Paging Mr. Trump

Driving through the "heavily fortified Green Zone", aka International Zone, today you can see where the Government of Iraq has begun clearing a massive lot near the British Embassy. The wooden sign at the entrance to the bulldozed lot depicts a picture of a palatial building, ostensibly the one to be constructed, and words stating that this is the future home of the Prime Minister's Guest House. Aren't there enough palaces here already? Why is anyone wasting money, (American tax payers' money?) on yet another palace?!

What Iraq needs is commercial not government infrastructure. Why an international hotel chain doesn't come in and build a Hyatt or Radisson within the Green Zone or the airport facility is beyond me. Even with the SOFA people are going to be coming in and out of Iraq for decades to come, and right now there's no place to house them aside from a handful of double-wides on a dusty lot near the airport.

The same could be said for Baghdad's international airport. Some bright investment company should purchase, and completely renovate it. Right now it's a dusty, dark shell that is being utilized at about 20% of it's full capacity. A renovation would be easy at this point. Again, there will be plenty of traffic through there in the next 20-30 years to make it well worth someone's effort and investment.

What's Not To LIke?

Iraqi woman stares into the camera. She's not about to smile.

After banging around this country for over a year I’ve just now come to the conclusion that Iraqis do not like us, not at all. I know that it’s hard to fathom, what’s not to like? Westerners in general, and Americans specifically, are happy, jovial, albeit culturally insensitive people that are here to rebuild their country. Yes, all of that is true, but in the eyes of the average Iraqi we were the ones that broke it in the first place. In the words of retired General Colin Powell, “… you break it, you own it”. To be truthful, our “ownership” has not been all that good.

At best the Iraqis tolerate us simply because we’re slowly making infrastructure improvements, we’re the only game in town at the moment, we employ a lot of them, and not having us here right now would be exponentially worse. At worst, they want to blow us up, and speed off to paradise.

The Iraqi people that I come in daily contact with have worked for years alongside westerners, and still there’s an undercurrent of disdain, or maybe more accurately, disapproval. They don't understand the western culture and simply try to exist alongside it while maintaining some semblance of their own cultural and religious identity.

In the meantime we are working to make the best of the situation at hand because that’s really all we have. In the end we rely heavily on one another and working friendships are formed, but if conditions were better I believe they would just as soon see us off to the airport with a hardy “thank Allah those idiots are gone”.

Slow And Steady

The intense heat, and dust gives the Baghdad skyline a ghostly look to it.

Reconstruction continues in Iraq. While not wanting to use the cliché, it truly is two steps forward, one step back. The ‘one step back’ is normally quite sensational and garners the vast majority of media attention; a bomb in a marketplace, a kidnapping of an official. The forward steps are the slow, but meaningful increments of progress; often not terribly newsworthy and subsequently going unnoticed by the international audience. There are however, children walking through the streets to school, public water and sewage, Internet service, traffic lights being adhered to, and most importantly smiles and laughter. Don’t count Iraq out just yet. There's a long, long way to go; years even decades, but there is visible progress. You can see it everyday, even through the haze.