Category: Iraq

The Marines from RCT2 do not have mixed feelings about leaving Iraq.   They are going home after a job well done and they are happy to be done with Iraq, at least for the time being.  Marine units are self contained.  They take what they need with them and when they get back to North Carolina they will have most of the same duties, friendships & relationships.  It is not like the FS, where we move as individuals, but as an individual left behind by the group I am in a melancholy mood despite the joyful noise all around me.  My friends are leaving and I probably will never see them again.

We have been living close together.  We sleep in the same can cities, eat at the same chow hall & fly on the same helicopters.  You do not have any friends at home that you do not have at work and there is nobody you know that everybody else doesn’t also know.  Work merges with personal life and there is no genuine privacy.  While this has its costs, this situation creates a strong feeling of shared purpose and community, but as a civilian I am adjunct – someone in the community, not of it.  I usually do not feel this very acutley; today I do.

I hear stories about retired military guys hanging around bases.  They use to commissaries and PX not so much to save money as to maintain their affiliations.   The military is a very encompassing culture.  It is hard for anybody to just give it up.

The new guys from RCT5 seem great.  I met some of them at PRT training courses in Washington in September.  Everyone has been supportive and friendly.  I am sure I will have equally productive relationships with the new team.  The Marines design their system so that individual personalities will not affect the integrity of the unit and the mission, but people still matter.  I know I will make new friends among the new Marines.   I have already started, but I still can be sad that my old friends are leaving.

Even the oldest people around here cannot remember a winter so cold.  It snowed in Baghdad for the first time in 83 years, according to the records.  One of my contacts told me that it got down to -13 c in Al Qaim.  The picture above is from Rawah, near the Euphrates.   It never snows in Rawah … but it did, and some even stuck to the ground for a short while.

I am happy with this weather.  It gets fairly warm in the afternoon.  It could be a bit warmer, but not too much.   As running weather, it is nearly perfect and our cans have heaters.  I pity some of the poor Iraqis, who are unaccustomed to this kind of cold and whose houses are designed to withstand only heat.    I remember my freezing time in Mudaysis.

Maybe this cold winter will mean a cooler than normal summer.  I am not particularly excited about experiencing a colder winter, even if the icy blasts impress and chagrin the locals.  For me, this doesn’t seem very cold.  Our lows have been around 29 f degrees and it gets around 53 during the sunny times in the afternoons.  If you wear dark clothes, the sunlight feels like liquid warmth on your back & the sensation of radiant heat is very pleasant in the cold, dry air.   I would be content if this summer was the coldest in memory.  I am not counting on such luck, but I would appreciate even a modest reduction.  Of course, during the summer the highs and lows will be about the same as those I mentioned, only this time they will be in Celsius.   

This is the end of the day on one of our patrols.  You cannot see much, but I think the picture is iconic.  The big truck is an MRAP – horrible thing.  You cannot really drive it offroad because it bounces so much.  They are not very durable either.  There was a lot of politics behind getting them here so quick. I expect most of them will become part of that ever growing junk heap in Iraq.

I asked my team to dress like civilians around camp.  We are issued military uniforms, but some of us just cannot wear them right.  Our slovenly uniform appearance offends the Marines, so it is best to avoid the situation entirely by wearing civilian garb except when we are forward deployed.

I also took away the guns.  A couple guys liked to strut strapped like the Cisco Kid.  We are a civilian team.  Wherever we go, Marines are there with lots of guns to protect us.  If the bad guys get past them, past the 50 calibers and through the armor, my guess is that an old guy with a pistol is not going to turn the tide.  The Marines have the added advantage of knowing how to use their weapons.  An untrained civilians (or one whose training dates from the Johnson Administration) is more likely to shoot himself, his friends or some nearby kids than the enemy.

The real warriors don’t need some drugstore cowboys playing war. We should, all of us, do the jobs we do best.  Our team is diplomatic and it is our time.  “For everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven.”  Or as Clint Eastwood put it more succinctly, “A man’s gotta know his limitations.”

I was surprised at the calm in the isolated Nukhayb region.  Maybe there just are not enough people to form hostile groups.  Sunni and Shiite live together in harmony.  They intermarry and even share the same Mosques.  Another explanation is good management.  The area is guided by Sheik Lawrence, named for the famous T.E. Lawrence of Arabia.  (Local pronunciation eliminates the initial “L” sound and his name is usually transliterated as Lorans).  

We spoke to Sheik Lawrence at length during a gathering of local leaders at the Nukhayb “Government Center”.  The 17 city council members present were all Arab Bedouin men in traditional Arab garb, several of the men are Sheiks of some level.  

Lawrence is a man obviously in control, to whom the others clearly deferred.  He stands out from his fellows who were dressed in the traditional flowing robes, since he wore a western style blazer and slacks.  He also clearly understands English and showed that he understood before the translator spoke.  He is well connected in Iraq and internationally.  He is kin to the Saudi royal family and has connections all over the Gulf, a member of the provincial council of Anbar and can get appointments with anyone he wants in Baghdad.  As a result of all this, Nukhayb gets its share of money from the central authorities.

In our foot patrol through the town, we saw a reasonably well maintained and prosperous place, with smiles and waves from most everyone we encountered.  Area children were well clothed, healthy and happy. For a small community in the middle of nowhere, this town doing very well.  What were the problems?

In one word: rain, or lack thereof.  No rivers run through the region.  The six wells in the region supply only drinking water. Agriculture depends almost entirely on rainfall.  By this time of the year, the wadis are usually green with new shoots and the shepherds can take their flocks there for food.  This year has been bone dry.  When the vegetation doesn’t get water to grow, the goats and sheep, which make up the bulk of the local economy, suffer.  

I could not get an estimate of the numbers of sheep and goats that I thought was really reliable, but the number of 150,000 came up as consensus figure herded by around 200 nomadic shepherds in a fifty kilometer radius around Nukhayb.  Raising sheep and goats is always a precarious business.  In the roughly one in five “good” years, there is sufficient grass for the animals.  2003-4 was like that.  Other years present varying degrees of hardship.  One of the old men in the meeting told us that currently it costs around $150 to raise a sheep until it is ready for sale, but sheep fetch only around $100 on the market.  Without access to free range, sheepherding is distinctly unprofitable.

During the bad years, the Iraqi government used to subsidize or provide grain.  According to the old men at the meeting, during the time of Saddam Hussein, the government supplied two kilos of grain per head per month.  With this guarantee against failure, my guess is that shepherds expanded their herds, which made them ever more dependent on government subsidies and had the additional pernicious effect of overtaxing the carrying capacity of the land.  We have a classic tragedy of the commons situation, since the land is not held privately, exacerbated by the moral hazard of government ensuring against failure.  Sustainable sheepherding would probably require a significant reduction in the numbers of sheep.  This is not the solution the local people embraced, however.  They requested that our ePRT either provide the subsided grain or pressure Iraqi authorities to do so.

I am afraid that we have neither the resources nor the inclination to go into the subsidizing of environmental degradation business.  We told them that we check into offering some emergency help, which will consist of advice and medical and vitamins, which will help ensure that the sheep that do survive are healthier.  The viscous circle of drought, weakness and disease is in play.  As the animals get weaker, they are prey to more and varied types of worms and parasites.  We can help reduce these maladies.

In the longer run, Sheik Lawrence thought digging wells for irrigation would help mitigate this recurring cycle of crisis.   He mentioned that he had seen developed well-based systems in Jordan and Saudi.  Ground water in the Nukhayb region is ONLY 220 meters below the surface he claimed.  Farther to the west, it is deeper under the surface.  He mentioned that they had plans for central pivot irrigation systems, but lacked the experience and expertise to make them work. 

Fortunately, our ePRT agricultural expert, has both.  Dennis also thinks that some of the local soils could be extremely productive if the proper irrigation techniques were used.  We offered to let Dennis help, should it be appropriate.   Preliminary steps would be identifying soils that will make irrigation worthwhile and actually digging the wells.  Lawrence said that during the time of Saddam Hussein, there was lots of talk about digging wells, but not much action.  How have things changed?

This morning I heard something weird.  The sound on the roof was rain.  Maybe it is not too late for some of those sheep ranchers.  We didn’t get much … so far, but it doesn’t take too much out here.  It already had the good effect of washing some of the dust off some the date palms and eucalyptus trees.  They are now a more actually green instead of that dusty greenish color.   I would like to see the greening of the wadis.  

Another unexpected thing you find in the deserts are proto-watermelons.   You can see them in the picture above.  Those little green balls are the ancestors of the big ones we know and love every summer.  They are yellow, not red, inside but otherwise look like mini-watermelons, which is more or less what they are.  

They grow wild in the middle of the desert.  I would have thought something like a mini-watermelon would grow near water, and it seems profligate to produce a water filled globe in this desiccated landscape, but the roots evidently go down deeply enough to tap what water is available.

Speaking of the unexpected, I just wanted to post this picture from the traffic circle in Nukhayb.   That’s right.  It is a bunch of teapots around and eagle.  I don’t know what it means either, but somebody went through a lot of trouble to make it.

My home… this is.  Above is the VIP tent at Mudaysis. 

Sleeping on a cot in a tent is never comfortable.  A modern cot is made out of synthetic fabric that has the peculiar capacity to draw away and dissipate body heat.  This would make cots great hot weather equipment, but the fabric evidently can accomplish its mission only on cold days. You wouldn’t believe how cold it gets in Iraq.   I was equipped with my thin sleeping bag.  Even wearing everything I had with me, I was freezing.  The first night was the worst.  We experienced one of those rare days when it was overcast all day.  Usually, you can count on the warmth of the sun to clear the cold from your bones, but for the record on New Years day 2008, the sun shined weakly or not at all in Mudaysis.  Temperatures hovered in the 40s at midday.   At night the clouds cleared permitting a drop into the 20s.  I have never been so cold for so long.  Coming from a Wisconsin native, who went to school in Minnesota and served tours in Poland and Norway, this might sound strange.   I certainly have been more intensely cold, but not for two days solid.  In the cold climates, really cold places, we heat our dwellings, wear warm clothes and hunker down inside warm buildings when it gets really cold outside.

Necessity is the mother of invention. On the way to chow the next morning, I noticed lots of discarded cardboard boxes.  I took a couple back to the tent and made the thermo-mat you see in the pictures.   The boxes were ironically labeled – KEEP FROZEN.  Cardboard, as every bum & drifter knows, is a good insulator.  It really made my second day in the cold tent a lot less unpleasant. 

We traveled to this God forsaken high desert in the SW corner of Iraq along the border with Saudi Arabia to meet with the local sheik to talk about problems the drought is creating for local agriculture.  There is usually not a Marine camp here.  The Marines are stationed temporarily at Mudaysis to protect pilgrims going on the Hajj.  They arrived just before the Hajj began a few weeks ago.  We take it for granted because we see it so often, but it remains truly remarkable how the U.S. can project power anywhere on the globe.  Even here in the middle of what could pass as a science for a movie about Mars, we can set up and supply a camp, complete with hot meals, its own fire department and fully functioning command operation out in the desert.  Heated tents for visitors, however, is evidently beyond our powers.

Below are my friends Reid & Dennis at the chow hall.

This is the potential free trade zone (FTZ).  It looks the same no matter which way you look.  Lots of room for expansion & nothing to stand in your way.  BTW – This land has not been cleared.  This is more or less what it looks like in its natural state.  About 1/2 mile from here the landscape turns green near the river; beyond that nothing grows.  The change is very abrupt.

I thought that we were to look at a potential free trade zone at or very near the POE.   The Governor of Anbar and the Mayor of AQ had other plans and perhaps better ideas.  They showed us their choice for a future FTZ some twenty-seven kilometers to the east of the POE along Hwy 12 outside the village of Karabilah.   Please see the nearby map.

They understand that a FTZ need not be right on a border (Brazil has a FTZ located in along the Amazon River very nearly in the geographical center of that vast country, for example.) and that it is more of an administrative concept than a physical infrastructure.  In other words, it makes much more sense to locate the FTZ where it makes business sense rather than next to the POE just because there is a POE.  The Governor and the Mayor were thinking right.  This FTZ is currently a large area of nothing but dirt and sand, but this pile of dirt and sand has the advantage of being near roads, the railroad, water resources and electric power lines.  The governor envisioned at least three stages of building the FTZ, correctly pointing out that there was room to expand should expansion be required. Like everyplace else around here, there is plenty of free parking. We will be getting the details of the FTZ soon, such as the number of hectares and the precise location.   An important question beyond these technical ones would be, “what do we envision being made in the FTZ?”  Most FTZs are home to assembly industries, where value is added to imported materials and finished products are exported.  This particular FTZ does not have access to abundant supplies of inexpensive labor or raw materials with significant potential for value added.   The principle local industries are cement & phosphate production along with various types of agricultural enterprises, especially sheep.  These products are not highly processed. 

There was some discussion about specialty agricultural products, such as cut flowers or high quality vegetables that could be processed in the FTZ and then shipped fresh to markets in Europe or the Middle East.  (Fresh cut flowers are profitably shipped from places like Kenya to Amsterdam on a daily basis.)   Iraq certainly has the soils, water and climate (complementary to Europe’s) to support such endeavors.  The infrastructure piece missing from this equation is a good airport.  These high value perishable items are usually shipped via air transport.

It looks bleak now.  In fact it makes me wonder why we call it  REconstruction.  There doesn’t seem to me me “re” here. But things take time and all accomplishments require someplace to start.