OWNERSHIP SOCIETY:

Iraq needs an ownership surge (Clare Lockhart and Joseph Konzelmann, April 13, 2008, Washington Times)

Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. ... Also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is.

— T.E. Lawrence to British soldiers, 1917

The military surge in Iraq has created conditions favorable for long-term stability. Now a new approach to economic reconstruction is needed to sustain the hard-fought military gains.

The top-down model of the Iraq government and international donors isn't working: Last year Iraq spent only 4 percent of its $10 billion capital projects budget, according to the U.S. General Accountability Office. The problem is that Iraq lacks the national-level capacity to spend its money effectively. We propose a new approach — one predicated on local partnerships.

A starting point could be an Iraq Local Ownership Program backed by initial funding of $200 million — just 2 percent of the capital budget.

It could be based on local leadership of micro-level reconstruction projects, modeled after Afghanistan's successful National Solidarity Programme (NSP) and similar to the U.S. Commander's Emergency Response Program (CERP) in Iraq that has delivered impressive results on the street. NSP has developed the ability of local Afghan communities to identify, plan, execute and monitor their own development projects.