Potemkin Village

Kevin Drum has been all over David Petraeus' PR surge to bamboozle lawmakers, the press and the public, and today he finds the mother of all deceptions. That Dora market, tourist destination number one for all visiting delegations? "It's like an Indiana market!" "Five rugs for five bucks!" That market? Yeah, it's made of papier maché:

"This is General Petraeus's baby," said Staff Sgt. Josh Campbell, 24, of Winfield, Kan., as he set out on a patrol near the market on a hot evening in mid-August.

....[But] visits to key U.S. bases and neighborhoods in and around Baghdad show that recent improvements are sometimes tenuous, temporary, even illusory....Even U.S. soldiers assigned to protect Petraeus's showcase remain skeptical. "Personally, I think it's a false representation," Campbell said, referring to the portrayal of the Dora market as an emblem of the surge's success. "But what can I say? I'm just doing my job and don't ask questions."

....After the delegation left, Maj. Ron Minty , 36, said that the generals had wanted 300 shops open for business by July 1. By the day of the delegation's visit, 303 had opened....Still, the Dora market is a Potemkin village of sorts. The U.S. military hands out $2,500 grants to shop owners to open or improve their businesses. The military has fixed windows and doors and even helped rebuild shops that had burned down, soldiers and others said...."The Americans are giving money, so they're opening up stores," said Falah Hassan Fadhil, 27, who sells cosmetics.

1st Lt. Jose Molina, who is in charge of monitoring and disbursing the grant money, said the U.S. military includes barely operating stores in its tally. "Although they sell dust, they are open for business," said Molina, 35, from Dallas. "They intend to sell goods or they may just have a handful of goods. But they are still counted."

This is no more a sign of progress than a Hollywood movie set would be. You can secure one area and turn it into your perfect indicator but that doesn't make it ACTUALLY indicative of anything. Until you look at overall goals instead of random anecdotes you'll never get the real story. And if you read the independent judgment of the overall goals, you see that they are failing.

UPDATE: Speaking of independent judgments, why is Michael O'Hanlon getting another chance to explain his views on the surge in the New York Times? How about one of the researchers on the GAO report? Somebody without an agenda?

Laura Bush is in the bubble, too

I defy you to listen to this NPR report from Weekend All Things Considered and not lose your lunch. It describes the lengths to which large government agencies will go to shield the powerful, in this case, the First Lady, from undeniable truths, and in fact it accurately characterizes how Western elites have allowed themselves to be exposed to colonial lands for centuries. While visiting the African nation of Mali, one of the most persistently poor and water scarce countries on the planet, the US Embassy and international aid organizations did their best to create a Potemkin village, ensuring that Mrs. Bush would walk away from the visit satisfied that life was improving for the people of Mali, when in fact the same struggle for existence continues. It's a sickening report.

Addie Goss courageously chronicled the tremendous amount of work done to refurbish a school that would be the centerpiece of the First Lady's visit, which is financed by the President's African Education Initiative:

It was Thursday, only 24 hours left before the First Lady’s visit, and a work crew from the US Embassy was installing electrical outlets in two classrooms. The next day, the outlets would power the fans to cool Mrs. Bush and the rest of the crowd. But like most schools in Mali, the Mandela school doesn’t have enough money for electricity, so the power cord from these new outlets led out the windows to a mobile generator the Embassy brought over and hid out back.

USAID bought brand-new gravel to cover the mud in the courtyard, so Mrs. Bush could walk down it during her choreographed visit. The trees and bushes were freshly trimmed and watered. The kids who would serenade Mrs. Bush wore matching traditional outfits. This is about as far removed from the reality of Mali as humanly possible.

Demba Bundi is a high school teacher who works with the Teacher Training Via Radio program. During the week before the First Lady arrived, he watched the slow removal of plastic bags, peanut shells and paper trash from the courtyard. On Tuesday, he saw an embassy work crew tear out two of the kid’s water spouts because they were in the way of Mrs. Bush’s entrance. He was also struck by some selective re-painting on the wall surrounding the school.

DB: Only the entrance door has been painted new, because that’s where everybody gets in. But the rest of the wall is dirty, and you have all these American gangster boy kind of graffiti on the wall, and nobody seems to care about that, but just the entrance door which to me is so interesting.

Every move of Mrs. Bush was planned to the letter, so the US Embassy did the bare minimum needed to ensure that she wouldn't encounter anything in her line of sight that would trouble her beautiful mind. The school even set up a chorus of third-graders who would grace the First Lady with a "traditional song." So traditional that it was in a language none of the kids knew, French, the COLONIAL language of the nation. That must of been more soothing to the Western ears of the First Lady than Bamanka, what they actually speak. So FOUR DAYS of class time was spent teaching these kids this one song in a foreign language so the First Lady could smile that Joker grin and feel good about herself and her husband's fine work serving the educational needs of Africans.

Incidentally, even BEFORE the renovations, this was one of the richest and most successful schools in all of Mali, inaugurated by Nelson Mandela (the school bears his name) and a recipient of plenty of foreign aid. But for a White House official visit, every blade of grass had to be in place, every piece of the wall had to be freshly painted. God forbid that someone noticed the crushing POVERTY in the country.

American sources at the Embassy say the school is refurbished to allow Mrs. Bush to be comfortable and focus on the substance of the event. Aside from the Mandela School, Mrs. Bush made just two stops in Mali: the President’s mansion and the house of the US Ambassador. The whole visit was over within hours.

So this was the part of the visit where Mrs. Bush got the "authentic" view of "real Mali." A complete fabrication. And did the US Embassy even bother to leave the improvements in place after the visit?

Yesterday morning I returned to the Mandela School with teacher Demba Bundi. The courtyard was once again covered in trash, this time water bottle labels and donut cartons from the First Lady’s visit [...]

We went into the classroom that had been electrically fitted. The Embassy had removed the fans, the furniture and the generator the same afternoon as the First Lady’s visit. Even the outlets had been pulled out of the walls.

It's impossible to know whether or not the First Lady knows about any of these herculean efforts to make surface-level improvements so the places she visits look just gleaming. Maybe she's as blissfully ignorant as the President. It's a comfortable place to be, as the Embassy employees said. You can will yourself into believing that you're a fine person who's doing great things to help impoverished Africans and build them a better life. The reality is far crueler. But this of course is how emissaries have viewed the "rabble" of faraway lands for quite some time. And this false impression is a two-way street. The very wise teacher Demba Bundi had a great quote:

Mali is a poor country, we’re not ashamed of saying it, we’re poor. But despite poverty level, we still want to impress the West. Which to me is pointless. If I am poor and sleeping on the dirt and you are coming to visit me, let’s hang out on the dirt. And maybe I’d have a better chance to get some help from you.

If I didn't happen to be in the car on a lazy Sunday in the middle of summer right before a holiday, I wouldn't have known about this truly shocking report. Kudos to NPR for putting it on the air. And there's a lesson in it for all of us. We all have this subjective sense of how things operate, without going deeper into what has been constructed behind the curtains to maintain that impression. I know that the likes of Laura Bush probably never reflect on that, but maybe we all should. And we should always endeavor to seek information about the world as it is and not they way we would like it to be.