During a visit to Haditha in western Iraq last summer, I attended a meeting of tribal sheiks, U.S. Marine Corps commanders and members of a U.S. State Department Provincial Reconstruction Team.
As the cramped office of Haditha’s mayor grew stuffy with cigarette smoke, sweat, and the oppressive 115 degree heat, I was struck by how seriously these men took their work. As the morning-long meeting progressed, I was also taken by their sense of urgency.
They disagreed in the Sunni way—filled with theatrics and high-volume soliloquies—but once the speechifying was over they wrapped up their action plan to rebuild the city’s damaged infrastructure in a matter of hours.
All the while, they seemed oblivious to the sandbags in the windows and the presence of armed Iraqi soldiers, police, and Marines.
It didn’t hurt that the presiding official, Gov. Ma’Moun, Anbar’s provincial governor, was a former engineer accustomed to building and repairing big-ticket items. He had a kindred spirit in the Haditha mayor who was understandably eager to get on with making municipal improvements – from rebuilding roads, bridges, and railroads to putting cell phone towers on trucks to protect them against insurgent attacks in this once-thriving city on the Euphrates River.
A bitter war and subsequent insurgency had killed many of their loved ones—fathers, sons, mothers, daughters. Those losses, which were just starting to subside in western Iraq during my mid-2007 visit, may help explain their close attention to the many tasks at hand. It was vital to get the city up and running to stave off the growing unrest of an estimated 100,000 unemployed men in the region—a 60 percent jobless rate.
Over a lunch of lamb, rice and soft drinks, Gov. Ma’Moun told me how glad he was to begin rebuilding Haditha. “Now they have their government and kick terrorists from their town… Haditha has a very good location for the economy and the roads.”
These were not empty words: They came from a man whose life had been threatened many times by Al Qaeda in Iraq, and who had lost many friends to suicide bombings.
The brave, can-do spirit in Haditha seems to me to contrast vividly with the can’t-do spirit that pervades Virginia’s own governing council—the Sheiks of Capitol Square, otherwise known as the Virginia General Assembly. Reading the endless news accounts of their political gridlock over… well, gridlock … made me wonder what Gov. Ma’Moun might say.
“We’re back at square one,” one Fairfax delegate said after a faint wave of the legislative hand at Gov. Kaine’s recent proposal to raise $1.1 billion for transportation in the Old Dominion.
Are partisan games what we get for being so comfortable? I wonder how many state legislators can afford to lease planes or helicopters, or accept aerial transportation home from Richmond as gifts from contributors, and fly above the I-95/64/81 corridors, peering down at the traffic mess they haven’t fixed for years?
Is complacency the price of the easy living—and easy money–in America?
Do we have to have our hospitals blown up like the one I saw in Haditha, or place sandbags in the windows, to have a sense of urgency about getting things done around here?
Of course Iraq faces its own kind of political gridlock in Baghdad as a highly polarized land tries to move forward after so much war and hate and strategic blunders. And I’m sure any politicos that read this might think it naïve of me to compare Virginia to Anbar Province.
That’s OK. Because among the cynics I have a hunch there are still some leaders on both sides of the aisle at the General Assembly who have a sense of honor and purpose. Those are the ones who will set themselves apart and become Virginia’s version of Anbar’s Gov. Ma’Moun.
Perhaps at some point in these ongoing legislative games, someone will be inspired to put the interests of the entire citizenry above the partisan sum of its parts. Perhaps they’ll remember those hard-fought freedoms their counterparts in Iraq are putting to work. If you do, I will salute you just as Marine Gen. John Allen saluted the Iraqis trying to make democracy work.
“We have a genuine bond of friendship,” he said of the legislators in Haditha. “We fought shoulder to shoulder against the enemy out here, with a lot of bleeding on both sides.”
Considering the high price of freedom, is it possible for a spirit of cooperation to prevail in Richmond?