Homesteaders needed

Time to stake a new kind of claim in Iraq | Mindy Belz

Handout

This issue's cover story illustrates how a crisis arises when the streets are not safe for girls to go to school and for men to run a business. Thankfully that's not the story everywhere in Iraq, but where it's true it has forced millions of Iraqis to shutter their stores and to leave their homes (not to mention bury their loved ones), many of them for good.

Soldiers on the street make an immediate difference. Following recent violence, Iraqi army units beefed up their numbers in Mosul to 35,000 and things are improving again. One of the lasting lessons of the Iraq War is that the United States did not put enough boots on the ground when it should have. It built concrete walls around Baghdad's palaces and the Green Zone, sandbagged checkpoints at the airbases and government offices when it also should have been paying attention to the neighborhoods, the schools, the mosques, and the churches. But as one Iraqi recently told me, "The government can protect the church and it can protect the school, but it cannot protect every square meter."