Building, Not Destroying

I found this story encouraging: School Construction Halts Violence. Regardless of how one feels about the original invasion of Iraq, we should all be concerned now with the efforts to rebuild Iraq. (And when I say "rebuild Iraq," I refer to actual construction/infrastructure projects.) After all, these people have been through seven kinds of hell and deserve better. Unfortunately, these efforts have not met with uniform success, largely due to violence from local and foreign fighters against the Coalition Forces, their civilian contractors, and their Iraqi partners. But there appears to be a learning curve: the longer our military is over there, the better they get at dealing with locals on the local's terms. This story is an example of that, I think: instead of the military trying to play "whack-a-mole" with their assailants while building a school on the side, the military negotiated with the local leaders to broker a deal with the local fighters, offering to pay them for laying brick instead of laying bombs. And it worked! More of this please, and less of the other...