BOTTOM UP REBUILDING:

Rebuilding Iraq, a Well at a Time: Across Iraq, dozens of modest construction initiatives are generating at least a taste of the good will that has been so elusive. (JAMES GLANZ, 7/20/04, NY Times)

Typical of the little projects is a hole in the ground that was being dug last week by an ungainly contraption, chugging along with big, spinning wheels and an enormous weight that smacked the muddy earth again and again outside the isolated village of Khazna, south of Mosul.

The machine was gouging out a well as part of a civil reconstruction program led by American military forces stationed here in the north of Iraq, financed mostly by Iraqi oil revenues.

As a convoy of big armored vehicles picked their way, rut by rut, over the village's zigzagging lanes toward the well, the dubious scene easily evoked the skepticism that has dogged the rebuilding effort all over the country.

But then a villager named Rabaa Saleh, standing among the swarms of children who had run out to meet the vehicles, gave his view of the proceedings.

"It makes people think good things are on the way,'' Mr. Saleh said through a translator. "When this well is done, each time somebody takes a drink of water they will say the Americans did something good.''

Still, while local citizens like Mr. Saleh say they appreciate the work and are willing to credit Americans for paying for it, they often do not want to see Western faces at the projects themselves, fearing terrorist attacks and general hostility from ordinary Iraqis. At a ribbon-cutting for a major school renovation in Mosul on that same morning, the city's education director refused to invite the American officers who had financed the project.

The man digging the well in Khazna was a Syrian Kurd subcontractor. That project will cost the United States Army just $35,000 and affect no more than a couple of hundred lives in a dusty village that has never had its own well.

It is hardly a match for the ambitious program of $18.4 billion approved by Congress last fall for rebuilding the Iraqi infrastructure, money funneled largely through nonmilitary government agencies and major American contractors.

But for various reasons, ranging from the lack of security in Iraq to bureaucratic red tape, the projects in that huge pot of money have taken so much longer to begin than initially promised that Iraqis - those who have heard about the work at all - often have a hard time believing that they will ever really happen.

Around Mosul and elsewhere in Iraq, the American military, whether through wisdom or sheer luck, has hit upon an approach that seems able to overcome that skepticism, at least locally.

Who would have thought that "lucking into" solutions on the ground would work better than big projects designed by bureaucrats?

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 20, 2004 8:01 AM