Continuing our service for those who wish to give a helping hand to people in need around the planet, we wish to inform you that a Senior Election Advisor is needed in Baghdad at the Center for Transitional and Post-Conflict Governance. Doing the recruiting is IFES , an international, nonprofit organization that supports the building of democratic societies. The duties of the successful candidate will include: "training of election administration staff, advising on the development of laws and procedures pertaining to elections, and education of voters and election stakeholders regarding the electoral process."
The words "education of voters and election stakeholders regarding the electoral process", which sound so dry in so many contexts, have the quality of poetry here because despite the very best efforts of Der Spiegel and Le Monde to paint the picture black, lots of what's happening in Iraq should give us cause for celebration. For example, by May last year, one year after the liberation of Baghdad, 16 of the biggest cities in Iraq had elected city councils; 51 million Baath-free textbooks had been put into circulation; 20,000 contractors were in the country doing business; the Iraqi Central Bank had been established; the Iraqi authorities had taken full control over their oil resources and the first commercial airport in the Kurdish section of Iraq was nearing completion. By August last year, 278 new newspapers had appeared, 273 more than the state-controlled newspapers that had existed under Saddam Hussein; enrollment for first-year college students had risen to 90,000; the overall number of telephones, including cell phones, had grown 46 percent since before the war; 15 private radio stations had opened; and the Iraqi bond market had opened, complementing the new Iraqi stock market.
Shall we continue? Why not, seeing that you won't find any of this on the BBC or in the New York Times. By November last year, the upgrading of Iraqi railways had begun, with the three main stations at Mosul in the north, Baghdad in the center and Basra in the south; 12,000 teachers and administrators who had been members of the Baath party had been fired, while USAID trained 33,000 high school teachers and rehabilitated 2,500 classrooms; Baghdad enjoyed a surge in property values, and the heavy demand for construction required cement factories to work around the clock. By the time Iraqis voted on 30 January this year, Iraqi Kurdistan was bustling and prosperous; thousands of reconstruction programs — involving water, sewage, and irrigation systems, electricity lines and power plants, highways, railroads, and airports, clinics and hospitals, and the educational infrastructure system from grade school through university and including adult civic education — were in motion, supported by US armed forces as well as relief organizations from America and other nations.
All the above comes from a thoughtful review by Peter Berkowitz, in the current issue of Policy Review, of The Assassins' Gate by George Packer. Despite the setbacks, and despite the opposition of the Western media, the promotion of democracy in the wider Middle East continues. The appointment of a Senior Election Advisor at Baghdad's Center for Transitional and Post-Conflict Governance is a small but essential part of the plan.
