Odierno Reflects on Iraq's Rebuilding
By Tam Cummings / Fort Hood Public Affairs
FORT HOOD, Texas, May 26, 2004 — Soldiers fighting insurgents and terrorism in Operation Iraqi Freedom are also busy erecting educational, governmental, internal security and agricultural systems from the ground up, in the most complex military operation Maj. Gen. Ray Odierno said he has ever been involved in.“Our soldiers saw the condition of that country,” the commander of the 4th Infantry Division said recently. “We're not rebuilding a country, but building a country. There was no infrastructure, except in the palace complexes.”
Odierno said a typical palace complex might consist of 70 buildings. Iraqi citizens living within the complex would have electricity, sewer systems, running water and many features similar to those in the United States. But the majority of the 28 million Iraqis didn't live inside Saddam's private complexes.The process of building the country began within weeks of the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. “After the initial 30-day period (of the war), things settled down. We went out into the communities and reached out to the people,” Odierno said. “We began really building the infrastructure. You figure people have had no running water for 15 years. No sewer system and lights and electricity for maybe eight hours each day. That was the condition of the country.”
Odierno said much is changing. “The roads are a mess and no one was allowed to watch outside TV. You couldn't really own a car,” he said. “Now, 95 percent of the country has electricity at least 20 hours a day. We built sewers and people have running water for the first time in their lives.”
The soldiers are working to build needed systems in all areas of the country, he said. “Iraq has a tremendous amount of wealth because of water. What makes them different than any other country in the Middle East is water, not oil. There is a great potential for agriculture. These people can support themselves,” he said.
The Tigris and Euphrates rivers divide Iraq into three sections and two large interior lakes are found in the central area of the country. American soldiers have worked to develop a system for farmers to pump water to crops and fields, Odierno said.
Soldiers are also building proper school facilities for the children in Iraq. Troops of the 4 th Infantry Division undertook the start of that process before they redeployed to Fort Hood.
“Think of a mud hut,” the general said. “No blackboards, no desks, just a room with sand for a floor. There were 2,000 schools in our area and we got to 50 percent of them before we left. Now there are blackboards, desks, books, pencils, paper, nothing they ever had before.”
Odierno said the soldiers also encountered a problem with the school books the children were forced to use. “Every textbook had Saddam's picture on every other page. We had to completely rewrite their textbooks,” he said.
Starting up local city governments included changing some national aspects of the country. “We completely changed their currency in five months,” he said.
Then the soldiers went to work locally. “We stood up three provisional governments,” Odierno said. “We stood up city councils. Who did this? Lieutenants, captains, sergeants, battalion commanders. How did they do it? They knew how our system of government works.”
Showing Iraqis how local governments oversee law naturally went hand in hand with the soldiers' second mission of the war, “to stand up the Iraqi security forces, starting from scratch. There was no police force, not like what we have in the U. S.,” Odierno explained. “We had to stand up a police force, and we had to stand up an army.:
The general said he is encouraged by how the Iraqi people are rising to the occasion. “The people that volunteered in the beginning, at a risk to their own lives, those are the real Iraqi people. There are a lot of tremendously brave Iraqis involved and doing great things every day,” he said.
The impact of the soldiers and their work in Iraq will be felt in time, he said. “We are committed for the long haul. This was a brutal, dictatorial regime. The people know nothing less than to hate the West after 35 years of brutality under Saddam.
“We can't change all of that in a year. It's going to happen over time,” Odierno said. “It's going to happen.”
