Holiday Season in Iraq

Holiday Season in Iraq:

You are probably unaware of this if you're reading it in America, but this is also holiday season in Iraq. The Hajj season is winding down, having been ongoing here for quite a while now. Thousands of Iraqis have traveled to Saudi Arabia to perform the rites of the trip to Mecca. This week is one of the great festivals of the Islamic calendar, Eid al-Adha. Iraqis are celebrating by, among other things, touring Saddam's palace in Babylon. But it's a major celebration all around. I gather that the sheep market is booming, as sheep are used as sacrifices to honor ancestors; apparently sales this year are strongly outpacing last year's.

The media aspect of this war is a well-known difficulty. It's not just that AQI needs only to set off one bomb, anywhere in the country, to make the reporting on any given incident all about them. That's true, and it's a problem -- if they set off a car bomb and kill a dozen or forty people, you lose track of the fact that literally millions more people went about their day untroubled by al Qaeda.

But there is another problem, which is that when al Qaeda isn't able to carry off even a single bomb on a major holiday, there's little news to be found at all. This time, every one of those millions of Iraqis enjoyed their holiday with no violence; but I'd guess that around 1% of America even knows there was a major holiday here last week.

As a consequence of this dual difficulty, every last news story the average American hears about the war is about something violent that AQI did. The truth is that all the extremist groups put together are now only trouble on occasion; and much of the time, no trouble at all.

This place will get more interesting in January, however. The new Bilateral Security Agreement is going to change the way business is done here in some significant ways. I'm not sure how many of those ways have made the press yet, as I don't get a chance to read as much of the news as I'd like. I'm not going to talk out of school about it; let's just say that it's interesting in several ways, and a wise reader who wants something to think about will watch carefully how it is implemented.

However, whatever difficulties it has for us, it represents two invaluable things: a movement to the rule of law, and a chance for the Iraqi people to realize that they really are in control of their destiny. Their laws, and their votes, shall rule this land.

That, I think, is the hardest of Saddam's legacies to purge -- getting people to stop waiting to be told what to do, and to stop believing there is some conspiracy at work in their lives. It's the real gift of our microgrant strategy. The economic gain of such grants is powerful, don't get me wrong. Alexander Hamilton structured American policy after the Revolution to create small pools of capital in private hands, and out of those pools flowered an ever-growing economy.

These microgrants, though they seem small, can help to do much the same thing. Yet more than the economic output of these very small businesses, we're giving them a chance to realize that they have a chance to make a life for themselves. They can buy the tools to repair tires on these rickety old vehicles toddling down the roads. They can fix the vehicles. The guy who owns the vehicle, he may be delivering things for a living, or getting a little money from each of several friends in exchange for giving them a ride to work in a nearby village or town. The farmers bring their crops to market, and people have money to buy them.

There are bigger Civil-Military Operations as well -- canal cleaning for irrigation, filtering programs for drinking water, schools, repairs to public buldings, parks for children, and so forth. These are certainly also important. In the end, though, I think it will be the microgrants that really matter. They target the people who are ready to learn that lesson, and ready to take another step on their own road.

I'm guessing you didn't see it on the news, and you probably won't. I've seen it, and met some of the people involved in it. They're proud of their work, and I hope you're proud of them.