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Winning and losing hearts and minds

By James Rupert | Staff Correspondent

7:47 PM EDT, May 4, 2004

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Yesterday, I was at the press center of the U.S. occupation authority in Iraq. As usual, the stacks of press releases on tables in the back of the room included a couple about U.S. troops doing good. Typically, these accounts tell of this or that unit putting on a sports day for local kids or helping to repair a clinic or road.

Yesterday, one release announced the opening of a neighborhood sports complex in Baghdad built with U.S. funds and the help of the Army's 1st Cavalry Division. A soccer field, basketball court, playground equipment. In the PR war over the American enterprise in Iraq, these events get little attention in the international press. Sometimes, amid the bombings, air strikes and battles between U.S. soldiers and guerrillas, these sunny stories about soldiers painting schools or giving away soccer balls can seem laughably naïve.

They aren't. When you visit places where the Americans have helped build something that local folks wanted, you find gratitude that seems quite spontaneous and real. And it's impressive to see the idealism of U.S. soldiers. In the umpteenth month of an extended tour over here, in 100-degree heat (and that's the temperature outside their bulletproof vests and combat helmets), you actually find these folks volunteering for the extra work of building in their spare time.

These projects are probably the best part of an American effort to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis that is, overall, sporadic and inconsistent. The hearts-and-minds campaign depended utterly on the quality of the U.S. plan for governing Iraq once Saddam Hussein fell. It suffered its first major defeat immediately, when it turned out there was no plan to maintain order and prevent the massive looting and destruction in Iraqi cities in the days after Saddam's ouster. It suffered a second major defeat within a month, when the United States opted to dissolve the army and dismiss all civil servants who belonged to upper ranks of the Baath Party -- steps that immediately created an unemployed, unpaid, marginalized and angry class of more than 700,000 people.. (A class that was, by the way, well organized and militarily trained and had access to weapons.) On April 23, U.S. administrator Paul Bremer signaled a retreat on the army and Baathist issues, opening the door for their return to participating in Iraqi life.

The American hearts and minds campaign has never recovered from those early setbacks, but the volunteerism of ordinary soldiers has won many small-scale victories. Now, one of the great tragedies of the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib prison is that it effectively may wipe out countless numbers of those small victories. While the Abu Ghraib scandal thunders through Iraq and the Middle East with the power of an earthquake, the good work of the First Cavalry Division in getting a neighborhood sports complex built will get little attention beyond the Al-Doura neighborhood where kids now play soccer or basketball in a better place.