By Marie Cocco
The Sacramento Bee, 30 March 2006
WASHINGTON -- Amid the complaints that there are no stories of good news from Iraq, here is a story that brings distant hope that the news might, one day, take a good turn.
The story is told by an Iraq war veteran, a young man of 27 who went to college on an ROTC scholarship, only to find himself, soon after graduation, living in a Baghdad palace that once was a lair for Saddam Hussein's sons. For 14 months he and his fellow soldiers rumbled through their volatile rounds of neighborhood patrols and the nighttime rousting of alleged insurgents from their beds. What made it bearable was a singular joy he achieved by witnessing the unbearable -- visits to orphanages for Iraqi children who have lost parents, or whose parents have, in this war, lost the means of caring for them.
"You could take your gear off, you were in a fairly secure place, you could play soccer," says former Army Capt. Jonathan Powers of Clarence, N.Y. For about eight months, the soldiers of the 1st Armored Division visited St. Hannah's orphanage, bringing toys, clothes and food sent from their families in the United States. They fixed broken generators and tried to mend broken hearts. Then one day, the Iraqis running the orphanage delivered hard truth.
"You can't come back anymore because if you come back, they're gonna kill the kids," Powers recalls them saying.
Powers, who had intended on becoming a schoolteacher after college, returned to the United States and instead educated himself about the condition of Iraq's children. There are, he says, at least 5,000 orphans in Baghdad, though the count is suspect and may not include the children he calls "economic orphans" -- those whose families have lost everything.
Children who've survived are literally starving: Malnutrition rates among those under 5 have doubled since the American invasion, to 8 percent, according to the United Nations. Literacy is declining. More than 3.4 million school-age Iraqis aren't attending school.
During his own deployment in 2003 and 2004, Powers says, the street price for those willing to plant a roadside bomb was $1,000, with another $1,000 paid if the bomb killed Americans. Now it's $20 -- and kids are willing to do it. The Sadr militia has whole units of 15-year-olds. Simultaneously, schools and other spots where kids gather are increasingly the targets of violence.
Decades of war, sanctions and now the bloody civil unrest unleashed by the downfall of Saddam Hussein and the American occupation have created in Iraq precisely what decades of strife between Israel and the Palestinians have created in the West Bank and Gaza: a generation of youth traumatized by violence, besieged by a sense of hopelessness and adrift amid the collapse of civic institutions that would normally provide the framework for an ordered life.
They are growing up in an incubator for terrorists.
"We're starting to lose these kids. They're starting to become civically disengaged," Powers told a small gathering of potential supporters for his project, War Kids Relief. If something isn't done, he warns, "we will have to fight them in the future."
Powers, working with the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, is starting War Kids Relief with little more than his own hope and enthusiasm. Even large, sophisticated relief organizations are pulling out of Iraq because of the danger. The U.S. reconstruction effort has provided substantial funds for rebuilding and restocking schools, but little for development projects aimed at youth, even though half of Iraq's population is under age 18.
Powers, working through the Iraqi Ministry of Youth and Sport, is trying to start vocational education programs that would provide public jobs in reconstruction and cleanup, alternating with weeks spent training for permanent work in various trades. For just $50,000, he says, a youth center can be refurbished, complete with computers and the generators still necessary to supply power. For $200,000, he thinks he can run such a center for two years. It is a sum that Powers calls "a rounding error" compared with more than $250 billion already spent on the war.
The error of our ways in Iraq has shocked the conscience and soured the public mood. Talk of troop reductions will only grow louder as November's congressional elections approach. Powers may be among the few Americans willing to stay and fight a very different war that is urgently necessary to secure something resembling peace.
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Citation: Marie Cocco. "Losing Iraq's Kids," The Sacramento Bee, 30 March 2006.
Original URL: http://www.sacbee.com/content/opinion/story/14236591p-15057546c.html
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