JUST BECAUSE IT'S INEVITABLE DOESN'T MEAN IT'S QUICK:

We're building a democracy from the ground up: And we're succeeding (Col. Jimmie Jaye Wells, December 1, 2005, Dallas Morning News)

I regret that stories of success upon success are not reaching my family, friends and co-workers.

Yet, I'm proud that a stable democracy is developing. As the constitution continues to take shape, it appears that political power will flow to governors and provincial leaders. Independent political parties are forming, and projects continue to move ahead. In late October, I examined a water-treatment plant in Nasiriya that will provide water for more than a million people in southern Iraq. It, like democracy, can't be thrown together in a matter of weeks.

Our own history has plenty of examples of positive returns on American investments in reconstruction. None was an overnight success. Reconstruction after the American Civil War took at least 10 years amid vigilantism and extremism. After the Philippine-American War of 1899, the U.S. Army built schools and hospitals and developed democratic institutions there.

After the surrender of Japan, ending the Pacific war, some 190,000 engineer troops went about rebuilding Japan. Again, with U.S. help, this moved from a militaristic, feudal culture into a modern democracy within seven years. In Germany, former Nazi die-hards and Waffen-SS miscreants waged a deadly terrorism campaign against international aid workers, Germans and Allied troops. But under the European Recovery Program of 1948, or Marshall Plan, work continued, and West Germany became a sovereign nation 10 years after the war.

I'm proud of a nation that supports its fighting citizens, and I'm proud to serve in a free society that promotes free speech. As author and retired Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters commented recently, "If the military fails to speak for itself, fools will gladly speak for it."

As a soldier and not a writer, I can only hope that achievements in Iraq have more than equitable billing with the daily death tolls.

Ten years? Did any black Southerner think Reconstruction had succeeded yet a hundred years later?

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 1, 2005 4:08 PM