Category: Iraq

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.