WHERE WAS CNN?

A surgeon writes from Iraq.

''Saddam Hussein allowed his people to exist in the conditions of the 19th Century while he surrounded himself and his family with opalescence. Read on and see what a difference your money is making in the lives of people who have never known something we take for granted - like a hospital surgical suite.

Then there are the other things they are getting for the first time such as sewage treatment, water on tap, electricity, telephones in their homes, schools, books, storm drains to stop flooding and the things you grew up expecting to have outside of your door have not been built in Iraq in the last 35 years.

We didn't break them in the war - they just were not ever there.''...

Every so often I get a chance to watch CNN and its continued ''reporting'' of only the negative comments has turned my stomach...

I am just one man, but I have heard nothing but happiness expressed by the Iraqis that I have come in contact with.

Case in point; I was walking to the CPA late this afternoon with one of the soldiers from the unit, and this gaggle of kids (probably 10 of them) was walking towards us. All of a sudden, one of them broke from the pack and ran over to me. He couldn't have been any more than 10 or 11, and he came up to me and gave me a ''high five,'' which I returned. He then grabbed my hand, kissed it, and said, ''I love you, thank you, thank you very much.'' And the rest of the kids chimed in with their, ''thanks to the Americans.''

Where the hell was CNN for that? Where was CNN when I was eating lunch the other day at the newly opened ''Cofe Shoppe'' - a local restaurant operating in what used to be a gas station about 500 yards from the CSH - and the locals were coming up to us and thanking us for freeing their beloved Iraq from the hands of the madman Saddam. ''No other country could have done this,'' they said. ''We waited for the Americans to come, because no other country cared about us, and no other country could have done this as the Americans did.''