| Friday, April 11, 2003 |
15:58 - (Yester)day of the looters
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/04/11/wbasra11.xml&sSheet=
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Don't declare Iraq lost to permanent anarchy and chaos just yet.
The meeting had barely begun when the officer proclaimed: "Gentlemen, I am here to get this power station up and running. I've got engineers and contractors itching to get started. Is there anything you would like to add?"
"Actually," said the station's planning manager, Adel Hussein al-Shati, a stout, elderly man who once studied at Portsmouth Polytechnic, "we'd like to do it ourselves." He then explained how long it would take and how many men he needed.
"Well that's a relief," the officer said. "Get to work."
"Of course," Mr al-Shati said. "This is our job and this is our country".
That's in Basra. The same thing will soon be happening all over Iraq.
When it's the Iraqis themselves who will be (willingly) doing the bulk of the reconstruction and the reorganization of the country, they'll increasingly be some of the most realistic and urbane people in the Middle East. We'll have removed just one major roadblock, the one they couldn't have eliminated on their own-- Saddam. We won't, however, have built them a new country out of charity. If there's one lesson we need to have learned by now, it's that charity doesn't win us friends. Removal of obstacles does. Charity just breeds resentment.
And it seems to me that to assume that without a dictatorial hand on their shoulders-- either Saddam's or Bush's-- the Iraqis will automatically devolve into the kill-or-be-killed mud-hut proto-civilization of the Y2K episode of The Simpsons is to suggest that they're a bunch of little brown savages.
Somehow I don't think that's a fair characterization.
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