Iraq War: Mississippi Baptists on Iraq (1)

I'm not thrilled about the push of conservative Christian missionaries into Iraq. It's bad timing, at the very least.

But I did come across some relatively recent articles in the Baptist Record, the weekly paper of the Mississippi [Southern] Baptist Convention. It's interesting, because the general perspective is very supportive of the Iraq War. So some of their observations are interesting because they are kind of "testimony against interest." Or at least they don't fit the approved position of war fans. Here, from the 11/13/03 issue, is the kind of sugary story you would expect to see, datelined from "Central Iraq":

Children ran up to the five Southern Baptist men from Calvary Church in Winston-Salem, N.C., like they were long-lost uncles, giggling and jostling to get close. Mothers handed over their babies to be held, and the few men around extended greetings. [Any bets on how many of the American church group spoke Arabic?]

If there were any anti-American feelings, they were well-hidden in this impoverished Shiite Muslim village, where some families have had realtives killed or tortured under the regime of Saddam Hussein.

"It reminded me of kids coming up to Jesus," marveled Jim Walker, a digital press artist from East Bend, N.C.

But later in the article, we see something that would definitely not make Rummy happy to see someone reporting (my emphasis):

In one neighborhood, hundreds of food boxes were delivered to a school building in a poor area far from downtown. People have built modest homes of mud bricks on land taken by squatter's rights. Raw sewage runs through the dirt streets and livestock wanders unimpeded.

When we think of power outages in America, we think of a few hours at most with the lights in the house not working. The kind of extended and chronic power outages experienced in Iraq since the US-British invasion last May means the sewage pumps don't work and that raw sewage runs through the streets. This is not the first report I've seen of this. It's one clue as to why the occupation isn't universally popular in Iraq.