Rocco DiPippo

Rocco DiPippo is an American contractor rebuilding police stations in the Wasit Province southeast of Baghdad who reports in "Looking Iraqis in the Eye" that,

"The main reason the police station project succeeded was that most of the Americans and Iraqis assigned to it learned to trust and respect each other, to cooperate, and to focus on a common goal, seeing it through completion. Without the mutual trust and respect, the project would have failed."

DiPippo sees that as a model for the larger project of remaking Iraq into a better place, an effort that is being undermined by the defeatist rhetoric of the Democrats and leftist radicals.

"Iraqis watch us, and they listen to us. What they hear from some of our politicians, political activists and cultural elites has made many of them reluctant to work with the Americans in bringing security to their country. Many Iraqis are afraid of what they are hearing from the Democratic Party leadership and their media shills – that America will abandon them. And as long as they are afraid, they will be reluctant to seize the initiative in their towns and villages and chase out those who are murdering their families.

"That reluctance makes sense, since if the Americans leave now, as the Democrats are urging, the murderers will rule them. And the murderers will hunt down and kill anyone who ever worked with or cooperated with Americans."

DiPippo keeps being asked a troubling question by the Iraqis with whom he works:

"Go to Iraq. Not for a few days, like our politicians do, but for months. Spend those days living and working with Iraqis. Try answering the question I often heard from them while I was there: “Why are you Americans saying you are
going to leave my country before it is safe?” ...

"It should come as no surprise to anyone in the placid West that ordinary Iraqis have been slow to rise in defense of their neighborhoods and to join with the Americans in pursuing that task. They have simply been hedging their bets. And why not? The antiwar declarations of the U.S. media, the cultural elites, American academics and high profile Democratic Party politicians tell them that America will abandon them.

"Why would Iraqis join with the Americans, risking their necks, if they believe the Americans will leave before the terrorists were defeated? Why should ordinary Iraqis work with American soldiers in hunting down terrorists when prominent Americans like John Kerry, Richard Durbin, Barack Obama, Edward Kennedy, John Murtha and Michael Moore tell them that those soldiers are as cold and as brutal as the terrorists destroying their families, and America’s most publicized civilian activist, Cindy Sheehan, is telling them that the man leading those soldiers, George W. Bush, is the world’s biggest terrorist?"

DiPippo concludes that we should keep our word to the Iraqi people and finish the job:

"Brave men and women are counting on us to finish what we started, as are millions of ordinary Iraqis who will pay dearly for an early departure by the U.S. If we let them down, we forever lose the right to call ourselves a moral people."