Friday, February 06, 2004

09:30 – Baghdad. Tonight was a fete at the Green Zone Café.

As the only place in the Green Zone where you can get a pizza, it does a brisk business. The pie is adequate as pies go. The crust is well textured and not too doughy, with a strong taste of yeast. The sauce is subtle, but not especially interesting. The toppings vary as much as do local conditions. You get what’s available and like it. The cheese pizza is a good bet.

The raison d’etre of this event is Charles, who has had enough, and is leaving Baghdad tomorrow. [It’s a bit more complex than that, but,…] This struck me as a mildly disturbing development, as Charles was one of the true believers. He told me shortly after his arrival at the end of November, and on multiple occasions since, that the success of our work in reconstructing Iraq affects the fate of the Western World.

To paraphrase my recollection, his belief is that terrorist elements (the proverbial “Evil”) would do what they could to disrupt the reconstruction process, primarily through maintaining an unsafe (ok, dangerous) atmosphere throughout Iraq. As a result, the CPA (and the contractors to follow) would have a difficult if not impossible time retaining qualified personnel. If the cost of good people increased markedly as the available quantity dropped precipitously, the process would falter.

If the process were to waver, support from the voters of the United States would also wane, and the result would be increased calls to pull out the military, which would lead to increased attacks against those who remained, be they troops or civilians, American or others. This would dump Iraq in a downward spiral. No. Not a spiral. That would imply a constant rate of fall. What if you took half a parabola and rotated the thing so you got a three dimensional shape, then traced a line down the interior of this shape, sort of spiralesque, but accelerating towards the narrow and infinite end of this shape. From the top, this line would be seen spinning and spinning at a faster rate, while from the side, the line would be falling faster and faster, bashing violently back and forth across the inside wall of the shape.

That’s what would happen to Iraq. And the money and effort we’re spending here would be like the eighteen billion coins you drop into one of those sort of conic charity boxes. It rotates near the top for a time, seemingly in a stable orbit, then it just spins out of control as it falls into the black box beneath the visible portion of the collection system to be spent on who knows what.

If this situation were to happen here, Charles surmises (and this is the big, important part), it would destabilize the rest of the globe, and Evil and his buddy, Terror, would gain a free hand to be naughty all over the “civilized” powers. If naught else, America’s failure to rebuild Iraq into a functional democracy would play a big role in the Evil recruitment videos for the next decade. Ultimately, this would mark the next great step in the inevitable fall of America as Superpower.

Of course, it could be that Charles is nuts. It could be that terrorism is just another scourge to be dealt with, like lite beer and reality television. This well could be the case, but he is our storied and infamous head of Public Affairs, and if he thinks his individual task is hopeless, that of convincing the public that what we’re doing is effective, and hopeless enough to leave two months into a six month stint, he might also think the greater task is hopeless.

I don’t yet know the results of what we’re doing here, but this geopolitical, demise of the Empire thing is a quandary, and I asked myself this question as I walked the deserted Green Zone streets back to my hooch:

What happens if we fail here – is that the end of civilization as we know it?

Does a dog have the Buddha nature?