“You Broke It and You Have to Fix It”
Posted on July 23, 2008, by Hanna Ingber Win, under International.
An Iraqi who used to work for the New York Times wrote an excellent post for today’s Baghdad Bureau blog on the Times website. Ahmad Fadam answers the question of when American troops should leave Iraq by discussing what American troops should do before they leave.
If I put a bomb in someone’s house and destroy it, then I cannot just simply say “sorry” and leave. I have a responsibility to fix what I have broken, I have to rebuild the man’s house and bring it back at least to what it was.
The politicians have been talking about reconstructing Iraq for five years now, but I as an Iraqi, haven’t seen any. We used to hear about all the good things that we would get after “liberation” — factories, beautiful houses, fancy restaurants, movie theaters and playgrounds. “Baghdad will be more beautiful than Dubai,” a Western journalist said to me back in 2003, and the funny part is that the looting was still going on and half of Baghdad was on fire.
But what have we got? After five years of “liberation,” Iraqis still barely get electricity. People have started to make jokes about it, calling it “holy electricity” or “Ayatollah electricity,” because you have to pray to get it. One hour of electricity every day and sometime every three or four days … what a blessing!
