Abstract

Baghdad Beat

I am hardly a military strategist, but let me offer my ongoing concern that our leaders are dealing with Iraq in very much the way domestic police forces have too frequently mishandled crime in American inner cities, where wrongheaded tactics like careless profiling have repeatedly fueled community resentment and even riots in areas that had once begged for police presence. The missteps have generally involved a terrible dualism: overreaction to so much as a false twitch of a hand with a wallet in it, yet underreaction to large, complex problems like crack houses and drug lords. When I look back over the past year, I am glad that Saddam Hussein has been deposed, but I think we must also confront the longer sequence of devastation incurred in the name of his capture. In the first days of the war, a busy restaurant in an upscale Baghdad neighborhood was bombed, with heavy loss of civilian life, because Saddam Hussein was supposedly within. Certainly there are models of urban crisis management here and abroad that have succeeded in restoring order, but they tend to rely on close community relations, officers who know a little something about the neighborhood (which surely assumes speaking the language) and some measure of police-citizen trust. I wonder if that is possible in Iraq given the cultural barriers, and particularly when our intrepid military leaders keep stating that humiliation educates, pain deters, fear brings peace, so bring 'era on, good riddance, it's our life versus theirs.