Keystone Cops build Iraqi “democracy”

Great piece in the WaPo today aptly titled “Hope and Confusion Mark Iraq’s Democracy lessons”. It’s by Ariana Eunjung Cha–another great Post discovery, along with A. Shadid.
Cha went to a bunch of meetings in an area of northern Baghdad province called Taji with an American anthropology prof of Iraqi heritage called Amal Rassam. Rassam was trying to advise the local U.S. commander on how to establish the “provincial council” called for in the Bushies’ latest “quick exit” plan.
“Establish”, in this sense, being a euphemism for a Rube-Goldberg-like scheme whereby the US military seeks to select participants in this process at various levels up to the province.
Trouble was– as Cha apparently knew but Professor Rassam had yet to discover–that in Taji the people already had a fairly well-developed system of more-or-less elected local councils in place.
As Cha writes: “That Taji has had its own tentative representative system for months throws … Rassam off; no one had told her this.”
Rassam is working on this project as a sub-contractor for a North Carolina contractor called the Research Triangle Institute. Cha writes of the latest democratization scheme that, “Local leaders will be consulted, and some groups will actually cast votes to select neighborhood leaders. But the final decisions will be made by the military and the RTI.”
Cha describes Rassam as “one of more than 650 consultants” currently working on “civil society projects” in Iraq for RTI.
So this is where our $87 billion is going! I’m trying to figure how much it actually costs to keep one “New York professor” active in the field for say, six months or however long Rassam’s contract is for. Say, conservatively, $150,000? Multiply that by 650 and you get $97.5 million…
Nearly all that dosh would end up in the bank accounts of the profs or other US-based contractors themselves plus the other (mainly, US-based) suppliers of support services for them. Oh, and then there’s the RTI’s profits… So the vast majority of this cut of the “aid for Iraq” cake will be recycled straight back into the US economy, rather than into Iraq.
As a close family member commented to me today, “Why don’t they hire Iraqi schoolteachers or other professionals to do these kinds of jobs, and spread this amount of money around inside the Iraqi economy instead?”
Plus, Iraqi people who know the country might actually be a little less clueless when it comes to doing their job than Professor Rassam has been made out to be?