An Iraq in Progress
Though eclipsed by news of unrest and violence, positive developments are improving life and foretelling more advances.
Baghdad is a relentlessly ugly city. The main architectural feature is bomb damage. Streets are lined with drab concrete facades and faded, hand-painted signs.
So the new cell phone stores - slickly designed and freshly painted, with flashy logos and sparkling plate-glass windows - jumped out at me when I returned to the Iraqi capital in February, having last been there in the fall. There seemed to be one on every other block.
The service had just been on just a few weeks when I arrived. Iraqi men lined up by the dozens outside the newly renovated main office for Iraqna, the mobile provider. They braved an obvious security threat to satisfy their thirst for communication technology in a city where many of the land lines still don't work.
It's hard to overstate the quality-of-life improvement that mobile phone service has represented for those few who can afford it. It has made doing business dramatically easier. Because of international sanctions, Iraq was one of the few countries that never had wireless phones. Now, the phones are selling at a rate of a thousand per week, and affluent Iraqis are downloading catchy ring tones.
By any measure, it's a postwar success story, and one of the few that didn't cost U.S. taxpayers a dime.
Yet very little has been reported in the Western news media about the creation of mobile phone service, though it is as much a salient fact of life in post-Saddam Hussein Baghdad as roadside bombs. The fact is, writing a feature on phones doesn't have priority when hotels are being blown up and contractors mutilated. That's just how the news business works - crisis drowns out progress, every time.
That information gap is something to consider if you're trying to evaluate whether the U.S. occupation of Iraq has been worth the cost.
The bad consequences of the U.S. engagement in Iraq - some self-inflicted, some just part of war's messy landscape - are on display for everyone to see. They are many, they are awful, and they may get worse before they get better.
But during the five months I have spent reporting in the country since March 2003, I have seen a lot of good that has come of this painful expenditure of blood and treasure - very real progress that has made life better for some Iraqis, and promises to make it exponentially better, over time. Much of it is hard to measure and easy to miss, but it's there.
This is hardly a new idea, but it's one worth contemplating after the most violent week in Iraq since tanks rolled into Baghdad in April 2003.
With unrest spreading across the country, this is clearly a dangerous phase. Coming after months of suicide bombings, relentless attacks on U.S. troops, and repeated assassinations of police officials, these latest images must make the place seem like Beirut or Mogadishu, which is exactly what those mutilated bodies in Fallujah recalled.
But the truth is, even now, most of Iraq isn't like that.
Even as battles rage, for example, U.S. contractors and their far more numerous Iraqi employees go to work each day at dozens of power stations across Iraq, laboring to repair the electrical grid. I visited two of them recently and was struck by how much work had been done, largely outside of the public eye.
Sparse electricity is among Iraqis' chief complaints, and there's no denying that the coalition botched things last summer by not launching an emergency program to fix the power.
But now there is one, and occupation officials say, credibly, that by June the power should be on an average of 18 hours a day throughout the country.
By the end of 2004, the coalition will have spent $7 billion fixing Iraq's electrical grid. Western contractors will have modernized the system in a way that would have taken Iraq years, if not decades, on its own. And so far, while there has been intermittent sabotage, the insurgents haven't been able to stop this progress.
Electricity is only part of it. Last fall, Congress appropriated $18.6 billion for Iraq reconstruction. What hasn't gotten much attention is that this money began to flow only a few weeks ago, a delay attributed to infighting between the U.S. State and Defense Departments.
The United States has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on reconstruction over the last year, fixing schools, training police, and building soccer fields. But the new program is on a much larger scale. American money will fix ports, bridges, water and sewage-treatment plants, prisons, fire stations and schools. Two local firms, Hill International of Marlton, N.J., and Weston Solutions of West Chester, are in on the action. You can peruse a list of the projects at www.rebuilding-iraq.net.
Over the next five years, these projects will transform Iraq. But because this spending is coming after a deeply controversial war, it gets all but ignored by that war's many critics.
Whatever one's feelings about the Bush administration's justifications for a preemptive war, what I find amazing is the argument that the war wasn't worth it because Iraq is worse off now that it was under Saddam.
"The war has liberated the Iraqis from Saddam, but the costs have been too great," former U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix said recently. Others, including American politicians, have made similar contentions.
It's debatable whether Iraqis are suffering more now. Economists who have studied Iraq say living standards, while still low, are higher than at any time since the 1991 Gulf War. Thanks to oil revenue and U.S. aid, government salaries are tenfold higher, fueling a consumer boom. Iraqis can say what they want, worship as they like, and criticize politicians for the first time in decades.
What is true is that Iraq is a more dangerous place for most people these days. Political violence is one factor, but an even more pernicious problem is crime. Much of Iraq remains lawless and violent. Murders are common, and most go unsolved. The kidnapping-for-ransom business is thriving.
That kind of insecurity is poisonous. Most Iraqis know someone who has been victimized, and that's one reason they lack confidence in the occupation forces. The Iraqi police are still barely functioning.
But take a step back. During the first year of the Allied occupations of Germany and Japan, people were literally starving. As John W. Dower recounted in "Embracing Defeat," his (2000) Pulitzer Prize-winning account of postwar Japan, hungry Japanese children would press their faces against the glass of the American commissary, where well-fed GIs did their shopping. By the thousands, women sold their bodies to American soldiers to feed their families.
The Germans and Japanese were clearly worse off than they had been before the war, not only in the first year of the occupation, but for many years after that. Marshall Plan aid didn't materialize until 1949. Yet nobody argued that the war wasn't worth it because the Germans and Japanese were suffering. The suffering didn't last.
Obviously, this analogy has its faults, not least because Japan attacked the United States, the Nazis orchestrated the Holocaust, and World War II was a war for national survival. Moreover, there was no resistance to the occupation of either defeated country.
Given the precarious situation in Iraq right now and the possibility that it all may fall apart, the critics eventually could be vindicated. But shouldn't we give it more than a year before we conclude that Iraq is beyond repair?
Will Blix change his stance if, five years from now, Iraq has been able to cobble together something resembling a democracy and its oil revenue is back to early 1980s levels, which was $70 billion a year?
Nobody can predict whether that will happen - certainly not the U.S. officials who pretend to do so with confidence. But it's way too early to use such words as disaster and fiasco, as the Spanish prime minister-elect did last month in announcing he would withdraw that country's troops.
Even after a week as bad as last week was, postwar Iraq is not defined solely by bombs and bullets and death. Whatever one thinks about the war, the U.S.-led reconstruction has brought progress and has laid the groundwork for more. The question now is whether it will be enough to pave the way for the Arab world's first real democracy.
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Contact staff writer Ken Dilanian at 215-854-2405 or kdilanian@tin.it. |
