SOME DAYS, when the after party in Iraq isn’t going so well–which is to say, most days–I’m put in mind of the Bush administration’s admonition to be sunny-side-up journalists, to eliminate the negative, to accentuate the positive. God knows I try. I take stock in small victories, often overlooked. Like there was the time military engineers in Fallujah cleared a field of garbage, covered it with fresh soil, then erected goal posts to make a soccer field. Sure, the next day the goal posts had been stolen, and the dirt scraped from the field. “What kind of people loot dirt?” one frustrated Army captain asked the Washington Post. But you’ve got to crawl before you walk.
Then there was the Department of Defense press release which announced that veterinarians had purchased $42,000 in equipment for the Baghdad zoo, including an autoclave for instrument sterilization and a vaporizer to measure anesthesia drugs. (Damn you, New York Times! How could you let your liberal media bias get in the way of this triumph of the human/animal spirit?) Or how about when Marines in Qadisiya Province set up a Rotary Club–another advance that caught Big Media looking. Now, Iraqis, freed from tyranny’s grip, will have the inalienable right to gather in dingy meeting halls, listen to mediocre speeches, and to eat dried-out chicken.
