Let Iraqis Do It, George

A year after the US invasion, when the man on the street in Iraq was asked what his biggest concern was, the flat response was "security". Now, two years later, the American press rarely ventures out anymore to conduct interviews. Administration officials and the pro-administration pundits blame the present flow of negative stories from Iraq on a news media that either has a liberal agenda or a penchant for reporting only bad stuff.

You tend to give credence to at least the latter, because all you ever see on your hometown evening news is murder and mayhem. There is, however, a qualitative difference between the local TV news' "If it bleeds, it leads" paradigm and reporting the Iraq situation. This difference is best illustrated by the fact a cab ride to the airport in your city costs considerably less than the going rate of $36,000.00 for a ride to the Baghdad Airport from the Green Zone. The press doesn't conduct man on the street interviews in Iraq anymore because it's no longer safe to do so.

Security in Iraq is mishegoss, a complete cluster-[see VP Cheney's expletive in the Senate]. The US is trying to train Iraqis to secure their country, but the task is daunting if not futile. This is because the country is in shambles. Its infrastructure and economy are destroyed. So what we're really asking the Iraqis to protect with their lives is the possibility of a future country.

The situation is a result of tragically flawed and failed neo-con policies, but the blame game won't help the Iraqi people or ourselves at this point. What could help is the Iraqi-zation of Iraq. That is, let the Iraqis themselves rebuild their country: our money; their labor; their management; their companies. When that happens, the Iraqis will have a country to protect. 

Up until now, KB & R and a host of other US and British companies have overseen reconstruction and failed, although they have reaped phenomenal profits nonetheless. War profiteers have existed for as long as war itself, and cutting them out of the action might be politically impossible. Then too, the Shiites and Sunni may war in any case, and the Jihadists may be too entrenched now to reverse the chaos. Only "Iraqi-zation " of reconstruction could succeed, but perhaps it's too late for even that.

 One thing's for sure, we are going to start winding down troop levels, not because of any demonstrated metric of success, but because the well of volunteers is running dry. If the administration thinks it can reinstate the draft, it should be mindful that the public knows the current and previous presidents were both effectively draft dodgers. This means a draft packed with a cornucopia of deferments could not be sold to the American people, which in turn means that the sons of the upper middle class would be drafted, trained, deployed, and killed in the same proportion as the drafted sons and daughters of the poor. I've worked for wealthy Republicans who will follow the Jane Fonda tour like Dead-Heads before they go along with that plan!