November, 2007
A Commitment
Frank Colosi
A first hand account of reconstruction in Iraq
In a chilly spring month in 2007, an audience was taken back to April 21, 2003. This was the first day Col. Kimberly Olson saw Baghdad. During her speech the right-hand woman of Lt. Gen. Jay Garner spoke about her experience in Iraq. She was second in command of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, or ORHA. Her mission was to help rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure, provide humanitarian assistance, and help strengthen the new government.
She spoke of her first day in Baghdad and where they went. Stopping at a hospital, they were led through the facilities by the head of medicine and witnessed just how badly the city needed help. Seeing that they lack even running water and electricity, Olson understood the grave necessity for success. Even more challenging than the technical hurdles would be healing the wounds that the Baathist regime had inflicted on the people of Iraq. When they were leaving the hospital, Col. Olson noticed that the ground was covered in trash and debris, and she says the mother in her spoke up. She then pointed it out to Gen. Garner, and when they asked the hospital administrator why they didn’t clean it up the answer came back “Because no one has told us to.”
This was a large trend in Iraq and evidence of the lasting effect the Hussein regime had left behind. She stressed that the task of Iraq and its new government would rest in the hands of the new generation of young Iraqis who will have to pick up the pieces of a country torn apart by Saddam’s reign of terror. Over 1.2 million children are in brand new schools and over 4 million children (out of 4.4 million) had received the polio vaccine. A team of 5 medical personnel who traversed the country town by town in only 90 days administered the vaccine.
In Baghdad, Col. Olson said, all of the citizens were very hospitable to General Garner and herself. Often, when men would be talking in the main room, she would head to the kitchen to speak with the women. It is not only the women in Iraq who now have a voice, it is women in America, Afghanistan, and around the world who now have so many choices. “When I finished college I had only two choices, a teaching job in Michigan or to join the Air Force,” she continued, “I went to speak with my mother and I said, ‘I think I am going to take the teaching job’. My mother reached out and thumped me on the forehead and told me that she only became a teacher because that was her only choice and that I had to take advantage of this new option with the Air Force.
“Today women in America make up 51% of the spending population yet only have a representation of 18% on Capitol Hill, that’s less than both Iraq’s and Afghanistan’s respective parliaments.”
In closing she spoke to the “young people, without wrinkles.” She said “Every young person should serve their military in some way, not necessarily the military, but in things like the Peace Corps or AmeriCorps. My grandfather went to World War II...my generation finished the Cold War, and now your generation will face the Middle East crisis.”