 I'm out of town all day teaching new and prospective entrepreneurs about Community Based Enterprises (what I've called NCEs), and specifically about Innnovation & Entrepreneurship. I'll be back tomorrow. In the meantime, here is an extraordinary telephone conversation (requires Flash Player) between Jon Lee Anderson in Baghdad and Amy Davidson back at the home office of The New Yorker. In this article, and in the phone conversation, Anderson describes an Iraqi people that is increasingly cynical that anything
can come from continued military occupation of their country, except
the continued dysfunction of basic services, increasing anarchy,
corruption, power struggles among ever-more-radical Islamic factions,
and crisis levels of violence and insecurity. He explains that even the
most ardent advocates of American presence have given up trying to win
the "hearts and minds" of Iraqis, and describes the danger of ramping
up military action against well-entrenched, widely-supported
insurgents.
What is most frightening, and disheartening, is that the
well-intentioned but grossly inadequate and under-resourced allies
trying to rebuild Iraq have essentially accomplished nothing in the
year since the ouster of Saddam -- Anderson describes streets buried a
foot deep in raw sewage, ineptly trained police, and American troops
holed up behind tanks and barbed wire, in a seige mentality, totally
hidden away from, and inaccessible and invisible to, the people they
supposedly liberated. Meanwhile, the infrastructure and the
institutions of the country remain broken, lawlessness prevails, and
the militias and movements ready to fight each other and the Americans
for political control grow bolder, readier, and more impatient, and
they are now starting to work together to oust the Americans before
they resume their war with each other. As one of the US advisors put it
bluntly, "it's a powder keg".
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