Tossed Salad

Want is one only of five giants on the road of reconstruction; the others are Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, and Idleness.”-Baron William Henry Beveridge

Apparently, progress now has a new definition. Well, if you use the Bush Dictionary of American English, anyway. In the three years since “liberating” Iraq, our President today trumpeted the progress made in there.

Gone are the days of the Hussein dictatorship. Replaced, instead, by relentless sectarian violence. An insurgency that 10 months ago was in its last throes, according to Vice President Dick Cheney, has given way to the deaths of 50 - 60 Iraqis per day in tit-for-tat attacks between Sunnis and Shia. No longer to Iraqis live in fear that if they speak out against Saddam Hussein they might disappear, now their only fear is leaving the house and turning up in a mass grave somewhere outside Baghdad as a result of their religious beliefs. Now that, my friends, is progress.

Only half the country remains without electricity or potable water. Gas lines in one of the most oil rich nations in the world are down to a mere twelve hours- if a suicide bomber doesn’t muck up the works. More proof of our steady progress.

Are troops are hardly making progress, rather they seem to be treading water under the weight of a hundred pound block. Rather than increase their numbers and do the job right, we instead insist on handing more and more responsibility over to a crumbling police force awash in sectarian militias. Surely not for the benefit of anyone other than those in Washington concerned not for our troops or the Iraqi people, rather out of concern for the upcoming 2006 and 2008 elections.

No one wants to send more people into Iraq, but 60% of the American population supported entering the fray, unsupported by the world community, 3 years ago. Now in a place where much of the population lacks electricity, gas, water, and functioning schools, where business owns can’t open normal hours, violence foments. The two problems are inextricably linked. Without basic needs met, unrest, resentment, and violence increase. Without greater troop numbers to maintain security while also providing protection to contractors attempting to rebuild infrastructure destroyed during Shock and Awe, the situation will only deteriorate.

Germany, after World War II, was occupied for more than 40 years- and that was with an international contingent. So here we are, three years in with a pseudo-coalition, already calling for our troops to be brought home. The fault lies both on an administration who declared we would be welcomed and that Iraq would be a cake walk, and on an American public who has become so accustomed to microwaves and broadband that we actually believed that nation building was a one to two endeavor.

Realistically, progress takes time, even more time under periods of gross mismanagement. For us to pull out of Iraq involves international support in rebuilding and a UN Peacekeeping force, both of which are mere pipe dreams for as long as we belligerently act as though in the UN, only US opinion matters. We may be the richest and most powerful country in the world, but that only makes us shrewd, not smart. The idea of an international community is based on dialog, debate, and common ground, not US world supremacy.

The fact is, we broke Iraq. As such, we have bought it. The post-war sectarian violence is proof that Iraq is nothing more than a giant china shop, and the US is the 3 ton bull that took a detour through it on our search for terrorists.

Perhaps, when we can say that the Iraqi people do welcome us and America is more secure, we will also be able to say we’ve made progress.

To be welcomed in Iraq, we must give the populace the basic necessities we take for granted day-to-day. Simply put, if America is to be any more secure than we were March 18, 2003, then it is incumbent upon us to leave Iraq better than we found it. And when it is, perhaps then we can whip out the classic definition of progress.