Category: Iraq

Posted on

Department of Silly Hats

When you are “in charge” of the helicopter, you get to wear the goofy hat.  I caught the CH46 to Ramadi to consult with the PRT there and to deliver our agriculture advisor Dennis and our rule of law advisor Burt Brasher to meetings.   The advantage is that if I go we can get same day service, i.e. we can leave in the morning and come back the same evening AND we can leave from the Ripper landing zone, all of which makes life a lot easier for us.   I get this special treatment because my SFS/SES1 rank is finally paying off.   I am the highest ranking USG civilian in the AO.  Of course there are not many of us around here. 

I will try to use the one-day service once a week.  We can bring several members of the team to each engagement and get many of our appointments done at the same time and then get them back to AA.  This will save us literally day of waiting at landing zones & sleeping in those interesting advance bases.   We – almost everybody on my staff – are getting a little old for that sort of thing.  It will give me better opportunity to do the oversight and diplomacy job I am supposed to do.

Until now I got to use priority assets only when I went with Colonel Malay or with one of the generals.  These are always great opportunities and I think I add value to the delegation but it will be good to be able to deploy our ePRT resources independent of other people’s travel when appropriate.

This is good.

Posted on

The Oil Curse and the Patronage Trap

Stories that begin with somebody winning the big lottery usually end sadly.  I suppose it has to do with the corrupting power of unearned/unexpected wealth and the frailties of human nature.  Oil wealth can be as bad as a lottery win because not only does it often shoot more money into a country than it can usefully absorb, but it also empowers governments and encourages both centralization and corrupting patronage.

Let me hasten to say that I am speaking only my opinion and it is not based on any special knowledge, but as we see Iraq’s oil revenue jumping from around $20 billion under Saddam to $70+billion today.  I fear we may have a lottery winner. 

Oil revenues past helped destroyed Iraqi agriculture and retarded local initiative.   It doesn’t make intuitive sense that good fortune could be such a curse, but the influx of so much easy money crowds out other endeavors.   It cheapens hard work.  The lottery winner feels like a chump if he keeps on working just as hard.   Local initiative is stifled more directly, as money from the central government supplants local funding until the only guys left standing are those from Baghdad.

Oil wealth also creates a feeling of entitlement.   People think they deserve “their” share and start getting angry when that share is too small in their opinion … and eventually it always is too small.   It really is true that money cannot buy happiness and bribing people with gifts is a losing proposition.  Over the long run (or even the not so long run), resentment & irritation always trump gratitude and satisfaction in these sorts of uneven relationships.    

All this is much beyond my pay grade and since I have no ability to influence the outcome, I feel free to speculate.  Take it for what it is worth.   I think it is a stroke of good, but dangerous luck that Iraq is taking in so much more oil revenue.  The money will allow Iraqi to rebuild and recover from the damage done by so many years of war and mismanagement.  The caveat is that the oil wealth helped create the mismanagement and waste in the first place.  To adapt an old saying, to err is human, but to really screw up you need the steroid power of oil wealth.

I hope that Iraq will spend that windfall on infrastructure upgrading and maintaining what they already have.   There are certainly many places that could use such investments.  Infrastructure investments that do not include governmental management of the economy are usually a good thing.  Another thing that could be usefully done is to distribute revenues directly to the people, like the State of Alaska does.  This is not perfect, but it gets some of the money out of the control of the bureaucrats.  I fear there will be pressures to “do something positive” such as subsidize the dinosaur state owned enterprises and spread patronage from the central government.  Actually, I suppose it will be a mix of both hope and fear.  Let’s hope the hopeful part predominates.

But this is really above my pay grade.

Posted on

Dennis Can’t Find a Date

Below are the date palms at our oasis.  We have been having a little dust lately.  This picture was taken at the middle of the day.  

Iraq has 12-16 million date palms.  This is down from 30 million in the pre-Saddam times but it still makes Iraq the world’s largest producer of dates.  In Western Anbar, however, dates are not producing properly this year.   Dennis and I did a local check out in the grove in our oasis and could not find even one producing tree.  We are trying to figure out how the extent of the problem why it is happening and what Iraqis can do about it. Last year’s crop was good.  Even a partial failure of the date crop would be a big problem, so we are very interested is making accurate assessments.

In the longer term, there is a lot Iraqis can do to improve their date production.   Some of the techniques they currently use go back to Babylonian times.  They are not wrong, but could use some adjustments.  Most of these improvements would be easy and organic.   For example, planting a cover crop of ladino clover under the trees would help control water absorption and regulate humidity, as well as improve soil.  Another management fix is to plant the proper mix of male and female trees.  Date palms have gender.  Each male tree can pollinate around fifty palms. Pollen is distributed by wind so location makes a difference.  It is also useful to plant the male trees on the sunnier part of the grove.  Of course there are also the issue of irrigation scheduled to avoid salinity, better genetic quality of palms and modern use of nutrients.  Iraqi farmers need to learn some of the new techniques and often relearn some of the more traditional ones.

Dennis also did a field survey of around 10,000 donum (6,000 acres) of irrigated farmland in the Ubaydi area of the Al Qaim district.  Things have fallen apart.  The tragedy is how easy it would be to remedy the situation IF it could be properly managed.  For example, a twenty foot section of a pipe that draws water from the Euphrates is broken.  The system could be fixed for a few hundred dollars and an afternoon’s work.  Unfortunately the people farming the land don’t own it.   The owner is no where to be found.  Word is that they have left the country and the uncertainty is freezing developments.

There is also the problem of bureaucratic inertia.   In all our districts we find warehouses full of agricultural equipment and fertilizers local farmers need, but bureaucrats representing the authorities are unwilling or unable to release.   Some of it related to the problem of who should get it and the land tenure problems I mentioned above complicate every solution.  Our ePRT is trying to broken agreements, but our work is made awkward by our incomplete understanding.  I am not sure that anybody really knows the answer, but we are looking hard.

There are some things we can and have done on our own initiative.  For example, we equipped an agricultural laboratory that will help with things like soil analysis.  We are also looking to fund some solar powered water pumps and a we are helping buy some tractor for an equipment rental operation. 

In ancient times, Iraq was a phenomenally rich agricultural region.  It will be again after we all pass through this rough patch.

Posted on

Step-by-Step We Achieve Our Goals

Below is part of village in the Abu Hyatt region just outside one of our camps.  Not a pleasant place, IMO, but I guess people like the place they live and get used to it after a while.  The stone work is kind of interesting.  When you fly over these places, you see some patches of green that are not evident from ground level, so it is not as bad as it looks.  (reminds me of what MarkTwain said re German opera – it is better than it sounds.  Actually, I like the music where the fat lady sings, but the comment is funny.) Nevertheless, despite all the beauty contained in the various shades of khaki,  when I leave Iraq this fall I will not come back.  Some people like deserts and they can have them.  I like trees and grass too much.

Abu Hyatt was still hot and dangerous when I arrived in Iraq eight months ago.  Insurgents and terrorists passed through it and used it as a sort of safe haven.  RCT 2 made cleaning it up a priority and RCT 5 has followed up.  Today it enjoys a tentative stability.  People are returning and rebuilding.  A representative from Abu Hyatt sits on the regional board and our ePRT is working on projects and public diplomacy to help solidify the gains.

Sixteen villages comprise the district.  Most of the people work in agriculture.  They grow dates and citrus, fodder crops and sunflowers.  Of course, there are the usual sheep.  Some people also work at the local refinery at K3.

Since it so recently came out of its time of troubles, Abu Hyatt still suffers a lot of insurgent related damage.  The Marines are repairing schools and bridges, but there are some problems that were around before the late unpleasantness. One challenge is clean water.  We are helping install some solar powered water purification systems in one of the villages.  If it works well, more can be installed; we are eager to share our experience and expertise, but prefer using Iraqi funds for the next steps.

One thing working well is our application system.  It is a form of intellectual property that helps us and helps the Iraqis.  We want to ensure that all the projects our ePRT funds are worthy and sustainable, but it is hard for us properly to vet all of them.  To address this, we developed an application process, which we make available in easy step-by-step form in both English and Arabic.  It requires the approval of those who will actually make the project work and requires that the Iraqi side make significant contributions in kind, labor or money.  We also want to ensure that the Iraqi authorities are not planning to do the project already.  Many would prefer to spend our money before they dip into their own pockets.  This makes it harder.

Our application system also puts the onus on the Iraqis to organize. I don’t like the idea of going to visit someone and just getting a list of demands or needs.  We get a lot more done and a lot more respect when we work as partners not mere providers.  We do not fund most projects, but our contacts have told us that the organizing and planning they have done to prepare the proposal helps them make priorities and proposals for their own authorities to consider and fund, so the process has the salutary effect of providing real world, hands-on training.

Iraqis are competent people.  We should treat them that way, which means requiring them to hold up their side. 

I also got an interesting insight re Iraqi officials.  I just had not thought about it, but after the fall of Saddam the highest ranking officials lost their jobs and were barred from coming back.  Some of these were bad guys, who got what they had coming.  Others were just technocrats.  In any case, they were the ones with the experience and insight to run things.  Often we had to go down to the third or forth tier of leadership to find a politically correct guy to run things.  Some of these guys just needed an opportunity; others had been third or forth tier for good reason.  In any case, it is taking Iraqis some time to develop or redevelop the capacity for bureaucratic leadership.

Sometimes the most useful thing we can do is not give money, but rather the stimulus to exercise leadership and provide some methods that help develop it.

Above – everything happens in a cloud of dust.

Posted on

Bodily Functions

Some things speak for themselves; this requires a bit of explanation.  If you are squeamish, please read no further.  I don’t want to offend anyone.

The things that most affect the quality of life are often little ones and just as often things we rarely talk about.  Bathroom issues score high on both counts.   Those easily grossed out can skip the rest of my musing on this subject, but it is an important one.

We live pretty well on the FOB.  We have an excellent chow hall and bathrooms that are fully functional, if a little constrained.  This is not the case universally.  If you are at one of the smaller bases, you are lucky to have one of those plastic port-a-potties and your chow is not so good and sometimes in short supply, at least the hot main courses. Sometimes you are not lucky enough even to get these luxuries and you are reduced to MREs (boxed meals you cook yourself) and “wag bag”  toilets.

The wag bag is exactly what the name implies.  You are allowed only to go #2, since otherwise the bag would be even grosser to handle and dispose of by burning. You can see from the picture that the facilities are makeshift plywood.  It is not good.

As long as you are with me so far, I can also tell you that the local guys don’t use the sit down toilets at all.  They prefer a hole in the ground.  If you go to a local toilet, you see a porcelain hole with a couple of places to put your feet.  It might still flush, but it doesn’t work well.   We in the Western world owe a great debt to Thomas Crapper, who did so much to popularize the flush toilet we know and love.

We have a small but significant problem in our own facilities, as non-U.S. contractors prefer to squat on top of our toilets.  They break the seats and that is why you see the incongruous sign, “do not stand on toilets”  posted on the walls.

Above is just us going back to our convoy after a visit to one of the outlying posts.

Posted on

Tour de Iraq

I did catch that flight to Kuwait, but it was diverted to Ballad, where we all got off as the plane did some kind of medivac.   In Ballad, I heard that there was a flight to Al Asad with a 0325 show time, so I went to try to get on that flight.   I got on the waiting list, but at show time they told us that this flight would be for freight only.  No passengers.

The next flight to AA was on Wednesday, but I thought that was the best I could do, so I decided to look for some temporary billeting.   Unfortunately, the guy I asked, although very nice, directed me to general camp billeting.   It was a long way off, but I found it with the help of a guy in a pickup truck.  When I got there, they told me that I could not get that sort of billeting and that I needed to return to the air terminal and get temporary quarters. 

I asked the woman at billeting how to get back to the terminal.  She very helpfully pointed out the door toward a light shimmering in the pre-dawn gloom through the dust.  She told me to go toward the light and I did.

The Texas barrier below are at AA, but they look the same everywhere.

It is very depressing to walk around these places.  There are lots of sandbags and Texas barriers.  A Texas barrier is one of those concrete free standing walls.  It is like the smaller Jersey barrier you see along roads at airports, but it is around ten feet high.  In the gloom of night, they make you feel very constrained.  I wondered if I would ever get back and mentally kicked myself in the keister for just not staying put.

It was longer walk back w/o the help of the pickup truck guy, but I found my way through the dark and got to the building at about the time it started to get light.

To my surprise, the guys I had come in with still had not left.  They had evidently been having even a more frustrating experience than I had.  While I was walking around Ballad, they were going to the flight line on buses and then coming back.  I was able to get in line again, just as though I had never left, and get on the plane for Kuwait. 

The people at the terminal were very helpful in this bad situation.  Of course, they had taken me off the list when I told them I was going to AA, but they put me back on when I explained my sad story.  I notice the woman suppressed a smile.  I didn’t really mind.  It was kind of funny and I am sure I looked comical.   I had been just about everywhere around the base and in the end I finished exactly where I would have been if I never left.   To me, that was a victory. I was  back on the  bus.

The flight to Kuwait was uneventful.  I arrived and finished processing through just in time to miss the chow hall, which closes at 8 am.  I put myself on the waiting list for a flight to AA.   The next flight had show time of 2035.   I got on w/o incident.  We finally were off at a little past midnight and got to AA around 0200. 

I knew we were back in AA as the back of the C130 opened allowing a cloud of dust to come into the plane.  I caught the shuttle bus back to Camp Ripper.  It is funny how much the old can feels like home. 

Below is our new office space.

We are also out of the tents and back in the offices.  My office is actually very nice now.  They put in central air and plugged up a lot of holes, so the dust doesn’t get in as easily.   The office where my colleagues sit now has a couple of Plexiglas windows, so they have some natural light.

Below is my new office – sweet.

Well, back to the old routine with somewhat better surroundings 

Posted on

Consent of the Governed

Our significant task for the summer & fall will be to help Iraqis hold free & fair provincial elections.  It is a narrow path for us to walk.   The elections clearly belong to the Iraqis and it is important for them really to be theirs AND be perceived as theirs by all the world and the people of Iraq.   On the other hand, we can provide experience as well as technical and security support that will make the elections fairer, safer and more generally more successful.   We can easily help too much or too little. Actually I don’t think there is a Goldilocks “just right” solution.   We will get criticized no matter what result and we just have to accept that we will get much of the blame and none of the credit and be ready for it to happen.

Preparations for the elections will begin in earnest on July 15.  We still are not sure of the date of the elections themselves.   They could be as early as October 1 or as late as December.  There is a lot to do.  The Iraqis do not have accurate census numbers for their local populations, so making accurate voting lists will be difficult.  When you consider the significant trouble we Americans, with hundreds of years of experience, have with the practical job of holding election, you can imagine what the Iraqis are in for.

The people of Anbar are very enthusiastic about voting and I expect a big turnout.   They largely boycotted the 2005 elections and they learned a valuable lesson about Democracy:  non-participation doesn’t work.   They will not make that mistake again. 

The Anbaris have also come to believe in the power of the people to make changes.  Their belief and enthusiasm is a refreshing antidote to the pessimism that says “these people” are not ready for democracy.  They will get what democracy provides.  In the words of Winston Churchill, “democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

I prefer the first past the post form of elections, the one we have in the U.S. where every elected official represents a specific district and whoever gets the most votes wins.   Our system, however, is considered old fashioned by much of the democratic world.  The part most often criticized is what I consider the key to our stability and prosperity. Our winners take all approach forces compromise.  A group that wins less than a plurality of the votes has only one right.  They can try to get more votes next time.   That means they have to change their platform to appeal to more people or give up. 

Making elections proportional (e.g. 10% of the opinion gets around 10% of the authority) is in theory a fairer way to go, but it has often been the road to ruin when candidates win by a plurality that is significantly a majority (50 %+) of the votes.  Adolph Hitler and Salvador Allende, among others, were elected by only about a third of the voters, for example.  Extremists can often fool some of the people all of the time, but they have a harder time fooling a majority.  A U.S. style system excludes them.  Proportional representation gets their foot in the door.   But I am being old fashioned.  “Our” system tends to predominate in Britain and former British colonies.  Other places not so much. 

The Iraqi election system resembles those of continental Europe or Latin America.  I suppose that is a necessary component in a country as diverse as this one.  It has some complications designed to make it “fairer”.  Let me explain it as simply as I can.

A province gets twenty-five delegates for the first 500,000 people and then one additional for each 200,000 people over that number.   This is an advantage to Anbar, with a relatively low population, since it gets a little extra representation.   You could say it is like our system in the respect that if favors the small.  Wyoming has a population of around 515,000.  It has two senators and so does California with a population of almost 37,000,000. 

Anbar has a population of around 1.3 million, so it will get 29 seats.   All members are “at large” i.e. they do not represent a particular distraction.  Candidates run both as individuals and as party members.  This is how it works in an easy math example.

Stipulate that there are 100 voters and ten seats available.   The election commission determines that a candidate needs 10 votes to win a seat.  Anybody who individually wins 10 votes wins a seat.   But some candidate might win 20 votes.  His “extra” votes are transferred to his party to bring up the total of another of his party’s candidates.   They has a similar system in Brazil when I was there for my first post.  It enhances the power of political parties over candidates and one very popular candidate can pull up a lot of marginal ones, so you don’t always know who you are voting for, but it sort of works.

We are not quite done yet.  There is a proposal that at least 25% of the representatives be women.  In this case, the election commission would determine the number needed and then replace the lowest winning males with the highest losing females until they got the numbers they wanted.

Complicated as this all seems, it looks like it will produce an outcome that at least will approximate “consent of the governed”.    Nevertheless, a great deal of uncertainty remains.  Working in this ambiguous situation will be tough, but I guess that is why we get those big bucks.

I think we all are honored by the opportunity to see and be a small part of democracy at work in the Middle East. 

Posted on

You Get Used to It

I really have a sweet deal.  I get several R&R breaks and get to both go home and go to places I have never been.  In return I have to spend some time in Iraq, which is not as bad as people think.  You get used to it.  I am not saying I will volunteer to stay on beyond my time, but I am generally comfortable, the work is interesting and my colleagues are great.

On the other hand, I miss my family; I miss my home surroundings and I miss … nature.  I know nature is everywhere, but there really is not much of what I recognize where I live in Al Anbar.  I just need to walk in the trees.  They are too few and far between.  I also don’t like the dry.

This is a pretty shallow posting, but I cannot seem to get any deeper today.  I am at the Baghdad airport, the same place I arrived in Iraq in September.  I have not been here since then.  It is plenty ugly.  Maybe if you were greeted with something a little more inviting, you would have a better first impression of Iraq. I saw some new guys coming in.  You can tell new guys.  They are not covered in dust and even if they have become dusty, they don’t have the covered in dust look of the veteran.   They also still have expectations.  They really think they will make sense of things.  I understand that this is not possible.  I accept and even embrace the ambiguity.   I have found that you can understand something enough to make it work w/o making sense of the whole.  There are some things I know to do to get certain results, but I really don’t know why.  I would like to know why and I often speculate, but this is just an exercise.  I have found it is better to know what to do w/o understanding why than knowing why but not knowing what to do.  If you have a good chow hall and a secure place to sleep, you got just about all you really need.  It is illogical, but THAT makes sense.

I met an interesting guy here who made me think about my next job.  He is working in the Consular section,  but before that got a JD/MBA and worked in emerging technologies.  My new job will be dealing with such things, so we had a good talk.  We exchanged book titles to read.  He recommended a book called “In Athena’s Camp”  I ordered that on Amazon, but when checking it out, I also found a book called “the Spider an the Starfish” re network organizations.   I downloaded the audio book and am listening to it now.  Seems very interesting.

He has a webpage too and if you want to get a different first hand account of Iraq, check out his link. 

I will relate one story from one of my colleagues. It happened a while ago.  I didn’t mention it until now for Opsec reasons, better not give the bad guys real time information.

He is a brave man.  He was walking down the street when he heard the sirens go off.  He ran toward some duck and cover barriers.  An Iraqi guy walking next to him ran in the other direction.  Neither made it to shelter.  A rocket came down just where they had been.  The angle of the impact shot fragments into the Iraqi guy and killed him.  My friend got a shower of debris, but suffered no significant injuries.  You just cannot predict these things.  Evidently they caught his escape on a surveillance camera.  Some of the security people call him the lucky rabbit.  He is back at work. As I said, he is a brave man.

That was a while about and in Baghdad, BTW.   Al Asad is safer.  Mostly just dust falls from our skies.

Posted on

A Time to Gather Stones Together

Above is preliminary to stone construction along the road in Haditha

When John McCain came recently to Haditha, he went to IRD/CSP.  It was a good choice, since this is a clear example of the success of the “diplomatic surge”.  CSP means community stabilization program.  USIAD fund the program, so it is vaguely falls under our ePRT through our USAID rep, but it operates autonomously and presents Iraqi faces to the Iraqi public.

CSP employs seventy-four Iraqis and has deployed more than two million dollars in well targeted programs to help develop free-market democracy in the Haditha region.  The Iraqis bring with them local contacts and expertise.  They know where to deploy resources and how to get the best deal that will produce the most results. The highest profile programs involve cleaning up and enhancing the Haditha market street, so to some degree CSP contributed to the vibrant business atmosphere I witnessed yesterday and wrote about below.

Below is a classroom being fixed up in the vocational school. Almost good to go.

The centerpiece of the CSP effort is a vocational school they are refurbishing on a hilltop just outside the downtown.  The school will train young Iraqis in practical arts such as masonry, electrical design & repair, carpentry and construction.  There will be full three year courses and shorter two month workshops.  The three year program will have 2100 students, with an intake of just over 700 each year.  The short workshops are more flexible and can be expanded to meet demand.   The plan is for the three-year students to be real professionals, help train others and form the nucleus of a skilled trades community.  The curriculum has been developed in cooperation with the Iraqi labor ministry, which we believe will take up the funding for the program after the U.S. money runs out.

Below is the new vocational school

Although Haditha suffers from high unemployment, the building and rebuilding boom is creating a demand for skilled workers that is straining supply.  A similar CSP program in Al Qaim has graduated hundreds of short-course students in the last few months who have been quickly hired by local firms.  We anticipate nearly zero unemployment among graduates in Haditha.  To some extent, skilled workers create their own demand and their higher productivity helps create wealth that creates demand for more workers.  It is a very positive cycle.   The CSP vocational school certainly won’t solve all Haditha’s employment problems, but it is an excellent start.

The Iraqi leader of CSP is a visionary.  He is looking toward the future not only in CSP programs but also sees a brighter future for the area immediately around CSP and the technical school.   It is very dusty in the neighborhood.  This is Iraq and there will be dust, but the local effects can be mitigated by trees and other plants.  CSP is already bringing in soil literally to provide the basis of the future plantation.  Dennis, our agricultural advisor, gave some advice on the types and disposition of trees and plants.  I would like to see what this place looks like in a couple of years. 

Below is the future front garden.  There is a similar area out back.  The dirt piles are the soil that will sustain the greenery.  They are also digging a well.  Water is found at 37 meters.

I like the fact that this an operation run for Iraqis by Iraqis.  It has been very helpful in producing tangible and appropriate results.  My only concern is that the U.S. does not get enough credit.  This is not like an individual charitable giving, where you might want to do good anonymously.  Sometimes it is important to know who is funding the good work.  The U.S. is a very generous country.   The U.S. gives more foreign aid than any other country in the world.   When you include both public and private giving, the proportion is even higher.  Yet much of the world thinks we do not do enough.  One reason is that much of our investment is made in these effective but largely hidden programs. 

Ronald Reagan once said that you can accomplish almost anything if you do not worry about who gets the credit.  He was right.  Often trying to take credit, even when justified, makes result less effective.  It is a difficult balance to strike and I am not sure how to balance the needs to accomplish goals with the legitimate desire to improve the U.S. reputation.  For now, the CSP staff and all the recipients know what we have done for them and are grateful to the U.S.  But we have done good in many other places many times before.  People remember, but unfortunately when something resides only in living memory it only lives a short time.

Posted on

Vibrant Prosperity Returns to Iraq

Above is one of my teammates with a couple of friends. 

Today was very encouraging.  We came into Haditha from the south and walked up the market street that we call Boardwalk past workshops and retail outlets.  People were very friendly and open, more so than I have felt ever before but they were not telling us only what we wanted to hear.

Just as we got out of the MRAP and started to walk up the street, I guy ran up to ask re rental arrears on a building he owned.  He said that the Marines had occupied his building and but had yet to pay all the rent owed or fix the place up when they left.  One of the Marines with us knew who to talk to and said he could help with the problem.  The guy was happy that we listened to his problem and were working to fix it.  These are the kinds of interactions that are surprising locals and winning respect.

We stopped at a storefront where a bunch of strong looking guys were standing.  They were partners in a construction firm.  They told us that business was good, but they could use some loans to grow their business and enable them to bid on bigger jobs.  Unfortunately, the small loan program was too small.  They said they needed around $50,000.00 to really get to be big players.  They complained that many contractors do not do good jobs but continue to get contracts anyway.  This concerned us because we depend on local contractors.  The men assured us that things were better when Americans were doing the contracting, but we still do need to be careful. 

Down the street was a rug and furniture shop.  Sam Said bought a small rug showing the tower of Babel.   You can see it on the picture.  The owner told us that business was basically good, but that he still did not have total confidence in the Iraqi police.  Shop owners still needed to keep the wherewithal to defend themselves, he said.   I asked where the rugs came from.  He said from Turkey or Iran.  There are local rug factories, but they are not in operation.  Our PRT hopes to get a couple up and running.   There is obviously a market.

Up the street, the shops started to get better and more stocked with goods.  I have wanted to go to an ordinary Iraqi restaurant for some time.  Finally I had an opportunity.  Marc Humphries, who is our liaison officer in Haditha, told me that he heard that a particular kabob restaurant was good so we stopped in.  There were a few guys waiting for their food.  They told us that they were workers at Haditha dam.  If you look at my picture with them below, you see that my hairstyle and general appearance fits with the natives.

We got ten sets of kabobs and bread.  That Iraqi flat bread is great. 

Farther up the street we stopped in a grocery store.  I had been there a few months ago and the owners remembered my visit.  The shop had greatly improved in terms of goods on the shelves and general appearance.  The owners insisted on giving us some Mountain Dew and told us about business.  Business was generally good, but they had a big problem with the nearest bridge over the Euphrates.  In order to regulate the weight of vehicles, city authorities had set up a bar.  The grocery store owners said that their suppliers have small trucks that they pile high with goods.  The height of the vehicle is not necessarily related to the weight, but their tall loads cannot get through on the bridge.  I have seen how they load these trucks and I understand his position.  I am sure they would not pass American road standards, but it is the standard in this part of the world.  We are on the same side on this issue, BTW, since our MRAPs with their machine gun turrets, are also too tall to get through.

Our final stop on the market street was a dress shop.   It looked like a nice quality shop anywhere in the world.  The owner told me that most of his products come from Syria or Turkey.  They had some nice things on display.  I wanted to buy something for Chrissy & Mariza and I found some things I thought were nice.  When we got to the price, he wanted to give it to me free because we were guests in his country and he was grateful for what we had done.  Of course, I couldn’t let him do that and I paid the full price.  Now that I think about it, maybe that was his clever negotiating ploy.  He got me to pay full price and thank him for it.