The Postwar Corps
BARNES, FRED
The Postwar Corps Meet the Baghdad volunteers. BY FRED BARNES Baghdad IBERALS ARE FAMOUS for claiming the moral high ground for ./their causes and themselves. They like to pat themselves on the...
...When it's time to go, I go...
...I have great empathy with Iraqis...
...He says he had "buyer's remorse" from having avoided Vietnam by serving in the National Guard...
...He says he told them: "You don't understand...
...Now in a war zone, Galen wears a 9mm Beretta pistol...
...It was adjacent to the grave of her father, an Air Force officer...
...Wolfe was scheduled to leave Iraq in early March...
...Shortly after he arrived in Baghdad in Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...They face attacks from mortars and rockets and gunmen...
...I believe in this mission," he says...
...Swan was working in the Pentagon as a civilian when he was asked to join an Army Reserve unit from Orlando, Florida, that had been called up for Iraq duty...
...But it's not as inconvenient as coming to work at the World Trade Center and finding you had to jump from the 100th floor or have your body incinerated...
...Then there's Traci Scott and David Luft...
...They work seven days a week, 12 to 14 hours a day...
...Back in Washington for a brief vacation, she visited his grave at Arlington National Cemetery...
...Like Shane Wolfe, he's staying on though the term he signed up for has expired...
...September he learned he'd passed the bar exam...
...They like to pat themselves on the back...
...I'm not a sunshine patriot...
...That's the perspective I bring...
...He agreed...
...He'll wait for the turnover of sovereignty to an Iraqi government on June 30...
...So many have come, in fact, that Coalition Provisional Authority administrator L. Paul Bremer had to cut off the flow...
...blast prompt Scott to volunteer...
...Luft grew up in postwar Germany before emigrating to the United States...
...Galen got a call from the White House last summer and signed up...
...Two more: Army captain Patrick Swan, 41, of Alexandria, Virginia, and David McDougal of Boise, Idaho...
...Luft arrived a month ago to help Iraqis develop new businesses...
...David Luft, 59, is an economic consultant from Austin, who worked on the State Department's policy planning staff and for the International Trade Commission in the Reagan administration...
...They're willing to sacrifice their careers for a spell and leave their families for a cause...
...They eat institutional food...
...How did the U.N...
...I had good success in the past...
...They're idealistic...
...His mother and daughter urged him to get out of his commitment...
...They believe the removal of Saddam Hussein's tyranny can lead to a new and better Iraq...
...Despite the danger, they have volunteered to serve in the effort to make Iraq a free and democratic country...
...Having advised former Communist countries on creating a free market economy, Luft felt "the skill I had to offer would be something that would be valuable here...
...I committed to stay a while longer...
...If nobody's over here, there won't be anybody to help...
...What's particularly appealing about them is they don't pat themselves on the back...
...What do all these people have in common...
...I had to come...
...Charles Buehring, was killed in a rocket attack on the Al-Rashid Hotel inside the green zone...
...She was in Baghdad only six days when a military officer she worked with, Lt...
...I said absolutely," Swan says...
...They live in trailers, four to a unit, surrounded by sandbags...
...It's not pay or creature comforts that attract them...
...I felt people were going to start to leave," she says...
...McDougal is an odd case—a British foreign service officer on a leave of absence from his job as a producer of the Good Mining, Idaho daily TV show in Boise...
...But I don't have any doubt this [mission] is going to work...
...They spend most of their time inside the six-square-mile "green zone," the guarded headquarters of the CPA and Iraqi Governing Council...
...They are a kind of conservative Peace Corps...
...He got the job while rafting in Idaho on vacation...
...There are more than I can possibly take," he says...
...His wife is an American...
...I'm a good Idahoan," he says...
...Shane Wolfe, once a White House intern, had just graduated from the University of Akron School of Law and taken the bar exam when he heard CPA spokesman Dan Senor was looking for help...
...Conservatives are, hundreds of them...
...Galen is also a professional Republican, a former press secretary for Newt Gingrich, a TV commentator, and most recently the author of an Internet political newsletter...
...There's a low level of fear here, sometimes a high level...
...American soldiers made friends with me...
...I can relate to what's going on here...
...I'm an extra gun if they need it," he says half-seriously...
...She is a 39-year-old African American who gave up her job with Republican congressman Jon Porter of Nevada and came to Iraq after the bombing of the United Nations building here last fall that killed 22 people...
...He was asked to serve as spokesman for the top British official in Iraq, Sir Jeremy Greenstock...
...His press office colleague Rich Galen is, as he puts it, "a 57-year-old Jewish writer...
...I believe in it even more now after having seen the reaction of the Iraqi people...
...I've got 22 years in the reserves...
...But at the scene of today's most prominent humanitarian project— Iraq—they are not a major presence...
...Wolfe is 30...
...It's inconvenient...
...They have sacrificed to come to Iraq...
Vol. 9 • March 2004 • No. 28
