BAGHDAD, Dec. 16 -- Lt. Col. Lawrence "Barrett" Holmes, a tall, lanky commander, bundled out of his cream-colored, armor-plated Humvee in flak jacket, helmet and protective eyewear, held his M-16 rifle at the ready and barked what goes for a command these days in Baghdad's toughest neighborhood, what he calls his "slice of the pie."
"Salaam aleikum!" he belted out, Arabic for "Peace be upon you," inflected with a South Carolina drawl.
A U.S. soldier provides security at a Sadr City gas station while Iraqis wait in line. Residents say militiamen loyal to anti-American cleric Moqtada Sadr were organizing such lines until the U.S. military forced them to leave.
(Reuters)
|
|
With those words at a sewage station, he got down to business, overseeing $138 million that is being spent in Sadr City, a vast warren of 2.5 million people that, twice this year, was the scene of some of the most intense fighting the American military has faced in Iraq. A cease-fire is now in place, and Holmes can talk like an engineer (his education) rather than a soldier (his training) -- waxing on about the grade of roads, water runoff, sewage intake, trash disposal and dedicated power lines to pump stations.
"We have two kinds of folks," he said, "the haves and have-nots. Sadr City is pretty much the have-nots."
In scope, Holmes's task is among the most ambitious in Iraq: to reverse the fortunes of a ghetto with a lavishly funded, labor-intensive reconstruction program employing thousands. By March, most of the work should be done. Its legacy, though, may have less to do with the project's success or failure than with the way the American effort is perceived in this troubled country.
The U.S. military touts Holmes's work as an example for battle-scarred cities like Fallujah, and the altruism of the reconstruction is beyond reproach. Barring another eruption of fighting, the men will have demonstrated to the slum what many Iraqis expected from the beginning of the occupation: rehabilitating a sewer system built for one-sixth the people it serves, overhauling water distribution for 240,000 people, providing electricity for 180,000 people, and renovating a hospital and building health clinics.
But nearly two years on, many Iraqis say, the occupation has become more than a simple ledger of tasks completed. The American experience has become like the three-inch bulletproof windshield of a Humvee -- the U.S. military can gaze through the glass while not always hearing what's being said in the streets. In Sadr City, even in neighborhoods clouded with the acrid haze of newly laid asphalt, words of appreciation are often clouded with lingering suspicions. The disenchantment is so deep in some places that it leaves a question most U.S. officials prefer not to address: Is the battle for hearts and minds already lost?
"The Americans came as soldiers, and they're here to serve their interests," said Ziad Khalaf, a 25-year-old mechanic who talks less about reconstruction and more about the lack of electricity and fuel for a heater to keep his newborn son warm.
Holmes has his answer to the question. "They're tired of fighting, they want to move forward, and they want a better life, and that's what we want to give them," he said as the day drew to a close over his base, near a gas station snarled with waiting lines.
His chief operations officer, Maj. Pete Andrysiak, offered another perspective. "Things could have been done quicker," he acknowledged, standing next to his parked Humvee. "Had we come in and been a little bit more prepared, it would have had an impact. I like to think that. They didn't necessarily know conditions were going to be the way they were."
"It's a lesson learned," he added.
Specter of More Fighting
The motto for Holmes's 20th Engineer Battalion is "build and fight."
"We want to do less fighting and more building," Holmes said, smiling.
The fighting erupted in the slum in April and August between U.S. forces and the Mahdi Army, a militia run by Moqtada Sadr, a stridently anti-American Shiite Muslim cleric whose popular father, assassinated by Iraqi government agents in 1999, is the slum's namesake. While clashes in Fallujah and Najaf overshadowed the battles in Sadr City, the fighting in dense urban quarters was no less ferocious, and each time it ended inconclusively with a lopsided toll: dozens of U.S. soldiers killed, hundreds of militiamen dead.
