Teach Iraq to Fish

The Washington Post relates a telling conversation on July 25 between Army Major General Rick Lynch and one of his brigade commanders, Colonel Michael Garrett, about reconstruction efforts south of Baghdad:

"We have taken care of Diyarah," Garrett said. "The next push ought to be the government taking care of Diyarah."

"But it's a Shiite government and that's a Sunni community," Lynch replied.

"Yes sir, yes sir," said Garrett, acknowledging Lynch's point and shaking his head in frustration.

"It really goes back to the fish story," said Lynch. "Are we here to teach them how to fish or to give them fish?"

"Right now, we're giving them fish, sir," Garrett said.

I spoke to Garrett today during a Pentagon-arranged tele-conference. “There are a number of ways to build capacity," he said. "One of the things we’re dealing with is how to allow Iraqis to do things for themselves, and where is that line of failure. I don’t want them to fail. I want them to have more confidence in their abilities.”

But will the Iraqi government ever truly learn to fend for itself as long as it has the U.S. spoon-feeding it resources and expertise? Not according to Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat who has consistently opposed the Iraq war:

If we leave in ten months or ten years, there will come a moment where they [the Iraqis] will have to make a fundamental decision for themselves. Bush doesn’t want to face that reality, that they won’t choose the right thing, and that it may be worse than it was when we invaded. I think that is unfortunately a possibility. But we’ll never know until we put the burden and responsibility on the Iraqis. They have to step up and understand that we’re not going to stay forever. They have to make responsible and hard political decisions to move to the next level. I think as long as we are there, as long as every time they dial 911 another 30,000 American soldiers will magically appear, they’re not going to accept this reality. What I have seen with their army, with their police force, tells me that they need a dose of reality, in terms of what we expect of them. And I don’t think Bush is giving it to them.