Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to You mean your interpretation of data? Yeah, right.

I don't have the time to keep correcting the false statements here.
Tom Brosz — (archived)

Iraq, despite Saddam's terrible rule was thriving economically compared with Afghanistan. The average citizen's life has gone downhill since the invasion and I'd be willing to bet that nearly every one of them has had some loved one affected adversely by the occupation.

The average Sunni's lifestyle has gone downhill. The vast majority of Iraqis, the Shiites, the Kurds, and smaller groups like the Marsh Arabs, have a different view of what life was like in the "good old days." Pull the Sunnis out of any poll and see what happens.

When you talk to a Sunni about how things have changed, you are talking to the equivalent of a white South African. Keep that in mind.

For every family that mourns a death from the war, there are twenty to thirty mourning losses from Saddam's regime. They have memories, too.

Now a few items, from this source:

Before the war, Baghdad got 16 to 24 hours of electricity. Now it's down to 7.8. What you don't hear in the papers is that the rest of Iraq got 4-8 hours a day, now up to about 11.

Per capital GDP was 802 in 2002. It was 1,051 in 2005. There are twice the number of cars there were before the war, and eight times the number of telephone subscribers, including land lines and cellular. Pre-war Iraq had no cell phones.

There are fifty times the number of internet subscribers, not counting informal cafe use.

54 commercial TV stations, 114 commercial radio stations, and 268 independent magazines and newspapers. Under Saddam, all these numbers were zero.

Teachers salaries have gone from $2 to $100 a month. Number of primary school students went from 3.6 to 4.3 million (as of 2004).

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