Short News and Commentary
THE WAR IS OVER, AND WE WON
Your editor returned to Iraq in April and May of 2005 for another period of
embedded reporting. Compared to my earlier tours during 2003 and 2004, I could immediately see improvements. The Iraqi security forces, for example, are vastly more competent, and in some cases quite inspiring. Baghdad is now choked with traffic. Cell phones have spread like wildfire. And satellite TV dishes sprout from even the most humble mud hovels in the countryside.
The Iraqis themselves are encouraged. In a nationwide scientific poll in late April, 67 percent said “Iraq today is generally headed in the right direction;” 20 percent answered “wrong direction.” Asked whether “security” has grown better, worse, or the same in recent months, 67 percent of Iraqis said “better.”
The U.S. soldiers I was with observed the same things. Many of them had an earlier deployment in Iraq during 2003, and these almost universally talked about how much change they could see over their two tours: progress in the attitudes of the people, in the condition of important infrastructure, in security.
I observed many examples of this myself. Take the two very different Baghdad neighborhoods of Haifa Street and Sadr City. The first is an upper-end commercial district in the heart of downtown. The second is one of Baghdad’s worst slums, on the city’s north edge.
I spent lots of time walking both neighborhoods this spring—something that would not have been possible a year earlier, when both were active war zones, where U.S. tanks poured shells into buildings on a regular basis. Today, the primary work of our soldiers in each area is rebuilding sewers, paving roads, getting buildings repaired and secured, supplying schools and hospitals, having trash picked up, managing traffic, and encouraging honest local governance.
What the establishment media covering Iraq have utterly failed to make clear today is this central reality: With the exception of periodic flare-ups in isolated corners, our struggle in Iraq is over as warfare. Egregious acts of terror will continue—in Iraq as in many other parts of the world. But there is now no chance whatever of the U.S. losing this guerilla war to an insurgency that most Iraqis hate.
Typically, defeating a guerilla enemy takes up to a decade. The process is analogous to eradicating a disease like smallpox--it doesn’t happen in a dramatic burst, but only after a long, patient squeeze. In this case, though, the eventual end result has been apparent since 2004, when our military won fierce battles in Najaf, Fallujah, and Sadr City.
These will go down in history as smashing U.S. victories. Thousands of terrorists were killed, with comparatively little harm to innocent bystanders. These successes at the very hardest kinds of urban combat (mostly untold stories in the U.S. media, scandalously) made it crystal clear to both the terrorists and the millions of moderate Iraqis that armed fighters simply cannot win against today’s U.S. Army and Marines. That’s why everyday citizens have surged into politics instead (even including, at the end of May, 1,000 previously intransigent Sunni leaders).
That doesn’t mean the terrorist struggle has ended. Even a very small number of vicious men operating in secret will find opportunities to blow up public markets and buildings, assassinate political figures, and knock down office towers. But public opinion is not on the terrorists’ side, and the battle of Iraq is no longer one of war fighting—but rather of policing and politics.
Policing and political problemsolving are mostly tasks for Iraqis, not Americans. And the Iraqis are taking them up, often with gusto. I saw much evidence that responsible Iraqis are gradually isolating the small but dangerously nihilistic minority trying to strangle their new society. With each passing month, U.S. forces will more and more become a kind of SWAT team that intervenes only to bolster the emerging Iraqi security forces, and otherwise stays mostly in the background.
The Iraqi people are increasingly taking direction of their own fates. And like all other self-ruling populations, they are more interested in improving the quality of their lives than in mindless warring. It will take some time, but Iraq has begun the process of becoming a normal country.
IRAQI BULLS
The brochure is slick, even by American standards, featuring colorful logos and a photograph of a river flowing toward a gorgeous sunset. Other than the mosque on a bluff overlooking the water, the advertisement is indistinguishable from any other commercial flyer hawking consumer debit cards. But this one is being circulated in the southern Iraqi port city of Basra.
“We want to live like Americans, with credit and easy transactions,” says Zuhair Ali Akbair, general manager of the Basra branch of Iraq’s Central Bank. The cards, along with the roughly 200 machines that read them, could hit the Arab street as early as mid May, he adds. There’s just one problem: the Ministry of Finance in Baghdad will not approve the card’s release.
“Baghdad wants debit cards before we get them in Basra. It feels it has to be first in everything,” notes Abdul Hafiz Al-Atti, director of the Basra Business Council and a member of the city’s Board of Trade. “They are jealous of us. They know, unlike them, our security situation is good and we’re ready for development.”
Atti might be a little premature in his assessment of the investment climate in this city of 1.5 million people. To visit him in the swank, wood-paneled offices of the Basra Business Center, located in the center of town, I had to pass through a gauntlet of British soldiers and flakjacketed
private security guards. Still, his comments reflect a general sense of optimism percolating through the city’s financial class: With terrorism less of a concern, Basra is open for business, and yearning for foreign investment.
“This city used to be the trading center of the Middle East, and inshallah we will be again,” Atti enthuses. “We must be open to the entire world,” says Alaa Turej, a spokesman for the Supreme
Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the many religious parties that now dominate Basra. (Most Islamic political groups reject socialism and embrace free enterprise.)
On the surface, the city hardly seems a promising investment environment. Like most of Iraq, it is afflicted by crumbling buildings, a nonexistent sewage system, and trash that chokes streets and canals. “Saddam Hussein destroyed this city,” Akbair relates. “Our economy was consumed by his wars, and then he starved us of funding for essential services.” Moreover, notes Atti, “for the last 15 years, the regime isolated us from the outside world, cutting us off from access to international media and the Internet.”
Indeed, though numerous Internet cafes (and a plethora of home satellite dishes) have sprung up since the city’s liberation two years ago, Basra’s population is largely computer illiterate, and
residents are mostly ignorant of the outside world. Although the city has seven banks, most Basrans still keep their savings at home—even though, Akbair notes, private banks offer 4 percent interest on deposits. (“Government banks offer no interest because of Islamic law.”)
Credit cards are unknown, and checks are about as rare as ham sandwiches. As a result, says Ian Elliot, a consultant with the English engineering firm Mott McDermott, “Contractors are paid in cash, which means large amounts of money have to be transported around, adding to security costs and the risks of kidnapping and hijacking. Some bank managers won’t take on accounts for redevelopment projects because once that is known they become targets of insurgents or kidnappers.”
One person who understands this threat all too well is Akbair himself. Last April, he narrowly escaped assassination when a roadside bomb detonated beside his car, throwing the vehicle into
the air. “It was the work of the friends of Saddam,” the banker notes matter-of-factly. “They seek to kill anyone who wishes to rebuild Iraq.”
Other investment-discouraging problems in Basra involve its deteriorated infrastructure. The city’s water system operates at only 30 to 40 percent of capacity, while the electrical grid is off for much of the day.
Why, then, are business leaders bullish about Basra’s future? Because there is real potential. “We have everything here—oil, date groves, a port, the Shatt-al-Arab waterway,” says Atti. The model many Basrans look to for the city’s future is the tony, capital-friendly, jet-setting country of Dubai. “In ten years, we can be like that. Why not?” asks Akbair. “If Britain and the U.S. and the rest of world help us—if foreign companies realize the investment opportunities here, and the Basran people respect the law and democracy—I see no problem. Basra’s best days are yet to come.”
—Steven Vincent, who has written often from Iraq for TAE, is currently living in Basra.
STUPID HOLLYWOOD
Two recent studies illustrate again that the favorite Hollywood response to complaints of offensive content—“we just give people what they want”—is completely hollow.
The first bit of research came from the National Association of Theater Owners. It showed that even though Hollywood released only 110 films rated G or PG in 2004, those grossed twice as much as the flood of 540 R-rated films the studios churned out. Only four of the top 25 most financially successful movies last year were R-rated—and Mel Gibson’s religious epic The Passion of the Christ was by far the top among these. In total, the 540 R-rated films pulled in $622 million. The 110 G- or PG-rated pictures, grossed $1.3 billion.
Why doesn’t Hollywood pursue its own economic interests more effectively by making fewer violent, sexual, and offensive films, and more for general audiences? Because many film producers are even more interested in pushing a cultural agenda than in business success.
The president of the theater owners’ group, John Fithian, had a blunt message for the studios: “Look beyond the liberal confines of Hollywood, and realize the potential and diversity of our industry, and realize what sells tickets. Family values are O.K. Family values sell tickets.” And not only to children. Last year, PG movies were responsible for a 9 percent increase in moviegoing by people aged 40 to 59, and a 20 percent increase among people aged 60 and older.
Of course “there will always be a need for R-rated pictures,” Fithian noted sensibly, “we just don’t need 500 of them.”
In a second recent study, Dr. Ted Baehr of Movieguide compared the box office receipts, over a three-year period, of the top 250 movies. Films that contained “very strong moral content” (e.g., The Incredibles, Ladder 49, The Passion) earned an average of $107 million each in 2004. Films with strong sexual, antireligious, or politically correct content (e.g., Kinsey, Kill Bill, American Wedding) averaged just $16 million.
“Movies with strong moral messages, whether they were rated G, PG, PG-13, or R, consistently earn four to seven times as much money on average as movies with immoral messages,” summarizes Baehr.
Is anyone in Los Angeles and New York City listening?
EUROPE’S FAIRY TALES
Europeans insisted that the problem with the recent liberation of Iraq was that it was not “multilateral” enough. A “big tent” operation like Afghanistan, they say, is how wars should be conducted. In reality, they need to find a new story.
Recently returned from a trip to Afghanistan, AEI researchers Tom Donnelly and Vance Serchuk note that European nations that committed to freeing Afghanistan as part of a “multilateral coalition” have been assigned important tasks in rebuilding the country. Yet they simply haven’t done their job. Two critical examples are Germany and Italy.
It was Germany’s job to create an Afghan police force. And they will graduate 8,000 Afghan police officers from their new police academy—but not until 2008. Until then, an Afghan policeman is anyone with an AK-47 and a police patch stitched onto his jacket. The significance of Germany’s contribution is further called into question by a recent deal whereby Germany handed off the actual training of Afghanistan’s police officers to the U.S., eventhough Germany will retain its title as primary coordinator.
Italy has similarly failed to meet its solemn “multilateral” obligations to Afghanistan. While it was charged with creating the country’s system of courts, it has yet to build a single courthouse.
Meanwhile, the U.S., whose job it was to create an Afghan military, has invested the necessary time and resources and successfully created the Afghan National Army. In addition, the U.S. has repeatedly taken it upon itself to fill humanitarian and practical gaps and provide whatever help has been needed to get Afghanistan back on its feet. Be it dragging snow-bound cars from drifts
along the U.S.-rebuilt “Ring Road,” or continuing to fight terrorists in the country’s southeast, U.S. military and reconstruction forces are providing the vast majority of aid to the Afghans.
So let’s not hear any more sanctimonious European claims about how they would have run a better war on terror. In Afghanistan—where the script followed exactly the “multilateral” course they demanded for Iraq and all other interventions—the U.S. has proved to be the only reliable partner of the suffering Afghans.
—Frank Runyeon is a TAE intern.
BLAIR DODGES BULLETS
The May re-election of Tony Blair with a comfortable majority in the U.K. parliament solves one foreign policy problem for him, but opens up another.
Although Blair’s Labour Party tried to avoid discussion of the Iraq war, the issue was forced to the center of the campaign by an opposing third party: the Liberal Democrats. They chose to run on a platform to the left of Labour, with an anti-war emphasis along with a civil liberties push and plans for increased taxes and public spending. To the considerable extent that the Liberal Democrats made the election a referendum on the Iraq war, Blair’s actions have been ratified by the electorate.
Polling showed that only 2 percent of British voters had reservations about the Iraq war strong enough to decide their vote. As one influential Labour source told me, the loudest anti-war voices
were “big shots: lawyers, media types, former BBC chairman Greg Dyke, etc.” Grassroots voters were likelier to take an “all’s well that ends well” view. So Tony Blair survived his boldness on Iraq with surprising ease.
This spring, however, another threat to Blair’s political position popped onto the horizon: the question of Britain’s relations with Europe. Blair has promised that the two dominant issues concerning Britain’s role within Europe—whether Britain should abolish the pound and join the euro currency zone, and whether Britain should ratify the draft E.U. constitution— will be put directly to voters. Blair has been in favor of both; the British have resisted both.
Blair’s only mention of Europe during the campaign was seemingly to rule out any referendum on joining the euro for the lifetime of the coming parliament. This is consistent with his longterm strategy of deferring consideration of the currency issue so long as it looks like he would lose any pro-euro vote.
The prime minister has less leeway, however, when it comes to the E.U. constitution. A ratification process is now going on throughout Europe, with most countries holding referenda. Among E.U. member states, the British have been especially skeptical of the European project,
viewing it as potentially damaging to their sovereignty, and more than they bargained for when they voted in 1975 to join a pan-European free-trade zone. Tony Blair, however, has invested much in Britain’s membership of the European Union, so a large “no” vote would represent
a blow to his authority at home and within Europe.
It appears, though, that the prime minister may be able to dodge this bullet. The French and the Dutch have just voted “no” on the European constitution, handing Blair some deep political cover.
For their own separate reasons, France and Holland have torpedoed a unified constitution in Europe, rescuing Blair from a potentially disastrous referendum of his own.
—Briton Iain Murray is a TAE contributing writer.
RESOURCE MATH
The oil reserves that sit at one edge of the ANWR lands in Alaska—which Congress set aside as a national energy reserve a generation ago and which environmentalists have kept locked up since—could finally become available for intelligent development—if Congress can overcome
some last-minute obstructions this fall.
As TAE showed in some on-the-scene reporting from Alaska in our September 2001 issue, new directional drilling techniques allow geologists to tap the underground assets of 32,000 acres
from a tiny footprint of just nine acres. This and other advances mean that this last great American oil source could be tapped with barely an ecological ripple. (And keep in mind that this is one of the continent’s most forbidding and comparatively sterile environments, hardly the animal paradise of popular myth. Again, see our earlier reporting.)
Meanwhile, in an era when oil producers ranging from the terror-supporting Saudi princes to Castroclone Chavez in Venezuela are holding us hostage by under-pumping and overpricing
their exports, here is the relevant math: ANWR’s estimated 16 billion barrels of oil times $50 per barrel equals $800 billion.
Send in the drills tomorrow.
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE IN CONCORD
Some 159 years ago Henry David Thoreau made a name for himself by spending a night in the Concord, Massachusetts jail as part of a tax protest—an event glorified in Thoreau’s famous essay “Civil Disobedience.” Recently another Massachusetts resident emulated Thoreau (inadvertently) by allowing himself to be jailed overnight, but for an issue much closer to home.
After his five-year-old son came home with a bag of books promoting “diversity,” including one which depicts same-sex couples raising children, David Parker asked school officials to notify him or his wife in advance about any classroom discussions on topics like same-sex marriage, so that they might exclude their kindergartener from participation. When school officials refused, he explained that he and his wife, while opposed to same-sex marriage, were “not intolerant” of other people, but were determined not to give “unfettered access to the psyche of our son when he enters the school.” For refusing to leave the property of the public school, Parker was arrested.
Thoreau’s protest was against a government he deemed illegitimate because it included slave owning states. The Parker family’s request seems far more modest. Has the war against the traditional family really reached a point where children must be publicly indoctrinated to appreciate the virtues of same-sex parenting even at the age of five?
—David Schaefer is a professor of political science at Holy Cross College in Massachusetts.
NUMBED BY NINTENDO
My two sons recently entered puberty. There’s no better way to gain a firsthand look at the degenerate aspects of modern American culture.
Today’s music is mostly lacking in melody, and, at worst, is vile and offensive. The fashion is for boys to wear their pants so baggy that their underwear shows. When I was a kid, I called my father “Sir.” My kids have taken to calling me “Dude.”
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the modern youth culture is the computer game sensation. This past Christmas, against our better judgment, my wife and I gave our boys the new Nintendo
handheld Game Boy—a computer the size of your palm that plays hundreds of arcade games. Now it is omnipresent in our lives: Our sons walk around the house, down the sidewalk, through the mall, even (once) for Holy Communion at church hunched over in a semi-trance.
Young Americans have an addiction problem, and it isn’t drugs: It’s video games. These inane mind-vacuumers are the opiate of today’s youth! We resisted as long as we could, and were one of the last families in our neighborhood to buy a Nintendo. But we caved in too. Now our kids spend their vacation days—their golden days of youth—not outside playing sports or at the beach, but locked away in the basement glued to the computer screen.
Lest you think I’m jesting about the addictiveness of these games: The family down the street had a ten-year-old who was so deeply entranced by the Harry Potter game that he would sit unblinking in front of the TV set for three to four hours at a time, until he wet his pants rather than interrupt the game for a bathroom break. If we give our kids even a moment of unscheduled and unmonitored time, whoosh, they’re down in the basement in front of the TV in a comatose condition.
My kids won’t play real basketball, but they will play Allen Iverson in the NBA game for hours on end. The other day my son tugged at me beaming to come see his new dunk. So I naively headed out to the hoop in the back yard. After ten minutes he called from the basement: “Come on down here, dad.”
And so it is with every activity. They won’t roller skate, ski, bike, or play stick hockey. Why would they, when you can entertain yourself virtually on the computer screen and you don’t have to take a shower afterwards?
When I was growing up in the 1970s we nagged our parents incessantly for a quarter so we could buy a pack of baseball cards. The Nintendo game box is $149, and the cartridges to play the
games—John Madden Football, NBA basketball, Copkiller, Matrix Reloaded, James Bond Golden Eye, and on and on—sell for $49 a pop.
Studies show that kids who engross themselves in computer games have better hand-eye coordination and spatial skills than kids who don’t. But I have to pound on the basement door night after night pleading with my psychologically hijacked kids to come out and do the normal things that healthy 12-year-olds do: play sandlot baseball, ride bikes, go to the pool, run away from home, smoke cigarettes. “One last game, dad, promise,” come the shouts from the dungeon.
So parents of toddlers, here’s your warning: Be steadfast in your resistance to the computer game monster. Don’t let your kids become infected with the Nintendo virus. For my kids, there’s no way to put this genie back in the bottle. I’m just hoping they’ll outgrow the sensation by the time they reach high school. In the meantime, I’m trying to crash through the generational barrier with a twenty-first century appeal to my sons: “Dudes, get a life.”
—Economist Stephen Moore is president of the Free Enterprise Fund.
