The Postwar Corps
Meet the Baghdad volunteers.
by Fred Barnes
3/20/2004 12:06:00 AM, Volume 009, Issue 28

Baghdad
LIBERALS ARE FAMOUS for claiming the moral high ground for their causes and themselves. They like to pat themselves on the back. But at the scene of today's most prominent humanitarian project--Iraq--they are not a major presence. Conservatives are, hundreds of them. Despite the danger, they have volunteered to serve in the effort to make Iraq a free and democratic country. So many have come, in fact, that Coalition Provisional Authority administrator L. Paul Bremer had to cut off the flow. "There are more than I can possibly take," he says.

It's not pay or creature comforts that attract them. They are a kind of conservative Peace Corps. They live in trailers, four to a unit, surrounded by sandbags. They eat institutional food. They work seven days a week, 12 to 14 hours a day. They spend most of their time inside the six-square-mile "green zone," the guarded headquarters of the CPA and Iraqi Governing Council. They face attacks from mortars and rockets and gunmen.

They have sacrificed to come to Iraq. Shane Wolfe, once a White House intern, had just graduated from the University of Akron School of Law and taken the bar exam when he heard CPA spokesman Dan Senor was looking for help. "I believe in this mission," he says. "I believe in it even more now after having seen the reaction of the Iraqi people." Wolfe was scheduled to leave Iraq in early March. "I committed to stay a while longer." Shortly after he arrived in Baghdad in September ...