Major Robert Freitag

Thanks to people like Major Freitag who is serving his and our country in Iraq and who is helping to make life better for a people emerging from decades of severe oppression. Major Freitag states in today’s JS that “We’re clearly providing the best health care (Iraqis) have had in their lives. Local Iraqis brought in a 6-month old baby who was dying and we put all our resources to save the child. Those things are going on inside Abu Ghraib today, not torture and abuse.” While Major Freitag said the country is still unstable and full of violence, he wishes the stories of troops bettering the lives of the Iraqi people were told. “The experience taught me to appreciate what I have and how fortunate we are. Beyond that, I think it will take a while to come to grips with how it’s made me look at things.”

Iraq and the Middle East have suffered under oppression of many types over many centuries. Everyone should have understood that hatreds, jealousy, lack of education and lack of manufactured products or other goods to export, were not going to be quickly changed in a decade or two. When politicians, historians, analysts and commentators make some type of comparison with Iraq and with our own Civil War and Reconstruction these thinking people realize that democracy in Iraq was not going to be a happy marriage of religions and tribal customs and ethnic cultures. After all, we still, after almost 150 years, struggle with the aftermath of the war that was supposed to have ended in 1865.

Thanks, Major Freitag for honorably serving your country like the overwhelming majority of all United States citizens serving in one capacity or another, are doing or have done, in Iraq.