting oil for years.
Not a chance. You mean they’ve not only repaired the destroyed and damaged power stations, but built new ones? Bullshit.
Again, sanctions…the staff were available before the war, but all they had was beds and empty medicine stores.
Not yet, they’re not.
They were there anyway.
All no doubt true.
Bullshit.
I’ve no idea what this is supposed to prove
…by and American-installed puppet government.
BULLSHIT!!!
True.
Here’s the Snopes item, which does claim that Reynolds is a real person and a soldier. Snopes also provides a link to an article at Orwellian Times, which also says that Reynolds exists.
I admit to not being an expert on Iraqi geography but I thought the country was landlocked (hence a major reason they wanted to take over Kuwait) and googling “Port of Uhm Qasar” gives only references to this chain letter on the first page.
What gives?
Also:
I don’t think he was in power for a full 30 years, was he? And I also don’t think not mentioning him is necessarily a good thing. Maybe “not full of Saddam propaganda” would’ve been a better thing to say if you were composing a glurge chain letter.
Gorrillaman, do you have any cites which contradict the OP?
Not to dump fuel on any fires, but assuming it’s true that the textbooks don’t mention SH, shouldn’t they? It’s not like he didn’t exist and run the country for a quarter century…
No, it’s not landlocked - it has a small stretch of coast at the southern tip. The reason for invading Kuwait was oil.
Water and sewage provisions are well below pre-war levels
1.2m telephones in the country before the war - half a million still out of action in Baghdad alone.
Electrical supplies have only just exceeded pre-war levels
School attendance reportedly dropping, although no statistics available
Some of the statements are such outright lies (such as girls never before attending school) that they’re not worth rebutting with cites. And the destruction of Iraq’s health system by sanctions should be well-known to anybody who’d followed the situation there for the past decade. Twenty years ago Iraq had medical facilities to rival any Western country.
It’s a typical ruse in dictatorships, to place a page in the front of textbooks extolling the virtues of the leader - and probably having his portrait hung on the classroom wall, too.
Oh that is so ignorant that it makes me question the source of the information for the other claims. Is he not aware that there are educated women on the Iraqi Governing Council?
http://womensissues.about.com/cs/iraq/a/iraqi_women.htm
http://womenstrike8m.server101.com/English/iraqiwomenleagueopenletter.htm
According to the Iraqi Women’s League, they proposed and won rights to education, employment and inheritance after the 1958 Revolution. It may have taken a while, but as evidenced by the first link, it was in place by the 1970’s and 1980’s.
Keep in mind that reporters and journalists are not the only ones who provide information to the American people. The President of the United States should be*. If all of these things were true you can bet that he would not be distancing himself from the press so much. He would be addressing the country and going through this good news with us step by step.
Instead, he recently barely mentioned just a little good news coming out of Iraq. He told us that things were going to get worse and that we could expect chaos. That was the President speaking – not John Kerry.
Any idea how this soldier had verified all of this information? Did he by any chance get it from his CO? Did he have time to run the statistics on all of this while on his tour of duty?
That one is actually true. I’ve been able to verify it with several sources that date back to last fall. (Which means maybe the media did want us to know after all. :rolleyes: This one for example:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2001787201_historyiraq10.html
But wait! You’re not going to believe this!
Talk about revisionist history!!!
Please. Does the OP have any cites that provide any proof?
We’re talking about a textbook example of glurge here. Amazing statistics pulled out of a hat, an appeal that you “pass it on”, a good dose of patriotic chest-beating, and all from a ‘man of the people’ GI Joe, one of us, challenging those nasty politicians who would talk our country down!
The list contains a number of items that are quite clearly BS and are calculated to flatter the prejudices of the reader. I think the “field sanitation and hand washing techniques” one is a real gem. Are we to believe that the USA has brought the miracle of soap to the unwashed Iraqis?? And naturally the Iraqis want to be just like “our Country”, as it is the apex that all aspire too. :rolleyes:
OK, now this is scary - the level of ignorance in the wholesale repetition of these ‘facts’ extends up to Congressman Henry Hyde (scroll down)
There’s an ‘alternative version’ 
here: Welcome republicanpress.com - BlueHost.com
The source for much of this was the white house’s Results in Iraq: 100 Days Toward Security & Freedom which was released Aug 8, 2003. The bit about refurbishment of 1500 schools showed up in the president’s October 18 radio address.
The same list of accomplishments has been floating around for nearly 7 months.
The school refurbishment program is not without its critics, and chronic sabotage has reduced oil exports to ~1 million BPD.
I can see very little that compares between the two
