Month: December 2007

In the background are Hesco barriers.  Guess what those things in foreground are.

I truly enjoy the RCT 2 Marine briefings.  A lot of information passes but feelings of camaraderie and humor lighten the mood.  But it is a special kind of subtle humor, often more conveyed by slight changes in word emphasis (there can be a lot of meaning in a “yes sir”), facial expression or what goes unsaid.  I am afraid I will not be able to properly convey it, but I will try with an example.  First I need to provide a little background.

The Regiment is in the process of demilitarization – demiling.  During the recent unpleasantness, the Marines deployed various types of fortifications.  As areas are returned to civil Iraqi control these things must be removed and the place returned to its former condition.  This often means barren desert, but it has to be smooth barren desert.  The recently demiled desert is usually better than the original, since the smoothing tends to squash down and bury the preexisting garbage.  It doesn’t take military action to create a litter problem. 

Probably the most common forms of fortifications are Hesco barriers.  A Hesco barrier is essentially a barrel of fabric, held in place by wire and filled with dirt and debris.  You can see the pictures above.  They are easy to make and very good at absorbing explosions but unattractive.  The wire is valuable as scrap, but the fabric, which has no salvage value, must be separated.  The protocol calls for the fabric to be burned and the metal salvaged.  Now that I have set the stage, imagine the scene. 

The colonel asks the engineer captain about a particular stretch of road being cleaned up and Hesco barriers removed.  The captain explains, “We burn the fabric, sir, to salvage the metal…”  The captain pauses.  The colonel looks up in anticipation, saying nothing.  The captain gets a satisfied smile on his face and adds “… with our flame throwers, sir”.  Everybody in the room perks up.  The colonel says, “You have flame throwers?  Why do you have flame throwers?”  The captain answers, “Yes sir.  For counter vegetation, sir, we have two flame throwers.”  Testosterone surge in the room is palpable. There are several spontaneous offers to help with the flame throwers. 

It is true that the flame throwers are good for “counter vegetation operations.”  They are very effective in clearing a defensive area around a fortified position.  But it was clear from the enthusiasm expressed that using the flame throwers against vegetation or Hesco barrier is a chore nobody avoids.

BTW – in the picture foreground are urinals.  You try to hit the pipe.  Privacy is not an issue.

The picture is Madison, Wisconsin where I went to school.  I took it in September, just before I left for Iraq. It has nothing to do with Iraq.  It is just a place I enjoyed being.

I have conflicting feelings being the boss.  Everybody else on my staff has something particular to do.  In the “management position” you give up much of the hands-on fun and have to resist the urge to interfere in the productive work of others.  In compensation, you get to avoid some details as well as see and maybe shape the big picture.  The bargain is worth it, but there are clearly costs as well as gains.  For example, I would dearly love to tramp along on the agricultural assessments, but I cannot justify the investment in my time and, besides, I would surely get in the way of the real work if I hung around like a f*rt in a phone booth. 

One of my management duties today is to aggregate the work of my team so that I can understand and to coordinate efforts and, more urgently although perhaps less importantly, be able to brief high level visitors who will be coming around in a couple of days.  The team is active, making the aggregating job more complex, but at the same time making the leadership job a lot more satisfying.

I have everywhere been lucky in finding good colleagues and being able to profit from serendipitous opportunities.  Timing has also often worked to my advantage.

My timing in Iraq was luckier than I had any right to expect.  My predecessor set up the ePRT.  In the creation stage of any endeavourer, investments in time and resources show few tangible results, so the poor guy was working hard and doing good work, but had few specific achievements to brag about.  I inherited an operation at the takeoff stage.  In my short tenure, I have been able to approve and start scores of small projects collectively worth a half million dollars.  I look pretty tall standing on my predecessor’s shoulders.

I had even better timing with the security situation.  I set foot in Anbar at almost exactly at an inflection point in the violence.   Investments the Marines made in blood and treasure were beginning to yield results and the situation just continued to improve. The remarkable reduction of violence make it POSSIBLE to do our projects.   My colleagues who have been here longer tell me that six months ago it was hard to find organizations or contractors brave enough to take our money for projects.  Our problem today is choosing who among the many excellent opportunities.   Nor do I want to minimize the personal benefits for me and my staff.  It is much more pleasant to visit projects or contacts when you have a reasonable expectation of coming safely home.  The excitement of danger is much more attractive in the movies than in real life and I prefer to do w/o it whenever possible.

Life is an enormous relay race.  I got the baton now and it is my duty to run as best I can until I hand it off, but I have to be grateful that my stretch of track is smooth and mostly downhill due to the work of others.

Anyway, I need to get to work actually assessing the projects, making the list and checking it twice, so that I can better understand and explain all that we do and what we will do.  I am proud of my team.  It just goes to show that you don’t have to be smart if you are lucky and I am lucky to be here at this time with these guys.

BTW – to help me keep up with the many projects and commitments, I have gone low tech returning to something I used successfully for years – a durable little green notebook (Federal supply 7530-01-060-7511) about the size of a wallet that fits in my back pocket.  I always have access to it and when I have even a short time available, I can page through my notes.  It is a type of study and memorandum.  It has the advantage of being simple.  I used to make notes on a Blackberry, but I often forgot the notes I made and even more often let the urgent of the latest message replace the importance of the best idea.   With this, my constant review keeps important things at the front of my mind.  I am not going to give up technology, but for some tasks perhaps the appropriate technology is the simplest.

The picture above shows a couple of my paper PDAs.  Don’t worry the notes are from unclassified briefings and I made sure to practice good OPSEC.  Besides, who can read my writing?

The Colonel of our Regimental Combat Team was interviewed for Fox News.  

I admire Colonel Clardy.  He has done an excellent job here.  There is lots of credit to go around, but the Colonel certainly deserves a big share in turning this situation around in western Al Anbar.  He is well respected by his men and our Iraqi colleagues alike, a true soldier-diplomat.  I saw he is also very good on television and told him that he should run for political office.  We could use politicians who have experience running a big operation under these kinds of difficult conditions.  I continue to be amazed at how comprehensive a job it is, with elements of management, leadership, diplomacy, public relations and rule of law. It would also be good more politicians with real experience with war and peace.  

There are lots of heroes around here.  Some people fear that this generation of Americans is not up to the standards of the past.  Every generation has its heroes; it depends on where you look.  I trust my life to young men driving humvees or flying helicopters.  I am impressed by their devotion to duty, not to mention their intelligence, politeness and friendliness.  The Greatest Generation was great, but they did not use up all the heroism available in America.

Many of the officers are true intellectuals (although I am sure they would reject that characterization).  They work to understand the whole situation, not just the parts but how the parts fit together.   Especially impressive is General John Allen who I meet with some regularity.  I learn a lot just from standing near him. 

Sorry if I am rambling.  I just wish more Americans had the opportunity to work with the brave ad capable men & women here in Iraq.  They would be prouder to be Americans and it might change some attitudes.  One of my colleagues, a self described former tie-dye hippy, was talking today about how he quickly jumped to the defense of our Marines while at a conference about refugees.  He was annoyed when some UN & NGO types accused them of “invading the humanitarian space” that these organizations considered their rightful property.  The Marines were saving lives and building the future while some others were theorizing and chattering about when they were going to decide to decide to demand something be done by somebody else.  Heroes do more than talk about helping.

Out of the blue and completely unsolicited I received a box of harmonicas.  I guess somebody figured that the one thing we needed in Iraq was harmonicas.  There were more than a hundred.

They are Herb Shriner “Hoosier Boy” harmonicas.  The accompanying letter explains that Herb Shriner was a 50s era TV star and a harmonica virtuoso.  The harmonicas are a gift from his family.  They have evidently been in storage (the harmonicas, not the family) since the 1950s and now there is a program to give them to the troops. At first I thought the whole idea was a joke, but the harmonicas are proving surprisingly popular among the Marines and you can hear the sweet, but melancholy music of the mouth organ all over our corner of Al Asad.  Some people can play the harmonica, others can’t.   Those who can play evidently learned all their songs from watching westerns and/or movies about the Civil War (i.e. the war of northern aggression, to my neighbors near the tree farm).  So far I have been able to pick out “Lorena”, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, “The Bonnie Blue Flag” and of course that old favorite “Home on the Range.”   There are other songs that I either do not recognize or are unrecognizable at the current talent level of the performer.

I tried to learn to play the harmonica a couple of years back, but since I am uncommonly free of musical talent, the lessons didn’t take.  Maybe I will take it up again so that I can entertain people waiting for flights at the landing zones.  Maybe not, now that I recall everybody around here carries a gun.

BTW – I am trying to put the comments section back in.  Let’s hope I do not get spammed again.

Every Muslim who is able is supposed to make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in his/her life.  This visit, the hajj, is one of the five pillars of Islam.  It takes place during the lunar month of Dhu al-Hijja, which this year will start on December 11.

We are not directly involved with the hajj, but take a look at the map and notice where Anbar province sits.  Obviously thousands of pilgrims moving through our area of operations is hard to ignore.   Having Coalition Forces around will make it a safer journey for them as CF operations disrupt AQI and insurgents, so that the ostensibly devout (AQI) will have a harder time murdering the genuinely devout (pilgrims going to Mecca).

The Marines have been learning about the hajj and how to be culturally aware around the Iraqis and those traveling through Iraq during this special time.  Iraq shares a border with Saudi Arabia and pilgrims traveling over land to Mecca from the north and the east logically pass though Anbar.  I recently attended a lecture about the hajj.  One of the Marines had been assigned to learn about it and deliver a talk to enlighten the others.  He did an excellent job and was very earnest in his task.  It is important to be earnest.    His lecture was as factually correct as most I heard at college and it was a good deal more entertaining.  He connected the idea of pilgrimage to examples in the experience of most Marines and then gave the background on the significance of Mecca, the pilgrimage and many of the things pilgrims do before, during and after the hajj. 

Of course the best outcome for all involved is that absolutely nothing exciting happens during the month of the hajj, in Iraq or anyplace else.  According to the lecture and what I hear from other sources, the hajj is generally peaceful, as people are in a generous mood and no good Muslim engages in violence during this period. Of course, there always are some who seek the notoriety of disrupting peaceful people even during a special time like this. Let’s hope they don’t succeed this year.

A couple of years ago my son Espen  came for a take your child to work day.  I still have the letter he wrote about his experience.  He was bored because I didn’t do anything interesting that he could watch.  He concluded correctly that I was in the persuasion business and it is not interesting watching persuasion being made.

Diplomacy is like that.  You meet interesting people and wrestle with interesting ideas, which is why I like the work, but you really do not DO very much interesting stuff.  I guess that is why they do not make television dramas, or even comedies, about diplomats and when we do appear we are usually slick sweet talkers.  That characterization is unfair, but I can well understand if that is the way others see us.  Much of the time we are transmitting messages and if we do succeed in changing minds, they will look no different and it may well be best for all involved if nobody acknowledges that a change occurred or why.

I thought working in Iraq might be different, but it isn’t.  I spent my career in public diplomacy.  Since first post in Porto Alegre, Brazil, I have managed staff, run programs, met people, written reports and been generally in the persuasion business.  In Iraq I do the same things.  Being a PRT leader is not substantially different from working as a public affairs officer in Krakow or Porto Alegre.  Of course, I work with vastly greater resources and in a less settled general atmosphere, but I feel comfortable doing the KIND of job I have been doing for twenty years.

I was about to write that another difference is that working in Iraq is more dangerous, but I do not think that is still true.  The security arrangements make it seem a lot scarier, but those same precautions also make is less dangerous.  Beyond that, the security situation on the ground had improved very much.  On the other hand, in Porto Alegre I shared the road with big trucks and bad drivers when I traveled on narrow roads around my district.  On one particularly narrow and curvy coastal highway, informally called the road of death, I kept count of fatal accidents I passed.  During one seven hour drive, I saw seven – one for every hour.  Similarly, on the narrow poorly maintained road from Krakow to Rzeszow in Poland, traffic fatalities were so frequent that Polish traffic accident terms were among the words I could recite like a native.  I believe that driving developing country highways is statistically more dangerous than working here in Iraq today.

It is harder to work here and much more uncomfortable.  After the initial excitement of traveling in helicopters and convoys dissipates, you have the tedium, noise and discomfort of traveling in helicopters and convoys and travel is unreliable.  It might take days to make a simple trip and you might get stuck for a long time where your only option is to embrace the suck. 

What I miss is most the spontaneity and serendipity that I enjoyed in my earlier posts, but I am afraid that is lost in much of the world – not only in Iraq – due to security.  Terrorists have forced us to hunker down all over the world.   In Porto Alegre or Krakow, my office was on the street.  Friends and contacts could and did just wander in to talk and I could just walk out the office door and find them. If I had business with the head of the university or the mayor of the city, I could just go over and talk with him.  You get a lot done in those situations and it is a pleasure to do.  Of course, I could speak Polish and Portuguese and I do not speak Arabic, but that is not the key difference.  What I could resolve with a couple of minutes and two cups of tea in Krakow or a small coffee in Porto Alegre now is literally a Federal case requiring days of planning.  More perniciously, the ubiquitous security complicates human interaction, destroys spontaneity and makes it very hard to achieve the kinds of solutions that create synergy by giving everybody more than they thought they would get. 

I do not know if we can ever get that back – anywhere.  We have become a world of guards, gates and barriers, even in our own home towns, even in our own homes.  Terrorism has stolen a part of our humanity.

I am drifting too far into the dark side.  Today is Sunday.  We only work a half day on Sunday.  I am going to take advantage of this sunny and cool morning to run down to the peaceful Al Asad oasis and think harmonious thoughts for a least a couple of hours.

My father was a veteran of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and always spoke well of the experience.   I enjoyed the fruits of the CCC labors, as trees they planted came to maturity just in time for me and I have always had a special fondness for the whole idea of the CCC.  As a long time Federal worker, I am acutely aware of the limits of government, but the CCC was a big program that mostly worked. When I had my initial talk with our Ag guy Dennis, I told him that I wanted us to make a CCC style contribution, albeit a smaller one, to soil, water, flora & fauna of Iraq.  He has come up with a big project. 

Our area of operations is dusty desert with a ribbon of green along the Euphrates River.  We do, however, have a beautiful lake, called Lake Qadisiya, which I wrote about in an earlier post.  The waters of the lake provide for irrigation and produce hydroelectric power.  In this hot, dry climate, substantial amounts of the water are lost to evaporation.  The hot sun plays the dominant part, but dry winds have a significant supporting role.  A belt of trees planted perpendicular to the prevailing winds would, according to Dennis, reduce evaporation loss, trap blowing dust and generally ameliorate the local microclimate.  Date palms, being the most common tree around here, we thought of them.   The date palms have the added advantage of supplying marketable fruit in the short term, so they are the promise of the future and a blessing for today.

I was a little skeptical of the efficacy of such a scheme.  In the more moderate environments where most of us live, such things are less necessary or effective, so it is beyond my experience.  But Dennis has his PhD in Iraqi soils and I have to believe he knows what he is talking about.   Reid, our civil affairs person, confirmed it with a negative example.  He was assigned to Diyala Province during the 2003 Operation Iraqi Freedom.  He noticed the incongruous presence of what looked like rice paddy infrastructure in the desert and came to understand that there had indeed been rice there before the 1980s.   Extensive groves of date palms had protected and improved the micro climate, preventing dehydration and increasing local humidity enough to allow rice cultivation. During the Iraq-Iran war, Saddam, fearing that insurgents or Iranian agents could hide among the trees, destroyed the groves and consigned vast acreage to the desert.

This will be a big project, one we can begin but never hope to finish, a generational task like the work of the CCC.  We are talking lots of trees to do the whole job, more than we can reasonably achieve, but it is better to start now than to wait for the perfect opportunity that will never come.  In time perhaps what now seems so improbably will come to look inevitable.  It makes sense.Although once established, the trees will create the conditions for their own continued success, they will require irrigation to get them started, so it would be not enough to just get some guy to plant seedlings every two paces as you might be able to do in more benign environments.  The investment required to do this is well beyond our means, so we will be looking for partners.   The near term pay off in terms of the dates we hope will entice local cooperation.  It is easier to convince someone to do something by promising a cash crop in a few years than offering the satisfaction of having done something good for a future generation, but people are motivated by both and we will present a balance.

Maybe I should also include some windmills to tilt at.

Anything you have “too much of” is not a problem; it is an opportunity.  In Iraq, junk opportunities abound.  In an earlier post I talked about the strange cases of sophisticated jet fighter planes strewn randomly around the desert.   They are just some of the more unusual components of a very large junk pile that is Iraq.

Debris piles are nothing new here.  Until 200 years ago, people were only vaguely aware of the great civilizations of Mesopotamia.  French and British archeologist were much more interested in learning about them than the people nearby and it was not until they got here that anybody started to study the big mounds of dirt and rubble that formed the most prominent hills in an otherwise pancake flat landscape between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The ancient Mesopotamians built with mud brick. When structures were no longer worth repairing, they just smoothed them down and built on top, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Over time, town elevations increased. Each layer from a different time, so keeping track of precisely where particular artifacts were found makes a difference for the chronology. Before the 19^th century archeologists arrived, people plundered the mounds for treasure and building materials, but rarely paid attention to the context.  As a kid fascinated by ancient history, I was puzzled that anybody could be so dismissive of the past.  I am beginning to understand, if not accept that perspective.

Heaps of junk and garbage are everywhere.  Most is the detritus of recent civilization.  Modern people produce more rubbish than their ancestors did and the materials are different.  Mud bricks made of dirt, pottery shards made of dirt and artifacts made of dirt are not that different from the dirt they are piled on.  In fact most people probably thought they were just dirt piles.  Nevertheless, trash of all kinds persists in the desert.  In humid climates, metal rusts; wood rots and minerals dissolve.  Above all, growing vegetation soon covers any garbage pile, integrating it into the living environment or at least obscuring the view. Not here.  In Anbar integration processes anticipate the advent of the next ice age to do their work and bide their time until then.

Trash heaps are so ubiquitous that you stop paying attention, even if digging in them might reveal history.  I suppose the native population of the region just became inured to them, as I have.  The first nearly complete Soviet MiG lying in the desert is interesting.  After a while they become about as remarkable as a derelict car on blocks outside a trailer park.   The types of junk below the fighter jet in the pecking order of interest fall even faster.

We need to make a distinction between junk, trash, garbage and scrap, BTW.  Scrap can be very valuable, especially with prices rising as the worldwide demand for metal climbs.  The Iraqis may not be sitting on a gold mine, but their scrap heaps are mines for all sorts of other metals.  The Iraqi government figured this out and outlawed the export of scrap.  They want to keep it here. Rebuilding Iraq will require lots of girders and rebar.

Some of the best scrap is the wreckage of war.  Good metal goes into weapons systems.  Wreckage of war is maybe not exactly right.  Saddam enriched Soviet, French and Chinese arms merchants buying war materials that he never properly used.  Everybody would have been better off is Saddam had just brought scrap from the Soviets or the Chinese and dumped it directly w/o the intervening steps.  There is no American scrap in Saddam era scrap piles. 

The widely held misconception that U.S. firms armed Saddam is …a misconception.  In actual fact, the U.S. supplied only 0.47% of his vast arsenal.  That is ZERO point four seven and that is why there is no pre-2003 U.S. scrap.  But we are making up for it now.  Our big bases feature big junk yards, but the difference is that U.S. owned scrap can be exported, so these junk yards are going concerns.  Iraqi scrap stays here.  

Iraq lacks the capacity to reprocess its iron mountains.   This is an opportunity, not a problem.    I can only imagine how fast a mini-mill company like Nucor could turn that junk into useful building material, but if they built a modern factory in Iraq, what would they do when they had worked through the supply?  There is already an overcapacity of steel production worldwide.  Since Iraq has no significant iron ore deposits and these giant piles of scrap will not last very long if efficiently processed, perhaps it makes more sense to export the scrap and import the metal.  Somehow I doubt that good sense solution will be the one chosen.   Everybody wants to be in the steel business. Unfortunately not everybody can make money at it.

Above is a picture of part of my forest in Virginia, my 178 acres of private landowner contribution to the world’s forests.  The picture is from 2006.  the litte trees in the front are much bigger now.  They grow up so fast.

Today I had the usual meetings and paperwork, but mostly I caught up on my reading.  I found an interesting article on Iraq  but I promised myself not to think only about Iraq.  And a good news article about trees puzzled me.  According to the report, developing countries are leading that way in planting trees.  They evidently planted a billion trees last year.  UNEP spokesman Nick Nuttall speculates “… they more intimately understand the wider benefit of the forests from stabilising water supplies and soils up to their importance as natural pharmatives as well as the importance of trees in combatting global warming.” How nice and PC.  What was puzzling about this was that I remembered that Southern U.S. landowners plant more than a billion trees EVERY year and it does not make the news at all.  I found out that the U.S. produces around 1.6 billion seedlings a year – every year.

When you look at the big picture you have to wonder why something is so extraordinary in some places and routine in others. How best to make it routine worldwide?  The key but prosaic explanation is private property rights. In twelve southern states we routinely, every year, plant a billion trees and because somebody owns them. If the what the UNEP guy says about that intimiate understanding in developing countries is true, you have to wonder how they got in that treeless mess in the first place.

It is also one thing to plant the trees and quite anther to be ABLE to protect them. Big PR events and passionate speeches are great theater, but the best way to protect forest resources is through the protection of property rights. That is because when all the speeches are done, the party is over and the activists have moved on to the next cause, if you have property rights somebody still cares intensely and personally about each acre of trees. It is no coincidence that the worst cases of predatory logging occur on lands that are publicly or communally owned or where property rights are not well respected. It is a classic case of the tragedy of the commons coupled with the predatory mentality of transient firms, the cupidity of bureaucrats and the corruption of governments.

Property rights, protected by the rule of law, are crucial to the most kinds of progress. If you look at a list of the most pleasant and prosperous countries of the world, they vary in terms of types of governments, ideology, geography and culture. What they all share in common is that every pleasant and prosperous place protects property rights.

Strong property rights protect forests, human rights and other living things. I know this goes against some conventional TV-inspired wisdom, but it is clearly the case. That is not only the experience of the southern pine states, but also of the U.S. in general as well as Europe, Australia and other countries with strong property rights protection.

Lest somebody make the extrapolation, protecting property rights to private forest land does NOT preclude the establishment of public parks or preserves. In fact, it enhances it. You can logically set aside special places that need to be protected only if don’t declare everything special. When everything is special, nothing is special and any talk or protection is just talk and no more. Many corrupt countries have on their statute books beautiful and comprehensive laws to protect natural resources, but you cannot find these rules manifest anywhere on the ground.

In fact, I have noticed that in general the very best sounding laws are in places where the rule of law is not protected. They can enact what they want, because they know they will not have to carry it out.So protect forest property rights and enforce the rule of law and you will have forests now and forever. It will not have the same PR impact, but it will ensure forests for today and tomorrow.
As for the new tree planters, keep it up. Make it a routine so that it doesn’t even get noticed by the media. A word of advice to the UNEP and the governments involved in this noble endeavor. If you want those seedlings to grow to be healthy mature trees, make sure you protect the property rights under them.