Running After the Meaning of Life

I know my title is extravagant and vainglorious, but it makes some sense to me.  I have been running regularly literally my entire adult life.   I began to run in along the lake trails at U of Wisconsin in 1977.   It was in style back then and technology had just made regular running possible.   Shoes are the key to success in running and the Nike “wafflestompers” were just coming out.   W/o good shoes, you wreck your knees and few guys my age would still be able to run with the old shoe technologies.

I don’t run for exercise alone; I would never do it on a track or treadmill and I would never – every – bowdlerize the experience with an I-Pod.  I run with nature, to be in the environment feeling the wind & sun, hearing the sounds, feeling the undulations of the topography and getting to know the place – and my place.  You cannot really get to know anyplace until you have put your feet on it and it is important to experience different seasons and moods.  Running gives you a chance to think and the movement helps you think clearly.  Running (hiking too) balances me.  I suppose there are other ways to do that, but it is hard to think of easier or more effective ones.  Running has the side benefits of good fitness and the virtue of being cheap and universally available.  You need the good shoes, so running costs around $100 a year.  Other accessories are even cheaper.  I still wear a sweatshirt that hails the 1987 Minnesota Twins championship.  I don’t doubt that I have some clothes that are older, but they don’t have dates printed on the front.  The per-use cost of these thing is vanishingly small.  Everything else is free.

I have run all over the world.  I really cannot say which is my favorite trail.  I still look back with fondness to my “original” trails through Grant and Warnimont Parks in Milwaukee and the lake trails in Madison, but Norway on Bygdoy and Brazil, through the lush woods at St. Hilaire Park also hold strong positions.  My favorite trail in Minneapolis was in Wirth Park. I loved running in Las Wolski in Krakow, with the caveat that there was significant air pollution sometimes.  I ran on the old road between Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts.   That was wonderful because of the surface of the road and all the historical buildings around it, but I only did it once.  You see, I collect running memories the way some people collect coins or beanie babies.

Washington region has lots of possibilities.   At lunchtime at work I run around the Capitol Mall.  That is the “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” run.  You get to go past the Capitol, Whitehouse, Jefferson, Lincoln, Washington Monument Vietnam, Korea, WWII and the Smithsonian all in around a half hour.  Talk about inspiration.  The W&OD trail in Virginia follows old railroad lines, so it provides a long trail w/o too many hills.  It goes all the way from Washington to Purcerville in the Blue Ridge.  Of course, I have never run the whole way, but I have been on many segments.  The pictures are from the part of the trail nearest my house on the W&OD and the nieghborhoods around and from the Washington Mall trail.  I have been running on this trail since 1997.  

Below is a neighborhood of Vienna, Va near the trail.  I cut down along these suburban roads.  Nice houses in pretty surroundings. They completed that one just last year. They do a good job of making them fit in and seem like part of the established neighborhood.  The homes are not cheap.  Maybe less expensive now with the mortgage crisis, although I doubt this is a subprime place.

I have gotten a lot slower over the years.  I used to repeat my miles in less than six minutes. Now I feel doing them less than nine minutes is an achievement.  It still feels the same and I have a hard time believing I am moving 1/3 slower than I did before, but it has been more than thirty years.  Sometimes young punks come flying past me, but I assume they are just sprinting at the end of their runs. I have replaced my running watches several times, since I figured they all must be defective, but I have been unable to find one that records my miles at anything less.

It is funny – almost paradoxical given my other attitudes re running – that I don’t like to run w/o the watch, but I really don’t care about the times.  I know the distances along the W&OD because there are mile markers, but most of the places I run I don’t know how far I am going and I don’t try to find out.  But over 30 years of running I have gotten the idea that it is not really running w/o the clock running.  My saving trait is that I don’t write the times down and do not keep good records.  I can kind of fool myself that I am still not that slow and the self deception doesn’t cause me much distress.

Only a shallow person lives a life w/o contradictions and only a fool tries to resolve them all.

Tenting Tonight on the Old Camp Ground

Our HQ building is being rewired and repainted, so our PRT and our RCT colleagues are out in tents.  It is not good.  When the wind blows, the sides of the tents blow in and out.  There is a generator outside that make lots of noise. It gets hot in the tents when it gets hot outside. Fortunately, it is not as hot yet as it will get.

This affects me not as much as it could.   I am out on R&R.  With any luck, I will miss most of the camping.   I have to give a lot of credit to my PRT colleagues and the Marines.   Conditions are not good, but they are doing very well.

I am delighted with the growing cooperation between my team and the associated Marines.  We have really become one team for the one fight. 

No War for Oil

We did not invade Iraq to take the oil.  We are not trading blood for oil, but conspiracy buffs have been saying we did for years now.  I think we now have definitive proof that these guys were wrong.  As I reread my note from yesterday, I realized the proof was before us.  I even mentioned it, but I cannot resist expanding a bit.

War opponents have changed arguments.  They now acknowledge that we are achieving success in Iraq.  All that talk about defeat, so common last year, is gone.  Now they are complaining that it costs too much.  They also point out that Iraq is rich enough to pay for its own reconstruction.  They have a point on both issues.  But consider the implications.

If you call upon Iraqis to pay more, you have to assume they CAN.  What does this say about your confidence in the capacity of the Iraqi government and economy?  You cannot simultaneously believe that Iraqi is collapsing into ruin and that they can afford to pay billions of dollars. The other thing that it says is that this was not a war for oil.  If CF went in to take the oil, we would not have to worry about asking the Iraqis to pay more of their own way.  It would be like somebody robbing a liquor store, not taking any money and in fact using his own money to help fix the place up.  I don’t think we would call that a robbery.

I am just getting sick of this war for oil crap.  It is juvenile.  Let me explain.  There is no doubt that w/o oil we would have been unlikely to have a strong interest in this country or region.  But that does not make it a war FOR oil.  Oil in a resource that allows those who control it to wield power.  If you have a tyrant in a poor country, he is a local menace.  Somebody like Robert Mugabe is a good example.  W/o the big money provided by a resource like oil, guys like Osama bin Laden and his followers would just be a nutty bunch of desert bandits.  Add oil to the equation – lots of oil – and you get lots of trouble.  A local psychopath can become a global threat when you inject the steroids of oil wealth. In some ways, therefore, the war is about oil but not for oil.  That distinction is very important. 

The oil curse is also the curse of easy and generally unearned wealth.  It tends to corrupt the recipients and it can make them dangerous. This is a variation on the point and don’t want to belabor it.  Those who know me understand that I sometimes can rant a bit, but now that rhetoric has changed from defeat in Iraq to success in Iraq is costing too much – and that Iraq can and should pay more – it should at least let us dispense with one of the more annoying pieces of disinformation.  There was no war for oil.

Bureaucrats Who Can’t Spend Money

I watched closely the Petraeus/Crocker Senate testimony.  Some of the questions made me wonder how some people get to be Senators, but others made a good point about Iraqis paying for Iraq’s development.  I am not an expert on the whole country, but I do have some local observations.  

My instructions on coming to Western Anbar and the instructions to my team stipulate that our job is to get the Iraqis to spend their own money for projects.  We don’t do anything unless the Iraqi side contributes.  Beyond that, many of our training programs from the inception of the ePRT have been on “budget execution” for Iraqi officials.

It is a lot harder for governments to spend money than we think.  In the U.S. we have no shortage of bureaucrats who have a tradition of knowing how to allocate & spend money.  We have various numbered forms, document numbers, obligations, fiscal data etc.   Our problem is often to slow down the spending.  We forget how lucky we are. Iraq lacks almost all those things we take for granted.  The British left a reasonably efficient bureaucratic tradition, but that was a long time ago and those skills have passed almost from living memory.  Saddam Hussein actively destroyed the power of intermediaries (and often the intermediaries themselves) between his desires and execution.   In Saddam’s Iraq bureaucratic execution had meanings beyond the fiscal and the rules based systems broke down and largely disappeared.  Bureaucrats remained, lots of them, but they stopped doing the things that bureaucrats, even bad ones, usually do.

This is a big difference between Iraq and Germany post WWII for example. In Germany, out of the rubble of Nuremburg, Dresden or Berlin emerged a living bureaucracy.  In those places, as often in the U.S., the challenge is/was to cut thought the red tape.  Around here we often don’t have enough red tape to hold the package together.

I have observed the rule of rules (good bureaucracy) developing in Western Anbar, but it is a painful process and the tradition of the strong man remains.  I have written in previous posts about my discomfort at seeing a big leader dispensing projects and favors to local supplicants, but at least the money gets spent this way.  The better situation is that local, provincial and national government develop budgets, set priorities and allocate funds based on the instructions of elected officials in the context of the rule of law.   We also need to see more initiative from the lower levels and less emphasis on central authorities.  I wrote a blog entry about that when I first got here.

My team and I are pushing hard to get the Iraqis in Western Anbar to allocate and spend their own money.  We are doing “good” here and many of projects help the people of Anbar.  But our purpose is not to do good.  Our purpose is to make Al Anbar a place where the insurgency and AQI cannot find a foothold.  We are spending the taxpayers’ money and risking our safety to accomplish THIS mission. Development and improving the lives of Anbaris is a happy collateral benefit.  I take great personal pleasure in seeing that our efforts will help people help themselves and I am especially gratified when we can help restore the degraded environment of this arid region.  But I recognize that these are fringe benefits.

Iraq is enjoying an oil boom.  The country is earning something like $56 billion a year in oil revenues.  They should be and will be able to pay their own way – soon. I hope that we in the ePRT can work ourselves out of a job – soon.  But it is in OUR interests that Iraq succeeds and not fall into the hands of a hostile or terrorist regime.   That is why we are still involved.

BTW – the very fact that the IRAQIS – not us – have that pile of cash indicates that all those guys who said we were in this war for oil profits were full of crap.   If we were after the oil we would … get the oil.

So I agree that Iraqis can & should pay more for their own development.   I believe they will do it.  But we have to prime the pump a little and since a secure Iraq is important to us too, it is worth it.  I regret that we get stuck with the cost and the risk but the alternative is not acceptable.

Measuring Success in Iraq (Banana index)

Two separate groups of people came to see me about measuring progress in our area of operation and gave me an opportunity to pontificate in my very best style.  I am doing my best to deploy all my skill and experience on how to assess and measure.  I am delving way back to my MBA days when I studied marketing research, but Iraq presents a researcher with almost the perfect storm of confusion.  I am not sure how to measure progress in Iraq and I am not sure that information is knowable even in theory.

One of the guys who came to visit was a practicing anthropologist.  I didn’t know they had that kind of career path, but it makes sense.  Anthropologists study relationships between people, institutions, traditions and society.  The skills of an anthropologist are more appropriate in Iraq than those of a public pollster.   I don’t believe the usual polling methods can produce valid results in a place like Iraq. Figuring out the situation here is more an art than a science, more anecdotal than analytical. My study of marketing research methods gave me a good feeling for the strengths and weaknesses of statistical studies. 

Graphically Misleading

The most misleading sort of study is the pseudo-scientific one, with lots of numbers and graphs w/o valid grounding in reality.  Such things are usually based on a kind of snowballing of the power of a few guesses.  A few people make estimates that are locally valid for decision making but not scientific.  For example, “How much traffic is there on the road?”  “Lots.” You could make a decision based on that, but it is a soft estimate.  Somebody aggregates these guesses and gives them numerical weight.  As the aggregations get farther from the original sources, they get less and less related to reality BUT more and more impressive in terms of certainty of numbers and presentation.  

In my traffic example, if you aggregate traffic information from downtown Manhattan and rural Wyoming, you might conclude that traffic is a moderate concern in both places and you could produce graphs and charts to support your position. I learned a long time ago that if you want to enhance the power of your own gut estimate, you should put it into writing and if possible draw a chart or a graph. I know this works, but I also know that it is primarily a presentation ploy.  Even in the best cases, it is used to simplify information and make it easier to understand.  In the process, we trade some degree of accurate detail for presentation. Anyway, I think we are demanding more of the information we have than it has to teach us and much of our precision is unjustified. 

Spock Trap

I remember in the old Star Trek when Spock would say something like “impact in 10.5 seconds.”  How stupid is that?  That is why I prefer Picard. By the time he says 10.5, the number has changed.  It is unjustified precision, but it is easy to fall into the Spock trap.  It is attractive and makes you seem intelligent.  BTW – my own experience in using deceptive numbers is that you are much better off using precise odd numbers.  For instance, 97 is a more credible number than 100 or 90.  (Remember that Ivory Soap was 99 and 44/100ths percent pure, not 100 %.)My feeling about the part of Iraq that I know best, the places I have actually set foot and looked at with my own eyes, is that things are much better now than they were when I arrived six months ago.   I use the word “feeling” because that is what I have.  I have observed that people seem friendlier.  Markets are fuller.  There seems to be less fear.  Local people were once afraid to talk to us or work with us.  Not any more.  It just feels better.

Dreadful Conditions

I am convinced that conditions here are better than our measurements will be ever able to detect.  Iraqis have a long history with oppression.  Smart people learned to hide their prosperity from predatory authorities.  If Saddam’s henchmen found out you had something good, you might not be able to keep it.  We also saw the age-old desire to hide assets from the tax collectors.  As a result of all this, people have become accustomed to lying to anybody asking questions and trying to make conditions seem as dreadful as possible. 

Sing the Body Electric

A good example of a statistic we cannot use – but we do – is electricity.  Iraqis get some hours of electricity from the grid.  This power is essentially free, since the authorities have generally lost the capacity to meter and charge for it.  Naturally, everybody wants as much of this free power as they can get and when the power comes on they plug in everything they own.  It makes demand appear much higher and shortfalls more acute. If asked, people complain bitterly about the lack of power.  BUT if you fly over Anbar or drive thorough a city at night, you see plenty of lights even when there is ostensibly no power.   The fact is that many communities and even individuals have generators.  They prefer not to use these generators because it means that electricity is no longer free.  However, when they say that they do not have electricity, they really mean that they do not have FREE electricity.

Demand for electricity in Iraq is growing at around 12% a year, as people buy more things like refrigerators, microwaves and DVD players.  Supply can never catch up with demand as long as electricity is de-facto free.   I am convinced that if/when the authorities figure out how to meter and charge for it, the “problem” of electricity will be mostly solved, or more correctly it will stop being a problem and become an expense.

Fear v Greed

There are some sorts of statistics that I think we might be able to use IF we could assess them.  One is the risk premium that contractors and others demand.  Six months ago we had to pay relatively more for services because people thought it was risky to deal with us (i.e. they were afraid the insurgents would target them in retaliation). They charged us more to compensate.  Now the prices we are paying for our projects are dropping.  Of course that could be because we are getting better at knowing local conditions and negotiating better deals.   I think that if I could figure out a reliable way to estimate the risk premium, I would have a very good measure of improvement.  It is a kind of greed v fear measurement.

Banana Index

One of my own assessment methods is a “banana index”.  I observe fruits in the market especially bananas.  No bananas are grown locally.  They all have to be imported from somewhere else.  It is very hard to get a banana to market exactly at the right time.  They will usually be either green or brown.  A banana stays yellow for only a short time and if it is mishandled it gets easily bruised.   If you see lots of good quality bananas in the market, you know that the distribution system is working reasonably well and that good are moving expeditiously through the marketplace. Anyway, I shared my methods with the researchers. They are just rules of thumb, but if you call them heuristics they sound almost scientific. 

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, How Was the Play?

In a previous post I described how my promotion ended up costing me thousands of dollars in overtime pay and that because of my promotion into the Senior Foreign Service I would make LESS money in 2008 than I would had I stayed an FS01.  I took consolation in the fact the SFS is eligible for performance pay bonuses.   I figured that my service in Iraq leading a PRT would probably deserve some of that.  Wrong again. 

The Senate approves promotions into the SFS.  Usually they do this in November but this year the Senate acted slower than usual and didn’t get around to it until January.  As a result of the late promotion, the State Department in its wisdom and following its rules that probably have never applied before did not include the normal pay raise in my promotion raise, so I lost a little money.  But it got worse. Because the promotions came too late, I am not eligible for performance pay.

In other words, everything I have done in Iraq counts for nothing as far as the Foreign Service performance is concerned.  I don’t want to complain.  I did not come to  Iraq for the career.  But it is just one thing after another.  Like most people, I appreciate recognition from my employer and I find it annoying that some of my most significant contributions as an FSO are like the tree falling in the woods with nobody around to hear it.  Beyond that a significant part of SFS compensation is devoted to performance pay.  It is supposed to encourage and reward good work.  Not being eligible for this while serving in Iraq seems a little out of place.

And there is still another permutation in this nefarious spiral.  SFS does not get the automatic annual pay raises like other Federal employees.  Our raises are based on performance and those not recommended for performance pay are not eligible for the pay raises, which means in 2009 I will have taken a de-facto pay cut by whatever the rate of inflation is this year – all this because I got promoted last year.   I love the honor of it, but price is getting higher.

 “It feels sort like the fellow they run out of town on a rail. If it wasn’t for the honor of it, I’d just as soon walk,” to quote Abraham Lincoln.

Adding insult to injury, they sent that elegantly worded letter to the wrong place and it came back to them address unknown.  I got a cryptic email asking for my home address.  A few days later it arrived in Virginia. 

Dear Mr. Matel,

With the President’s attestation of Senate confirmation, let me extend, on behalf of the Director General, warm congratulations on your promotion into the Senior Foreign Service. 

I want to make sure you are aware that you will not be eligible for senior performance pay consideration by the 2008 selection boards, as fewer than 120 days – the threshold established by regulation – will have elapsed between the January 6 effective date of your promotion and the April 15 end of the 2007-2008 rating period. 

I have long maintained that I serve the task not the master and I will certainly not let my frustration with FS personnel interfere with my responsibly to my country and my colleagues. This blog note will be the extent of my expression of anger and all of you are doing me the favor of listening to my ranting.Thank you. Tomorrow I will be back on task, but for the rest of this evening I am p*ssed off.

No Man is a Prophet in His Own Village

Our trip to Hadithah was cut short when we ran into a wall of dust coming in the other direction.  We were lucky.  A convoy of trucks coming out of Al Asad held us up.  The delay meant that we were not far outside camp when word came in about the approaching dust clouds and we could go back.  Being dusted down in Hadithah is less pleasant in terms of bunking and preparations (i.e. we would not have our toothbrushes etc). 

So we spent the morning riding in MRAPs on a road that went nowhere, but the day was not a complete loss.  Colonel Malay decided to stop off in Baghdadi, the first village outside Al Asad, and do a foot/candy patrol.  Generous people back home send lots of candy and other little gifts to the Marines at Camp Ripper.   They get a lot more than anybody can reasonably eat (unless their goal is to weigh 300 lbs) and they share this bounty with the local kids when they go on patrol.

I talked to the local shopkeeper in Baghdadi who told me business was bad.  Costs were high and profit margins low.  He didn’t have much in his shop to sell anyway.  A bunch of guys gathered around to complain about the lack of jobs.  They wondered if the U.S. could pressure the Iraqi government into creating some local jobs and/or if there were any good jobs to be had on Al Asad.   I was a little disappointed by what they were telling me.  It was not the lack of jobs, which is a legitimate problem, but the kinds of jobs they seemed to want.  Everybody wanted to work for the government.  The idea that private businesses could/would/should create jobs seems not to have occurred to them and did not resonate at all when I brought it up. 

Of course I understand that I did not meet a representative sample and that guys hanging around on the street in the middle of the day are probably not the most active and ambitious people in town.  Everybody was reasonably well dressed.  The shopkeeper wore traditional Iraqi garb, but the young men were dressed in western style trousers and relatively clean shirts emblazoned with the names of Brazilian or European soccer teams. One man dressed in a t-shirt and sweatpants insisted on talking to me separately.  He said that he was a trained teacher and qualified to teach math and science. Yet he had been unable to get a job teaching because successful applicants either needed to bribe or know somebody.  He said that he could get a job with the IA, but preferred to work in his own field and asked that CF look into corruption in hiring at local schools.

There were many small businesses open on the street.  A quick glance around revealed three “gas stations”, each consisting of several plastic tanks of gas standing in the sun.  It doesn’t seem particularly safe or efficient, but it is a form of commerce.  We noticed that there was significantly more gas available for sale now than in the past and the plastic tanks were sitting on 55 gallon drums of fuel.  Selling gas here makes sense since we were on a main road along the Euphrates and there was consistent traffic passing by.  There was also a mechanic shop and a few more shops selling groceries. Fields near the river were green and growing.  They were planted with onions, lettuce, tomatoes and spring wheat and somebody had laid a few water pipes to irrigate fields a bit farther away from the riverbank.  A boy herded flocks of sheep though the fields.   It is clear that irrigated fields were once more extensive in the area than they are today.  The Euphrates is fast flowing at this point.  We saw ruins where waterwheels had once harnessed the power of the river probably to pump water to more distant places, but we didn’t see any working wheels anywhere along this stretch of the river.  Water wheels may be a lost art locally.  A diesel engine is less reliable and more expensive to run, but it is easier to set up and work.

Dennis has previous experience talking to local citizens about farming.  Farmers complain that nobody wants to be a farmer anymore because the work is too hard.  You can’t get good help these days.  Everybody wants to work for the government, they complain.  Our short reconnaissance and the comments of the idle young men seemed to confirm this anecdotal evidence. As usual, kids came out looking for candy.  Some could ask for candy, pens or sunglasses in English.  Some people came out of their houses to look at us or wave.  The mood was good.

A couple of guys came up who identified themselves as administrators from the high school and elementary school.  They both seemed to understand some English.  We nevertheless spoke through Franco the interpreter.  The two men complained that their school building had been taken over and used as a CF checkpoint.  I promised that I would mention the problem to the RCT.  These guys seemed intelligent and involved in their community.  They said that they had fixed up buildings themselves to serve as temporary schools, but hoped that we would do the right thing and give them back their building.  When I shook hands with them I noticed that – unlike those of the earlier group of young men – these guys had hard and strong hands.  I don’t know what kind of work they have been doing, but it is something that requires consistent hand labor.  Maybe they are indeed working to refurbish their houses to serve as schools.

They also complained about salaries and about Baghdad not giving anything to Anbar.  They said that each time money moves some leaks out of the pipeline.  Some leaks in Baghdad; a little more leaks in Ramadi and Hit.  By the time it gets to Baghdadi there is not much left.   Iraq is a rich country, they told me, but you wouldn’t know it to look around.  They indicated that they had more confidence in U.S. forces than in either their local government or the national government.  They were nonplussed when I suggested that there should be an Iraqi solution but asked that we intervene with the Maliki government to make changes.

The Fobbit

Above shows accommodations down range.  These are nice ones, but the snoring can be intense.

Camp Ripper is a forward operating base – a FOB.  A FOB has some of the comforts of home, including a good chow hall, toilets that flush and cans with electricity instead of tents.  You also have access to laundry and shower facilities.   FOBs are comfortable and some people never – or very rarely – leave the FOB.  They are called Fobbits.

I don’t know the exact numbers, but my guess is that around half of the guys in Iraq are Fobbits.  I am a semi-Fobbit.   I spend most of my time on the FOB, i.e. I endeavor whenever possible to return at night to the comfort of my own can.  However, I do regularly travel away from the Shire and sometimes get stuck at some outpost or tent city where conditions are less comfortable.  

Fobbit is a term of some derision among non-fobbits.   Some people love the FOB and there are others who evidently like to be out in the deserts eating MREs.  I prefer the semi-fobbit life.  I go out when my job requires it and do so eagerly and happily.   I always enjoy getting away from Al Asad and most of the blog-posts I write are about those experiences.  However, it doesn’t take long for me to satisfy my sense of adventure and I like to get back to the cans of home. 

I am getting too old for this.  Most other places are either too hot or too cold and I sometimes worry – irrationally – about scorpions, camel spiders and snakes.  (I say irrationally because I have seen only one scorpion and no snakes, but I know they are laying in wait – stingers and fangs poised.)Besides, you usually have to sleep among people who snore loudly.   I also have the sense of guilt since I know that I snore too and am inflicting this on my colleagues.  Of course we all have earplugs.  Better to be in your own can.

Hanging Around Like a Fart in an MRAP

Riding in an MRAP is never fun.  You feel every bump.  One of my colleagues literally hit the ceiling on one bumpy road.  After that I started to be more careful about the seatbelts.  In addition, they are top heavy and prone to roll over.   A few of my colleagues rolled down the hill near Hadithah Dam.  Four times they rolled over.  One guy broke his ankle and another cracked a vertebra and a rib, but nobody was seriously hurt.  The turret gunner followed his training perfectly.  He hunkered down, hung on and walked away with barely a scratch.  The gunners are in the most danger and they are often the ones thrown out and crushed.  The saving grace of the MRAP is that they are practically indestructible.  The same things that make them unpleasant make them robust.  It is the dreadnought of land vehicles – and probably as heavy as the original seagoing varieties..

Yesterday we had a particularly uncomfortable ride. We were packed into the MRAP heading toward an engagement, bouncing along with each pothole when somebody started to fart.  There were five suspects (I leave myself out because I know it wasn’t me), but nobody would admit it. Once was bad enough, but whoever it was silently broke wind several times.  Talk about bad manners.  There is not much circulation in an MRAP anyway, so odors of all sorts tend to linger, but then it got worse when the air conditioning broke down.  There we were, tightly packed in an atmosphere of dust and warm methane.  It makes you appreciate the Humvee, which is more cramped but less close or even the helicopter which has those 80 MPH winds constantly blowing through the open gun windows.

None of the modes of transportation, BTW, provides anything in the way of lumbar support.   The body armor provides a useful place to rest your chin, but puts a lot more strain on your lower back.  It hurts like mad.   I have addressed that problem with one of those u-shaped neck pillows.  I got a nice one made of temperpedic material, which I jam up against my lower back.  It really works.   I don’t leave home w/o it.  Some of the Marines say that sort of pillow is an old man’s accessory and they are probably right but when I get out of the vehicles I don’t feel like I fell off the back of a pickup truck.  The ridicule is transitory; back pain persists. 

Water in the Desert

This bleak landscape holds more promise than it seems.

“Then Moses raised his arm and struck the rock twice with his staff. Water gushed out, and the community and their livestock drank. …”

Securing the route that both oil and commerce must take from Bayji to the population and refining centers in Hadithah is a major strategic goal.   In support of that goal, ePRT Western Anbar is looking for ways to support commerce and prosperity along the route, by encouraging small merchants to set up kiosks, perhaps with the support of a microfinance loan, and helping local pastoralists and farmers make a living nearby.  The challenge is that the land along way makes Death Valley look like a garden.   Development depends on water and there is not much of it available anywhere near the road, railroad or pipelines – until a few days ago.Dennis identified possible water bearing formations in Pliocene formations along the route during a helicopter reconnaissance and then followed up with a Marine patrol and a backhoe.  They struck water in three of the four areas he identified.  In one case, they found enough gushing water at a depth of about three meters to support a small community.  

This water is sustainable with wise use and replenished from natural rainfall in the area, i.e. it is not “fossil” water (as in parts of the Ogallala Aquifer, for example) that will be drained out by use.   Dennis and engineers at the RCT have already developed plans for a pond system that would take advantage of the terrain and some modern dry land farming techniques to create permanent oases around these tentative water holes. 

Below – the water is muddy at first, but left stand it clears and the flow was strong.

The technique involves “pitting,” which is a series of hundreds of small holes produced upstream from the place where a pond will be constructed.  These pits slow the runoff and allow it to soak into the ground, replenishing the aquifer.  Normally, the local desert soils shed water like a Wal-Mart parking lot.  The runoff puddles up in low places, without significant percolation and generally bakes off in the sun leaving salty pans and doing nobody any good.

We estimate that a properly constructed series of ponds featuring pitting and silt ponds to moderate rapid runoff and erosion could provide year round sources of water for local agriculture and other uses.   The only caveat is that the presence of reliable water sources on public land could stimulate increased sheep populations that could stress the limited resources available in this arid and poor environment.   This could be a classic “tragedy of the commons” where all producers try to maximize their own consumption of what becomes a dwindling and overtaxed resource base.  This however, is a challenge at any level of development.   The Iraqi landscaped suffered for years cut off from new developments during the dark years of Saddam Hussein.  Access to fresh, clean water is a growing problem worldwide and it is an especially acute situation in an arid country such as Iraq.  These inexpensive and effective projects will help address the issue in Western Al Anbar.