Lou Lantner’s nine-man Provincial Reconstruction Team, embedded in the 3rd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division in Mahmudiyah, Iraq, took a crash course in modern banking with the aim of helping the town’s bankers modernize their paper-and-ink ledger systems. But when the PRT approached the bankers, they said, “Thanks, but no, thanks.” They would stick to their system, old and unwieldy though it may be.
And that’s the best news I’ve heard all week.
Iraq is a wealthy and populous nation. It has a long tradition of professional education and business savvy. But after decades of repressive rule, war and sanctions, it’s a nation suffering from deep psychological wounds. But now with a measure of security drawing many everyday Iraqis out of their bunker mentalities, we’re beginning to see the nation standing on its own two feet. A bunch of old-fashioned bankers saying no to Lantner’s offer to help might seem like a little thing, but it’s indicative of surprising progress occuring across the country. In Al Anbar and throughout north-central Iraq, “concerned local citizens” are forming armed neighborhood watches to keep extremists off the streets. In the south, an iron triangle of a strong Iraqi Army general, a strong governor and a strong police chief has helped keep down militia violence to the lowest level in years (more on that later). This is Iraqis solving their own problems. This is progress.
Iraq is still a mess. Lantner, who spoke yesterday morning at a Pentagon teleconference, said he still travels in heavily armed patrols, even though that makes it difficult to do the kind of face-to-face meetings that are the grist of provincial reconstruction. While he, too, acknowledges the tremendous progress in Iraq in recent months, he says he won’t be happy until there are “totally civilian PRTs and people don’t have to wear body armor and don’t have to be accompanied by armed patrols.”
Related:
Iraq oil law stymied
Reconstruction teams struggling
Reconstruction a little late
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Of course the Iraqis saw what happened with the Baghdad stock market when we (the US government’s provisional authority under Bremer) sent a 20-something in to spend millions of dollars renovating their stock exchange only to have it fail miserably. What did they do? Go back to chalk, blackboard and paper slips… quite successfully.