40 Things you may not have heard about recently:

1. The first battalion of the new Iraqi Army has graduated and is on active duty.
2. Over 60,000 Iraqis now provide security to their fellow citizens.
3. Nearly all of Iraq’s 400 courts are functioning.
4. The Iraqi judiciary is fully independent.
5. Oct. 6, power generation hit 4,518 megawatts-exceeding prewar average.
6. All 22 universities and 43 technical institutes and colleges are open, as are nearly all primary and secondary schools.
7. By Oct. 1, the Coalition rehabbed 1,500 schools, 500 more than scheduled.
8. Teachers earn from 12 to 25 times their former salaries.
9. All 240 hospitals and more than 1200 clinics are open.
10. Doctors salaries are at least eight times what they were under Saddam.
11. Pharmaceutical distribution has gone from nothing to 700 tons in May to a current total of 12,000 tons.
12. The Coalition has administered 22 million vaccinations to Iraq’s children.
13. A Coalition program has cleared over 14,000 kilometers of Iraq’s 27,000 kilometers of weed choked canals that irrigate tens of thousands of farms. This project has created jobs for more than 100,000 Iraqi men and women.
14. We have restored over three-quarters of prewar telephone services and over two-thirds of the potable water production.
15. 95 percent of all prewar bank customers have service and first-time customers are opening accounts daily.
16. Iraqi banks are making loans to finance businesses.
17. The central bank is fully independent.
18. Iraq has one of the worlds most growth-oriented investment & banking laws.
19. Iraq has a single, unified currency for the first time in 15 years.
20. Satellite TV dishes are legal.
21. Foreign journalists aren’t on 10-day visas paying mandatory and extortionate fees to the Ministry of Information for minders and other government spies.
22. There is no Ministry of Information.
23. There are more than 170 newspapers.
24. Foreign journalists (and everyone else) are free to come and go.
25. A nation that had not one single element — legislative, judicial or executive — of a representative government, now does.
26. In Baghdad alone residents have selected 88 advisory councils. Baghdad’s first democratic transfer of power in 35 years happened when the city council elected its new chairman.
27. Today in Iraq chambers of commerce, business, school and professional
organizations are electing their leaders all over the country.
28. 25 ministers, selected by the most representative governing body in Iraq’s history, run the day-to-day business of government.
29. The Iraqi government regularly participates in international events. Since July the Iraqi government has been represented in over two dozen international meetings, including those of the UN General Assembly, the Arab League, the World Bank and IMF and, today, the Islamic Conference Summit. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs today announced that it is reopening over 30 Iraqi embassies around the world.
30. Shia religious festivals that were all but banned, aren’t.
31. For the first time in 35 years, in Karbala thousands of Shiites celebrate the pilgrimage of the 12th Imam.
32. The Coalition has completed over 13,000 reconstruction projects, large and small, as part of a strategic plan for the reconstruction of Iraq.
33. Uday and Queasy are dead — and no longer feeding innocent Iraqis to the zoo lions, raping the young daughters of local leaders to force cooperation, torturing Iraq’s soccer players for losing games, or murdering critics.
34. Children aren’t imprisoned/murdered if parents disagree with the government.
35. Political opponents aren’t imprisoned, tortured, executed, maimed, or are forced to watch their families die for disagreeing with Saddam.
36. Millions of long-suffering Iraqis no longer live in perpetual terror.
37. Qatar is reforming education to give more choices to parents.
38. Jordan is accelerating market economic reforms.
39. Saddam is gone. (O.K. the news did report that one)
40. Iraq is free.

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