POPP Director Shares Firsthand Experiences
in Iraq Peace Building
Many
professors will go out of their way for their
students, but few would risk their lives. To
teach effectively in SPP’s Peace Operations
Policy Program, Director Dave Davis says that
he and his staff must participate in real-life
peace operations – even if that means
working in volatile or life-threatening situations.
“ Our
whole focus is on teaching students to intervene
in peace operations. If we’re going to
talk about doing this work, we have to have a
background doing it ourselves,” he explains
just weeks after returning from his assignment
in Baghdad, where he worked over the summer
as a policy analyst for several U.S. government
branches, including the Coalition Provisional
Authority and the Iraq Reconstruction and Management
Office.
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Dave
Davis is director of SPP’s Peace
Operations Policy Program. |
But it’s not just
practical experience that Davis brings into the
classroom. He also
conveys the realities of living and working under
fire everyday. When you ask Davis about the bombs
in Iraq,
his lively demeanor changes: His shoulders slump,
and his smile disappears.
“
I’m still to the point where if someone slams
a car door, I’m a little twitchy,” he says,
then admits, “I was anxious to leave.” Mortars
went off daily near Saddam Hussein’s
palace, where Davis lived in a trailer with
other U.S.
government workers. Weekly someone was hurt;
once a blast came
so close that shrapnel littered the grounds.
Almost immediately, though,
Davis tries to downplay the danger he faced. The
aim was so poor that
the mortars caused only minimal damage, he
says. The
palace itself
was hit only once, and, thankfully, no mortars
ever hit the flimsy tents or trailers where
most of the
workers slept.
The mortars are just one
sign of what can happen if you ignore the peace-building
step
of reconstruction,
Davis suggests. The United States made a mistake by
tying up too many funds in infrastructure and ignoring
security needs, says Davis, who performed a quantitative
analysis of how the Iraq Reconstruction and Management
Office has allocated its money. “You get a bigger
bang for your buck if you put some money into peace
building and security,” he says.
During a recent discussion
with his students, Davis explained how these budgetary
mistakes affected the
current ongoing turmoil in Iraq. “I told my students
to follow the money,” says Davis, adding that
the U.S. government is finally beginning to shift more
funds for security purposes.
Although he feels that
things may get worse before they get better, Davis
remains optimistic that Iraq
will find long-term peace and stability. “The Iraqis
are very resilient and nationalistic in their own way. They want us out of
there, and that may be their biggest unifying force,” he says, adding, “I’m
also optimistic because Americans do learn over time too.”
