HEROES WHO MAKE THE FOURTH OF JULY, A DAY OF INDEPENDENCE

[Tylergal]

The Oklahoman Editorial
WE wish Barack Obama and others who can't wait to get out of Iraq could read an e-mail sent last week to the family of Steven Farley, a Guthrie man who died while trying to help bring stability to strategically vital Sadr City. The e-mail was written by Dr. Hayder Jabar, a member of the Sadr City District Council and a survivor of a bombing at the municipal building that killed Farley and three other Americans.Think about that: Farley's impact was such that a man with whom he worked is planning to change his son's name to honor Farley's memory. Could there be a greater tribute?

 "i dont know what i say because i crying and my eye full with tears wherei write this letter,” Jabar wrote to Farley's son, Brett, and is used verbatim here with the son's permission. "my brothers be proud of your courageous father, he is our hero. i will chang my son's name from yousef (jouseph) to steven to see hime infront of my eye always.”

Farley, a Navy reservist, was running a family cleaning service in Guthrie when he volunteered to go to Iraq to serve as a liaison between the U.S. military and local Iraqi governments. He had worked since May of last year with Sadr City officials. "My father explained that the progress in Sadr City is critical because it represents progress in general for Iraq — as Sadr City goes, so goes the country,” Brett Farley wrote in an e-mail.

The week before he was killed, Steven Farley and several councilmen realized the chairman of the District Council was a surrogate of Muqtad al Sadr. They forced the man to resign. A few days later, shortly before the start of a council meeting where a new District Council chairman was to be elected, the bomb went off. Steven Farley believed the planned vote "was the most important event in the Iraq campaign,” his son said, because "he was convinced it would start a cascading effect that would result in rapid rebuilding, growth, and finally sustainable self-government in Sadr City and in Iraq.”

That effort has now suffered a terrible blow. Brett Farley said that despite a $1 million bounty on his head, his father was optimistic about the prospects in Sadr City and believed "that helping achieve freedom for the Iraqi people ... was something these dear people deserved. And he was willing to die to give it to them.”

Steven Farley, 57, will be buried this week with full military honors. He leaves behind a wife and family, and many friends who will never forget him, here and in Iraq. As his son said, and the note from his father's Iraqi colleague makes clear, "He loved them and they loved him.

[nonesuche]

Yes Guthrie was indeed a hero.

I don't think many americans can imagine the atrocities that our servicemen witness on a daily basis in Iraq, for this is a country where human rights is so low on the list for decades that many of us would feel sheer horror in the enormity of it.

My Rick served in the first Gulf War and he related situations he had witnessed and honestly he was a very compassionate man - which is why I was shocked when he stated unemotionally that soon the entire region would turn themselves into a "glass bowl" meaning they would likely bomb each other off the face of the planet.

Bomb, horrors, bloodshed all for their religion?

The equation is so wrong........when did Americans no longer care about the means by which countries achieve their goals or do to their own citizens ? Unlike casaeu I truly do believe we are a small planet and true 'humanity' should matter.