Eric Whitaker, right, a career State Department diplomat, with Gen.David Petraeus, commander of coalition forces in Iraq. Photo provided by the State Department.
by Frank James
There are two surges taking place currently in Iraq. The one most talked about is the military surge. But then there’s the civilian surge from U.S. agencies in Iraq to help build the local Iraqi economic and governance abilities necessary if Iraq is to have a chance of sustaining itself once the Americans leaves.
Eric Whitaker is a career State Department official on a one-year assignment to Iraq. A Dekalb, Ill. native, he leads a group called an embedded provincial reconstruction team, one of a score of U.S. reconstruction teams in Iraq working with Iraqis to rebuild infrastructure and plant the seeds of democratic government at the grassroots level.
Whitaker, who arrived in Iraq in April, is embedded with the 2nd Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division, living on a military base and traveling to meetings in eastern Baghdad with local politicians in a military convoy of Humvees.
The State Department made Whitaker and others serving in similar positions available to journalists Saturday, part of the Bush Administration’s effort to buy more time for its push in Iraq by describing the progress it sees being made there.
Whitaker told me:
Time is just regarded very differently in other cultures. This is something which is very hard for Americans who have not lived outside the states to understand, that our view of time is very linear. It’s very left to right. We have a great sense of urgency that just is not found in most other cultures. Many of the deadlines that we’re trying to impose simply don’t translate culturally.
We’re trying to rebuild an economy. And we’re trying to rebuild (sic) a democratic system from the grassroots up where there’s been decades of autocratic, centrally planned economies that simply didn’t work for most people. You’re trying to move from a Sunni-dominated military regime to a Shia majority with balanced Kurd, Sunni and Christian, to some extent, democratic system of governance that’s much more complex. It’s going to take some time.
While the central Iraqi government hasn’t made the progress its U.S. backers had hoped for by now, Whitaker indicated the situation is much better on the local level.
I think many of the (benchmarks) at the national level have been disappointing. Of course we look at the local level and we’re looking at are hospitals and schools being rebuilt? Yes. Are sewer and water systems being re-established? Yes. Is electricity being produced? That’s a much more iffy proposition. Are we training people? Yes. Are they increasingly taking governance and economic development into their own hands? Yes. Are they taking loans and business skills training are they reinvesting themselves into the local economy, yes…
The turning point we’re going to see is when Iraqi expatriates come back home with their capital, with their know how and with their initiative and really give the economy a shot in the arm. That’s going to be the real tell-tale sign. It’s when the Iraqis come back from Damascus and Amman and really kick the economy into higher gear.
These sort of people as they return are going to place high demands on the government and that’s also going to put pressure on the governance side to produce results or for the man on the street.
As Whitaker readily acknowledged, getting those expatriates to return is wholly contingent on the security situation. And the insurgents, terrorists and criminals have a big say in how that evolves.
When it’s safe they’ll return. And when they return the tide can turn very quickly. The problem is what will it take to convince them it’s time to come home? You just have so many random issues of the assassinations, kidnappings, mortar and rocket attacks, the random violence, the sectarian animosities. This just hasn’t played itself out. No matter how well trained the police are, if you have people who are very earnestly trying to get vengeance on the other side, that takes a long time to try to get that to cool down.
As is true for just about anyone in Iraq, Whitaker has seen the impact of the nation’s violence first hand. One of the local politicians he was dealing with was murdered, another stepped down after he survived an attempted assassination.
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When this council member was assassinated it was a very major event. His photograph had a black band on it. Flowers were at his normal seat at the table. Council members were openly weeping. It was a very dramatic event.
I don’t know the reasons he was assassinated. I’m not certain what the circumstances behind it were. I can’t say with any certainty it was because he was a neighborhood and a district council member. I don’t mean to imply that. It so happens there are so many assassinations and often for reasons we don’t know.
All this creates a daily routine for him and other members of teams like his, Whitaker says, that is unique among foreign service officers.
Secretary (Condoleezza) Rice, of course, talks about the need for transformational diplomacy. Well, I’ve called this expeditionary diplomacy.
We really are on the front lines and what we’re doing is a unique skill set. I don’t know of any place else in the world where foreign service officers are actually living and working in a red zone, where they’re on bases that take indirect fire on a near daily occasion, where their counterparts on the military side are taking actual casualties.
What of the statements by U.S. politicians like Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) that a strong reason for withdrawing from Iraqi is that Iraqis don’t want the U.S. there any longer? I asked Whitaker.
In most war situations the occupier is loved and hated at the same time. If we look at our experience in the Korean conflict, there’s quite a bit of mixed feelings about this. We’re valued as one of the UN partners that helped retain the sovereignty for the south but at the same time we were a foreign force, a great power which influenced their destiny. That was something to be resented. I don’t think that’s at all to be seen as a surprise. I think most people have mixed feelings.
There is a certain amount of resentment. At the same time, everyone says, if you were to leave suddenly, it would leave an incredible vacuum and many Sunni and Shia would go after each other. The number of assassinations would go up dramatically.
So I think from talking to Iraqis, if we were to leave precipitously that would have a negative effect. How we phase out, that’s a matter of debate over the next several years because our projects that we’re involved will play out over a number of years.
It’s very hard to say x months. It’s going to be an evolutionary process. It’s never going to be as fast as the West wants it to be. Is it important for the long term stability of the country? Yes, because it’s a country surrounded by countries that have very strong interests in how they want to see Iraq’s future and most of whom don’t want to see a strong Iraq.
Even though the country’s got tremendous gas, oil and natural resources, it doesn’t have a very diversified export base. It’s going to take a long time for it to become a more diversified economy. And for it to really to show the respect for human rights and provide the basic essential services throughout. It’s going to be an evolutionary process over several years.
Again we’re dealing with a very ancient culture. So again to try to do it on a very short time line by an American standard comes with great difficulty.