The situation in Iraq has improved and will continue to get better

We cannot, I know, remake the world, nor do I believe we should. We cannot stamp out evil, I know. But this time we were morally right and our economic and strategic interests were involved. I submit that just because we can't do everything doesn't mean that we should do nothing.

We must have the moral courage to see this through, to do whatever it takes to secure responsible government for the Iraqi people. Having decided to topple Saddam, we cannot abandon those who trust us. I fear we will quit as the horrors of war come into our living rooms. Look at the stories you are getting from the media today. The steady drip, drip, drip of bad news may destroy our will to fulfill the obligations we have assumed. WE ARE NOT GETTING THE WHOLE TRUTH FROM THE NEWS MEDIA. The news you watch, listen to and read is highly selective. Good news doesn't sell. Ninety per cent of the damage you see on tv was caused by Iraqis, not the US. All the damage you see to schools, hospitals, power generation facilities, refineries, pipelines and water supplies, as well as shops, museums, and semi-public buildings (like hotels) was caused either by the Iraqi army in its death throes or Iraqi civilians looting and rioting.

The day after the war was over, there was nearly no power being generated in Iraq. Forty-five days later, 1/3 of the total national potential of 8000 MW was up and running. Downed power lines are being repaired and were about 70 per cent complete when I left. There is water purification where little or none existed before ... this time to everyone.

Oil is 95 per cent of the Iraqi GNP. In order for Iraq to survive, it must sell oil. All the damage to the oilfields was done by the Iraqi army or looters. The 14-storey office building of the Southern Iraq Oil Company in Basra was torched by Ba'athists, destroying all of the books, records and computers of the company. Today, the refinery at Bayji is at 75 per cent of capacity. The crude pipeline between Kirkuk and Bayji has been repaired, though the Ba'athists keep trying to disrupt it.

If we are doing all this for the people, why are they shooting us?

The general population isn't. By my sample, 90 per cent are glad we came and the majority doesn't want us to leave for some time to come but there are still plenty of bad guys, the Ba'athists who lived well under Saddam. The thugs of the old regime still hope to return to power, and there are plenty of them, mostly located in Sunni areas. Then too, Saddam, in the Ramadan amnesty, let every murderer, butcher, rapist and violent criminal loose on his own people. There are interests, including organised crime, with a desire for anarchy and profit. There are disruptive forces from Saudi Arabia, Iran and Syria.

We saw poverty on a scale that I have never witnessed except in pictures of Haiti. I saw one little girl: she was slender, very pretty, about 5 or 6 years old, in a tattered dress with a broad red hem, part of which was torn and dragging in the dirt. She would touch her heart and make hungry gestures. She was duplicated a thousand times during the journey.

The poverty in Iraq is a sharp contrast to the lives of Saddam and his sons. Saddam alone, not counting Ouday and Qusay and the leading Ba'athists, had 43 palaces. We are using several for civilian government. The one where OPCA is located is the main republican palace occupying more than 2000 acres. It is a monument to narcissism, four 25-foot tall heads of Saddam decorate the front of the palace, and his portraits and statues are everywhere.

We went to a second palace by the airport. It is surrounded by a lake that was created by diverting the Euphrates water, which limited agricultural irrigation downstream. His palace in Basra was used by him only once, I am told.

Basra functions fairly well except for the power. There are six lines into the city but it does not have a standard power grid. Saddam used power and other essentials as a method of punishing a city of 3 million! He would cut power for days to punish them. When I tell you the temperatures there, you will understand how bad that was. I am told that in high summer, it will hit 155 degrees (Farenheit), even 160! He has made no investments in this area, which is overwhelmingly Shi'ite. He has few friends there. Consequently, it is easier for the Brits to govern there, unlike Baghdad, and they are doing a good job of it. They are doing it at the moment by using pre-war personnel, perhaps contrary to Brenner's de-Ba'athification order.

The problem with Brenner's policy is that it removes almost all of the people who ran the country. The Brits have been pragmatic: they have largely left the judges and police in place and are removing them as they see the need and they are able to train and replace the bad ones. That was our problem in Haiti, we trained a police force but did not put the judiciary in place, so that the jails just filled up and then overcrowding forced criminals out. And the Haitian police have largely quit. (Ouday had a solution to overcrowding: when he received a complaint of overcrowding, he went to the prison and personally shot every 3rd prisoner.)

We want to keep Iraq a secular state, and that will present some difficulties as there is no real concept of separation of church and state in Islam. Attaturk was a true revolutionary where this was concerned. The tribal and sharia (religious) courts are functioning, and if we don't get a move on, they will replace the civil and criminal courts.