A couple great posts today on the real story in Iraq. At Instapundit, a reader emails a report on a recent talk by the commander of the 1st Calvary Division:

Said bin Laden and Zarqawi made a HUGE mistake when bin laden went public with naming Zarqawi the "prince" of al Quaeda in Iraq. Said that what the Iraqis saw and heard was a Saudi telling a Jordanian that his job was to kill Iraqis. HUGE mistake. It was one of the biggest factors in getting Iraqis who were on the "fence" to jump off on the side of the coalition and the new gov't ...

Pointed out that we all heard from the media about the 100 Iraqis killed as they were lined up to enlist in the police and security service. What the media didn't point out was that the next day there 300 lined up in the same place ...

Said that of all the money appropriated for Iraq, not a cent was earmarked for agriculture. Said that Iraq could feed itself completely and still have food for export but no one thought about it. Said the Cav started working with Texas A&M on ag projects and had special hybrid seeds sent to them through Jordan. TAM analyzed soil samples and worked out how and what to plant. Said he had an E7 from Belton, TX (just down the road from Ft. Hood) who was almost single-handedly rebuilding the ag industry in the Baghdad area ...

Said he could hire hundreds of Iraqis daily for $7 to $10 a day to work on sewer, electric, water projects, etc. but that the contracting rules from CONUS applied so he had to have $500,000 insurance policies in place in case the workers got hurt. Not kidding. The CONUS peacetime regs slowed everything down, even if they could eventually get waivers for the regs ...

Why, so long after we should have resolved this kind of stupidity, haven't the powers that be seen fit to inject some common sense in the contracting rules? My guess: it's directly related to a civil servant, lost somewhere in the bowels of DC, that just doesn't care, because they don't have to, because civil service management is an oxymoron. On the military side, "innovate, adapt, and overcome" is not just a cliche, and a single NCO is responsible for rebuilding the agriculture industry in the Baghdad area. On the civil service side, rules that hamstring the military (and get soldiers killed as a result) can't get fixed. What's the difference? In the military, merit is promoted. In the civil service, longevity is promoted.

And over at Mudville Gazette:

For several months while I was in Iraq I felt I had a second mission - not to be over dramatic but nearly as important as my official one (though my priorities were always straight). That second-level effort was to counter the doom and gloom reporting that was being sent out from the various hotel rooms in Baghdad for re-writes on international desks in newsrooms in London, Melbourne, New York, Washington, LA, and points between.

Stop and think about that for a minute. The troops at the front had to counter the negative (and non-factual) reporting of America's media. Don't just read these words - really, think about the ramifications. America's media had let it's readers/viewers down. By design or by incompetence there was never anything in major media to indicate that Iraq's elections would be anything other than a dismal, bloody, and catastrophic failure. Overall they were guilty of incredible ignorance or unpardonable crimes.

Go read his post, he has plenty of examples.

Something I wrote last June fits in nicely here.  ¶ 7:55 PM