Before We “Surge” in Their Country

Silvia Spring writes in Newsweek International that since the fall of Saddam:

• Iraqi real-estate prices have gone up several hundred percent
• Iraqi workers’ salaries have increased more than 100 percent
• The number of cars in Baghdad has grown by 500 percent
• The Iraqi construction, retail and wholesale trade sectors are all growing
• The number of registered businesses increased from 8,000 to 34,000
• The number of cell phone subscribers increased from 1.4 million to 7.1 million
• Stores are stocked with goods and consumers are buying the
  
  Silvia Spring writes in Newsweek International that since the fall of Saddam:
  • Iraqi real-estate prices have gone up several hundred percent
  • Iraqi workers’ salaries have increased more than 100 percent
  • The number of cars in Baghdad has grown by 500 percent
  • The Iraqi construction, retail and wholesale trade sectors are all growing
  • The number of registered businesses increased from 8,000 to 34,000
  • The number of cell phone subscribers increased from 1.4 million to 7.1 million
  • Stores are stocked with goods and consumers are buying them

  Furthermore, taxes have been cut, government revenues are up and oil revenues and foreign grants are estimated at $41 billion for the year just ended. The World Bank estimates that Iraq’s economy grew at four percent in 2006 (it estimates the “Euro area” grew at 2.9 percent).

  This is not to gloss over the gaping and bloody problems of Iraq or the difficult choices that have to be made there. It is, however, to remind Americans that as the American president prepares to make an important speech about American policy and American troops and American resolve, he is making it about Iraq – a country in which Iraqi people are showing Iraqi resolve to make choices about the Iraqi future despite a number of Iraqi deaths that far outstrips those of the coalition. The Iraqi Interior Ministry reported 12,320 civilian deaths in 2006 with almost 1,900 in December.

  JINSA remains convinced that entering Iraq and removing Saddam was the right thing to do – we firmly believed, along with the Democratic and Republican leadership of this country, that if Saddam didn’t have a WMD program plus stockpiles, he would use the end of the sanctions regime to restart his program and create them. We didn’t believe we could afford not to know. Our opinion on that hasn’t changed. On the other hand, it might have been better if we had simply toppled the government, conducted our WMD searches our way and, upon discovering no stockpiles, come home and left the Iraqis to do whatever they ever did to each other.

  But we didn’t. The President (naively?) held out hope to them for something different and better. Something that in fact resembles the blessings Americans have and often take for granted: hope for security and stability, a free society, elections and consensual government, economic revitalization and political reconciliation. Possibly all of those were bridges too far for the Iraqi people – surely they were bridges too far for lots of Iraqis. And we clearly underestimated the willingness of Iraq’s neighbors to join disaffected locals to foment, pay for and carry out widespread terror.

  So as President Bush puts the finishing touches on what may be the most important speech of his presidency from his point of view, we hope he remembers that there are other Iraqis in Iraq. People who build the buildings, drive the cars, talk on the cell phones, open the shops, teach the children, collect the garbage and hope every day that our country won’t let their country down – even as we remember that it is their country.