How Useless Is The New Iraqi Government?
You can't dial 911 without getting yourself killed.
The dysfunction works its way down to the street, too, which becomes apparent on a visit to the home of Bakr (he asked that his last name not be used), an engineering student who lives in the middle-class Waziriya neighborhood. One morning, as he was studying, Bakr explains, he looked out his window and noticed men setting up a mortar in the middle of the street. As the government encourages all Iraqis to do, he called the Interior Ministry's emergency line, 130, to report the insurgents. "They didn't answer," Bakr recounts."The next day, my friends warned me not to call, because your telephone number appears and they sell it to the insurgents." He insists we drive his Opel--the Humvee of the Sunni, as Iraqis call it--to an adjacent neighborhood so he can prove the point. There, faded on a wall, hangs the picture of a young man and the announcement of his death. The dead man, Bakr explains, got through to the emergency line.
Of course, the New Republican writing the article, Lawrence Kaplan, says the worsening disfunction is the very reason why we must STAY in Iraq. All right, I hope he is putting on a uniform and grabbing a gun because the current policy is just not going to fly. At this point, it's not a case if we are going to "declare victory and leave", but when.