Recruiting Problems?

Here's a group that doesn't seem to have difficulty recruiting:

While most Iraqi women live in fear of terrorists and criminals, one small band of women has taken up arms and is prepared to fight back.

Employed by a private security company, the women ride in the front passenger seat posing as ordinary housewives when the company's drivers transport customers around the city in nondescript vehicles.

But their firearms are always close at hand, and they are trained to respond with force if they come under attack.

"Before I got into this, I was like a normal female; when I heard bullets, I would hide," said Muna, a stocky young woman in a black T-shirt and black pants.

"Now, I feel like a man. When I hear a bullet, I want to know where it came from," she said, sitting comfortably with an AK-47 assault rifle across her legs, red toenails poking out from a pair of stacked sandals. "Now I feel equal to my husband."

If the work provides personal fulfillment for Muna, her colleague Assal -- a divorced mother -- sees it as a cause.

"I have seen a lot of innocent people die," she said, staring out with intense black eyes. "We are trying to defend ourselves and defend each other. I am doing this for my country."

That impression, the companies find, is enhanced by the presence of a modestly dressed woman in the front seat next to the driver, appearing to be a housewife out for a drive with her husband.

"We are a low-profile security convoy company. We do our best not to be discovered, and part of that is using women," said Mr. Karam, a veteran of the Lebanon civil war. "We never have been hit while they were with us."

"We train them all together, women and men. They are treated as equals," Mr. Karam said.

The training includes how to respond to an ambush, an attack from an overpass and a situation in which a company client is surrounded and about to be killed or kidnapped.
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After several months of training, the women say they feel more self-confident and stronger. Although none ever dreamed she would be handling guns or jumping out of cars, now all want more training, especially firing range practice with the Baghdad guns of choice -- AK-47s and 9 mm pistols.

"I used to watch action movies when I was a kid, I loved them," laughed Xena, a conservative Muslim who chose her pseudonym from the film character, Xena the Warrior Princess. "My favorite actor is [Jean-Claude] Van Damme."

Meanwhile, back in the USA, some academics bemoan their inability to inspire opposition to Iraq:

The deaths of five Maryland soldiers this month did little to elicit protest against the war in Iraq, and even as U.S. military fatalities climbed near 2,000 last week, military experts say they expect no public outcry. Like the death in Iraq 13 months ago of the 1,000th American soldier, this next milestone will barely register with a public easily distracted, predicts former Marine Lou Cantori.

Cantori, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, likens the rising U.S. death toll to the ticking of a clock. It's so constant and familiar that eventually it goes unnoticed.

"American public opinion is the proverbial deer caught in the headlights as a [foreign] policy disaster bears down on it," said Cantori, who also taught at the U.S. Military Academy, the Air Force Academy and the Marine Corps University in Quantico, Va. "The public is doing exactly what the president is asking them to do and what the Democratic Party is asking them to do -- to hang in there."
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"We looked at the market to see why people were joining the Guard," he explained. "The majority identified said they wanted to serve the greater good -- to be part of something bigger than themselves."

But Cantori says no such rousing spirit can be found to oppose the war. To explain the apparent and collective indifference, he searched for the right word. "Stultification," he said, finally. "American public opinion is stultified."

David Segal, a military sociologist who heads the University of Maryland's Center for Research on Military Organization, blames the news media in part for the nation's collective slow pulse. Without daily front-page and primetime TV coverage, Americans are easily distracted by other events, he said.

Also, missing from college campuses is any significant resistance to the war, said Cantori, who recently participated in a Middle East forum on the Homewood campus of the Johns Hopkins University. Compared with the Vietnam War, when young people faced a military draft and marshaled thundering protests, campuses today are quiet, according to students and faculty at some of Maryland's largest schools.
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During the Middle East forum last month at Hopkins, co-sponsored by the student chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Muslim Students' Association, a panelist asked if students were optimistic about the direction Iraq was headed. Of the 50 or so students present that day in the Arellano Theater, the majority raised their hands, said Claire Edington, 21, president of Hopkins' ACLU student chapter.

"I was surprised, but I was also encouraged because most of the students there were Muslim," she said.

Cantori was sitting on the panel that day and couldn't believe "the naivete."

But as long as we're on the subject of naivete,

Hopkins graduate student Kevan Harris, spokesman for the Hopkins Anti-War Coalition, or HAWC, believes resistance, like the polls, is rising against the war. When peace activist Cindy Sheehan spoke at Hopkins' Shriver Hall last month, she attracted a crowd, and HAWC meetings have drawn new members, he said.

For a peace march in Washington four weeks ago, HAWC filled a bus with 40 students who paid $10 each for the trip.

"Last year we wouldn't have been able to fill up a car," Harris said. "By comparison of degrees, this year [students are] qualitatively less apathetic."

And since we're talking about travel, let's revisit the ladies from our first story - they've been to some of the most notorious areas in Iraq:

Their trips take them around Baghdad, as far north as Mosul and deep into the violent western province of Al Anbar.

But always, before leaving, they take down a tiny red-bound Koran, remove the white tissue wrapping and turn to the passages that evoke protection.

"We pray together, we call each other to see if the other is safe," Muna said.