When Ahmad Ibrahim (last name withheld by the Wall Street Journal for good and sufficient reason) goes to work he puts on a disguise. He dons clothes worn by Baghdad's taxi drivers. He puts a taxi sign on top of his car, drives near his place of employment, hides his car and goes to his office. Once safely inside the 40-year-old man with a wife and six children puts on the uniform of an Iraqi police commander.
He does this for $450 a month, high pay in those parts, and the hope of a pension if there still is a government around to pay it when retirement comes, presuming that Ahmad Ibrahim has not been killed as has happened with a number of his colleagues. His occupation is a family secret. Ahmad Ibrahim's life expectancy is shorter than that of a Russian submariner or a Chinese coal miner.
Unless the rest of the members of the Iraqi police adopt the same tactics there will soon be nobody left for President Bush to brag on when he says how well it's going. But there are practical difficulties.
If Baghdad were to blossom with hundreds of new cabs, the cat would be out of the bag and the insurgents would destroy all of them. Other disguises are needed. Fake Good Humor ice cream trucks are a possibility but thousands of Baghdadis on the verge of heat stroke would mob them and the jig would be up.
Phony ambulances? They would be stopped to carry the wounded and the policemen would never get to work. Another possibility is brown UPS trucks. These could be videoed delivering clandestine policemen to their stations for commercials. With suitable inducements Vice President Cheney might consent to doing the voice overs.
Alas, there is a fly speck in that falafel, too. Everyone in Baghdad knows there is nothing left to deliver. So many brown trucks would excite suspicion. The insurgent-terrorists would peek inside and next there would be more news stories where they say they dasn't show us the pictures.
We need to commission the Rand Corporation experts to do one of their studies on how to get the police to work. In the meantime the morning line in Las Vegas is 7 to 1 against Ahmad Ibrahim living to see his oldest son's bar mitzvah.