Grumblings

Today marks the halfway point to my planned Rest and Relaxation (R&R) point of 20 December. That plan has me home for Christmas and headed back to the Big Sandbox on 3 Jan. Allow three days for travel on either end of those dates.

It remains difficult to see that far forward. A lot of the problem I attribute to the heat. I know I've been whining about it since early June, but it is beginning to suck the life right out of folks here. It is sort of the opposite of the problem folks in Alaska have, where it is cold and dark for months on end. Here it is hot and bright for months on end. I checked a number of websites to see what the average temperatures were supposed to be in Baghdad, and none of the four or five I looked at made any sense.

I'll pick one: Washington Post weather bubbas say average high temperature for August is 108. I'm telling you we can hardly wait for the day when 108 is the high. They say average low temperature for August is 75. I'm pretty sure the needle hasn't seen 75 since sometime in May. It hasn't dropped below 90 since sometime in June. But it's a dry heat! Last rainfall was at the very beginning of May. Next rainfall won't be until sometime in October. I'm certain this whole place would be better off if all 26 million or so of them just packed up and moved somewhere else.

The way government formation is going here, many of them probably feel like packing up and moving somewhere else. It is more than five full months since the elections and the winning parties have still not managed to figure out who will run what, thus no new government is yet formed. The problem remains the arrogance of two leaders, the two men whose lists (parties) finished the elections in a near tie. One is a former Prime Minister, the other the most recent Prime Minister. The system has been so manipulated that nobody can figure out how to get rid of the current guy, even though his list finished second in the voting.

The people deserve much better than this. They've been through the crucible, a particularly nasty sectarian civil war from 2005-2008 that none care to return to. At its height, from the summer of 2006 to the summer of 2007, an average of approximately 1,600 Iraqis were killed or wounded every week. Nobody is particularly excited about the prospect of seeing that again in their lifetime.

Yet they suffer nonetheless. They wanted, even voted for, an inclusive and representative government and it has so far been denied them. They had huge hopes that a national effort would be made to improve basic services and provide jobs, and none of that is happening.

In my admittedly biased opinion, Iraq has been handed a great gift: the opportunity to live freely and reclaim some of the glory that is their heritage. And they are squandering it. The greed and ambition of a few paralyzing the movement of millions, relegating hope to something as distant and tangible as a desert mirage in the relentless summer sun.