Of Curfews and Generators Posted by Heather Hurlburt

After a week in the canyonlands to recharge my batteries and get my mind off the "small stuff," I read Mike Signer's posts on some of the more fatal manifestations of a society that has been allowed to come apart at the seams -- one where US embassy officers can now do little more than write memos expressing concern at the fate of their Iraqi colleagues.

And I can't resist revisiting a post I wrote ten days ago about Iraqis' inability to get dependable power to watch the World Cup.

It's interesting to compare the inability of this relatively wealthy (or potentially wealthy) society and its occupiers to provide the basics like power with that of a smaller, poorer country which has known its share of military rulers and tenuous transitions.  With a GDP one-fifth Iraq's in 2005, life expectancy 10 years lower, and one-seventh the electricity consumption, how did Ghana manage to keep every tv and radio in the country on for yesterday's World Cup defeat of the US?

Well, according to this radio interview, the government asked citizens to sacrifice their air conditioners, washing machines, etc. to leave enough current for everyone -- and the country's gold mines stood down operations to reduce their power use. 

Now, this may seem like a trivial, even silly thing to write about on a national security blog.  But there you have a good example of a cohesive society functioning smoothly toward a national objective, even if only a sporting one.  Nobody would argue that Ghana is a "Switzerland of Africa" or any of the other idealistic epithets we apply to our visions of re-built societies.  But the ugly fact is that we don't know how to get from Iraq to Ghana, let alone from Iraqi to Switzerland.  Or rather, we do know:  luck and time, and above all wisdom and vision on the part of the people who have to live there. 

The next time you hear someone talking about remaking a society, any society, by force, ask yourself how long it will take for that remade society to meet what I'll call the "Ghana test."  (Now, if I made the criterion how long it would take to field a football team that could beat Team USA, that might happen faster.)

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