Iraq's neighborhood councils are vanishing

[Rose Siding]

...As he pulled away from his home, a white sedan screeched to a halt on his front bumper. A van blocked his rear. Four gunmen pumped his car full of bullets. Six rounds hit Colonel Rahim.

Rahim, a bald sparkplug of a man, was one of four members of Baghdad's Hay Somer neighborhood council killed in a two-week period last year. The council was one of the last holdouts of the dozens of local councils in Baghdad the US set up in 2003 as Iraq's first experiment in representative government for generations.

Two councils the Monitor has tracked since late 2004 - in middle-class Hay Somer and the poor Shiite neighborhood of Sheikh Maruf - no longer exist, and many of their former members are in hiding. The fate of the councils provides grim evidence of how difficult it is for democracy to take root in Iraq.

Hundreds of neighborhood councils, now a dead letter as the elite politicians who won seats in Iraq's national election squabble over the spoils, were set up across Iraq in 2003 by the US military and the Research Triangle Institute, based near Raleigh, N.C., was given a contract with up to $460 million to build local governance. The idea was to prime the pump of citizen participation and create a new culture that would make democracy work for citizens in a tangible way. But nearly two years later, the money and effort has yielded few visible gains.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0225/p01s03-woiq.html

[Barrett808]

1. All this "social engineering"

I remember when that was considered a liberal evil.