Wednesday, September 24, 2003
Baghdad City Cop
There's a great op-ed with that headline in today's Wall Street Journal (sorry, I don't have a link) by Bernard Kerik, a former chief of the NYPD. Mr. Kerik recently returned from four months in Baghdad, where he was a senior advisor to Ambassador Bremer. Excerpt:
This is the kind of message that needs to get out a lot more than has been happening.
To those who claim that we're not doing enough, fast enough, it helps to put matters in perspective. We're doing a hard job to the best of our abilities, in postwar circumstances, with really scarce resources and a clock ticking above our heads. In my four months there, I oversaw the setting up of 35 police stations in Baghdad. Try setting up 35 police stations in New York in four months!
New Yorkers will remember that it took the Giuliani administration eight years to create the safest large city in the world and that was with every resource under the sun. Five months ago in Iraq, we adopted a country of 24 million, with no electricity, water, technology, Internet, telephones or radio communications, etc. There was nothing, and yet the critics are saying that it's taking too long. One would think that they themselves have the answer, or the magic pill that will fix it all, but unfortunately, there isn't one! It's always easier to criticize -- as some Congressional delegations in Iraq are prone to do -- when you have no operational involvement, insight, authority or responsibility.
This is the kind of message that needs to get out a lot more than has been happening.
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