Iraq: The real story

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Five years ago last week 170,000 American and coalition soldiers, sailors, airmen, Guardsmen and Marines launched Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). When they commenced their attack they were outnumbered nearly 3-to-1 by Saddam Hussein's military, yet it took U.S. troops just three weeks to liberate Baghdad. No military force in history has ever gone further, faster or with fewer casualties.

Despite a lightning-fast victory over the dictator's Army, Republican Guards and Fedayeen, the challenge of leaving Iraq better than we found it proved daunting and dangerous. Unfortunately, few Americans know what their countrymen in uniform have accomplished in the Land Between the Rivers.

On the way to Baghdad, American and allied forces were accompanied by more than 700 print and broadcast reporters. Once the dictator's capital was liberated, most of the media elites either headed for home — or sequestered themselves inside the "Green Zone." There, they bought photos, footage and "news" from cameramen and "reporters" traveling with our adversaries.

As coverage shifted from the warriors to Washington, political controversy, casualties and missteps — inevitable in any war — became the focus of "war reporting." Courageous Americans serving in the line of fire found themselves cast as bit-players in a partisan firestorm. Bright, brave young Americans in the line of fire — not our enemies — became the targets for the mainstream media and powerful politicians.

The New York Times described those serving in our military as nothing but "poor kids from Mississippi, Texas and Alabama who couldn't get a decent job." A U.S. senator likened them to those who served Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Cambodia's Pol Pot and a presidential candidate claimed those who don't do well in school will "get stuck in Iraq." In 2005, after the press had been beating Abu Ghraib like a rented mule for a year, Newsweek invented a fictitious story about U.S. military guards flushing a Koran down a toilet — and precipitated riots throughout the Muslim world.

The consistent "spin" for five years has been to "get out of Iraq" — and despite extraordinary gains in the last 12 months, it hasn't stopped. On Monday, Sen. Hillary Clinton described how she intends to get our troops out of "a war we cannot win." Two days later Sen. Barack Obama claimed "our military is badly overstretched" and promised that "I will immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq" and to "remove all of them in 16 months."

Thankfully America's soldiers, sailors, airmen, Guardsmen and Marines have generally ignored the press and the politicians. Instead, they have been busy fighting a vicious adversary — and winning. Here are some inconvenient facts about why they believe they can — and must — finish the job in Iraq:

• Despite how they have been portrayed, today's all-volunteer U.S. military is the brightest, best-educated, -trained and -equipped armed force ever fielded by any nation. More than 1.6 million U.S. military personnel have served in Iraq. Notwithstanding the perception that our armed forces are stretched beyond the breaking point, re-enlistments have never been higher and every service is exceeding its recruiting goals.

• Iraq's police, military and security forces, widely depicted as ineffective or worse, have grown by more than 100,000 in the last year and have assumed responsibility for 9 of 18 provinces.

• In the last 12 months the Interior Ministry has opened 13 new training facilities, the Iraqi military now has 134 active combat, infrastructure and Special Operations battalions with a total of nearly 647,000 Iraqis who have volunteered to serve in uniform.

• After we first reported on the "Al-Anbar Awakening" in December 2006, the "Sons of Iraq" movement has crossed the Sunni-Shia sectarian divide and now has 91,000 members. In the same time-frame, attacks against Iraqi civilians and coalition forces have dropped by more than 70 percent.

• Since 2004, more than 4,000 civil reconstruction projects — including 325 for electrical distribution and 320 water treatment facilities have been completed. More than 3,000 schools and 75 hospitals, clinics and health-care facilities have been renovated or built from the ground up while nearly 3,200 primary health- care providers and physicians were being trained.

• There are now more than 100 privately owned radio stations, 31 television stations and 600 newspapers published in Iraq — a nation just slightly larger than California.

• In February, crude oil production exceeded 2.4 million barrels per day and this year the Iraqi economy is projected to grow by 7 percent.

In the half decade since OIF began, our Fox News "War Stories" team has made nine trips to Iraq — spending months in the field embedded with more than 30 U.S. combat units — from "shock and awe," to the "thunder runs," to gunfights in "bloody Anbar," to "the surge." The brave Americans we have documented deserve better than what they have gotten from the mainstream media and far too many of our politicians.

Oliver North is a nationally syndicated columnist and hosts "War Stories-Iraq: Five Years in the Fight For Freedom," a chronicle of courage, commitment and sacrifice on the Fox News Channel tonight at 8:00 p.m. EDT.