Tag: foreign service

Posted on

The Big Idea

I found the team leader conference in Baghdad very interesting and am trying to take some inspiration from it for my remaining time in Iraq.  I was especially attracted to what General Petraeus said about the big idea and how working toward them attracts talent as people want to accomplish these sorts of goals.

Below is a “gas station” in Hadithah.  Not much to look at, but there was no fuel to buy not long ago.

It is easy to get discouraged around here if we look at the things that are still lacking.  But when I think about how much has been accomplished, the mood changes.  Places like Hadithah, which were wastelands of rubble less than a year ago, are now enjoying growing prosperity and stability, with full markets and lots of economic activity.  Our “good news story” is part of that, but only ONE part.   The Anbari people are resourceful and resilient.  They are going to make it and we can take great satisfaction that we helped.

We are beginning to notice the effects of more Iraqi government money funding projects in the cities of Western Al Anbar.  Projects are being built without our involvement.  For example, the Al Faraby Primary School in Hadithah was an ITAO project. When USACE went to do site planning they found a GOI project already in full swing.  Similarly I recently visited a youth Center in Rutbah.  CA was planning to renovate it and the ePRT was supplying some soccer field improvements.  I recently learned that our help was no longer needed as GOI was going to fund and work the project with a big budget. 

Below is Hit near the City Hall

The effects are still uneven but unmistakable and they are bringing a subtle change in attitude.  Local leaders are coming to understand that their own government, not coalition forces, is where they should look for resources.  Effecting this change in attitude has been one of our key goals, but I am not sure how much credit we can take for it happening, sort of like the rooster taking credit for the sunrise.  Certainly equally important are the fantastic oil revenues that the Iraqi government is earning as well as the perception among observant people that the U.S. Congress and the American people are less enthusiastic about continuing to push American money into a country that can well afford its own development.

Below is irrigation system near Rawah

I was a little concerned to hear that the elections may be postponed.  We hear from contacts that the people of Western Al Anbar are anxious to have their voices heard.  They learned their lesson from the foolishness of their earlier election boycott and now want more representative politicians in power throughout the area.  I am afraid that frustration will build as elections are delayed and people suspect that incumbent politicians are abetting in the delay to protect their own careers and prolong their tenure in their jobs.

 All tolled, I find many more reasons for hope than for despair.  Iraq still has a very long and steep road to travel, but it is increasingly prepared to make the journey successfully.

Above is a Marine playing golf during free time.  You take what you can.

Posted on

Hypocrisy is the Tribute Vice Pays to Virtue

Below is the flag at Mt Washington, New Hampshire

At least that is how it used to be when Matthew Arnold wrote those words more than a century ago.  I am speaking only of my own observation but I have noticed a change in society.  I can recall when people doing bad things pretended to be good because they were rightfully ashamed of their bad behavior.  Today many celebrities and athletes revel in their horrible behavior with apparent impunity.   Being bad is now cool.  It is something akin to the radical chic.  Good people feel a little shy of admitting that they are not bad and cool.  It is strange.  We have in many ways reversed the earlier formulation.

When I talk to my colleagues in Iraq, both civilians and military, it is clear to me that most people are here for good reasons.  They came to do their duty, to serve their country and to try to make the world a better place.  Of course there are also other reasons, but duty is the dominant, the predominant, motivation.  It is the sine qua non of why we are here.  My new team members feel a little reticent about admitting that.  I did too.  Why? 

The Marines really believe all that stuff they say about patriotism, duty & commitment and being around them has been both refreshing and liberating.   I think we underplay the call to duty in our lives.  Most people are looking for meaning.  True happiness comes from doing what you should do.  It need not be heroic or dangerous and it will be different for every person, but doing what YOU think you should do is what makes you happy.  That means happiness cannot be found, bought or given; it has to be earned – too bad for rich heiresses and morality-challenged sports & movie stars.  

I am going to change my introductory talk to new team members to emphasize this a little more and give them more opportunity to feel good about what they are doing.  Maybe I can use some variation of that speech John F. Kennedy gave re going to the moon, we do these things “not only because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win…”

Or is that just too un-cool for today’s ears? 

Posted on

Perceptions of Iraq

My ePRT is on the edge of the world.   I realized this as we flew low to Baghdad in the Blackwater helicopter on the way to Baghdad.   Marine Air flies higher and straighter, so I don’t see as much, but there is not much to see anyway on my usual Western Anbar travels, just shades of dusty brown.   As we flew toward Bagdad, I saw farm lands that were wider than a football field’s distance from the river.   Some of the land looked very green and rich.   How different would my impression of Iraq have been if I had been somewhere else but Western Anbar? 

I went to Baghdad for the team leader conference.   The thirty-one PRTs in Iraq represent vastly different human and natural terrains.  Each of us sees part of the situation.  It is good to try to bring us together to discuss the bigger picture.

Below is our partner helicopter. 

Iraq has improved a lot since I arrive in September of last year.  Our meeting reflected this changed situation.   Back then it was sometimes hard to see a possible solution. Today I feel reasonably sure that we will succeed in helping this country become more democratic, stable and non-threatening. 

It gets lots less green near Al Asad …

Our challenge now is how to help the Iraqis usefully spend their own resources on development projects.  We were always supposed to be working ourselves out of a job.  The preferred end state is a normal relationship between the U.S. and Iraq and we are well on the way.

… and a lot more green as you get farther from AA.

During the conference I got a couple different perspective about Iraq.   For example, Iraq had an excellent system of public health until the 1970s.   It declined in the 1980s and got worse and worse as trained professionals left the country and facilities were no maintained.   The promising news in this is that we are helping restore, not create a system.  This is true of many aspects of this place.  As one of the presenters pointed out, Iraq is not a poor country; it is a broken country that can and is being mended.   The other different perspective I got came from the simply flying over the country and talking to my colleagues.  There is more to Iraq than Western Anbar and there is a lot of potential. 

Above – animals grazing, palms growing along fields of grain.   My impression of Iraq will always be Western Al Anbar, but I have to remember that is not the whole country.

Posted on

Courageous Journalists Needed

Picture below is from the Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma City.

I stay out of specific politics on this blog, but now that both candidates have come down to nuanced but similar policies of staying in Iraq as long (or as short) as the need exists, I feel a little freer to ask what the hell is wrong with the American media?

During the bad days in Iraq, not long ago, they were writing the American obituary.  They had no trouble finding and quoting experts telling why we couldn’t win in this sort of environment.   Now they cannot seem even to notice success.  Isn’t that an extraordinary story?  In the heart of the Middle East, on a battlefield chosen by Al Qaeda as their key front for their war against civilization, in a place where they proclaimed the beginning of their new caliphate we have driven them to virtual extinction.   As they cower in their spider holes, fearing the arrival of our Marines or our Iraqi allies, their frustration is palpable.  This was supposed to be their victory, not ours.   They thought they had the weight of events on their side; they were mistaken.   Why is this not story worthy of investigation and exposition by our esteemed journalists? 

My experience with journalists informs me that many, perhaps most, work from their existing models and do not actively seek out information that disconfirms them.  They have a narrative that is generally accepted by other people in the media and that tends to constrain their perceptions.   This is not something limited to journalists, but they are particularly susceptible precisely because they think they are not.  

The narrative that their conventional wisdom accepted was that Iraq was mostly lost and that we were in a holding pattern heading for a long term failure and withdrawal. They fixed the various data points around their narrative and the stories more or less made sense back in 2006.  This narrative is now unraveling but the MSM has yet to figure out a new one to replace it.   It is not a conspiracy, but it is a syndrome, a kind of a group-think.   It will take a lot of changed facts and a couple of courageous leading journalists to break out.  We have the changed facts on the ground; what we need now is the courage.  

BTW – I was reading one couragous journalist today.   People who have been here recently know a lot more.  Stay away from those pundits and bloggers who have been to Iraq years ago … or never. 

Posted on

A Perfect Al Asad Day

I spend some considerable time complaining about the weather here in Iraq and who can blame me if you look at the pictures of the nearly opaque red air?  But Al Asad has pleasant weather much of the year.  November is very nice around here.  Winters are a bit chilly, but never cold and usually clear.   It is churlish to complain all the time.

You just have to adapt.  For example, in the summer it is much too hot for any strenuous activity during the middle of the day.   The local Iraqis are active early in the morning and in the evening.  They hunker down in the shade in the middle of the day.  This bimodal activity optimal is probably the origin of the siesta.  If you follow a similar pattern, (IF you can) you too are okay. 

I have been getting my running in before 0700.  This time of the year, it gets light around 0430 and it is very nice at 0600.   I get up in the morning and look out the door. If I can see a reasonable distance (i.e. dust is not so bad) I go out and run.   There is an interesting aspect of the dust that I only figured out (maybe) recently.   On some days the dust is not so bad at 0600, but it gets thick and unpleasant by around 0700.   Some of this has to do with the nature of wind.  The wind tends to pick up around dawn.   I suppose it is because the earth heats differentially as the sunlight hits.  The wind picks up dust and a short time later it is a mess.  

But not all the dust is natural.  Much is kicked up by our own activities.  Around 0600 the trucks & heavy vehicles start to roll in earnest; each creates a tail of dust and cumulatively there is a lot of dust.  All this dust has to go someplace and it doesn’t settle very fast.   Most of the roads are paved with white gravel and I am pretty sure our activities are the source of much of the whitish “moon dust.”  The red dust comes from farther away.   Our weather maps show massive clouds, sometimes covering almost all of Iraq.  The most recent attack of the red dust originated in the western deserts of Iraq and in Syria.  This kind of weather pattern is usually associated with a northeastern wind.  

Our local activities can create local unpleasantness, but the real dust storms are those caused by Mother Nature.  Of course it is not all Mother Nature either.  People have abused this land for >4000 years.   Much of this dirt would have been held down by the roots of plants had humans and goats not uprooted them.  I blame Dennis, our AG Advisor, for the current problem.   He has been here nine months and still not managed to cover the hills with grass and reverse the mistakes of the last four millennia.

BUT today is nice.   The air is clear and the morning was cool and pleasant.  We are supposed to have at least three days of this before the next clouds of dust obscure the horizon.   I have to get my running in while the running is good.

I made the three and a half minute trek to the highest mountain in Al Asad, an elevation of at least 30 feet,  and took the pictures.  This is as good as it gets around here. 

Posted on

M*O*A*D*S

We are experiencing the mother of all dust storms.  The dust is more red than usual.  Satellite maps indicate that the storms are starting in Syria.   I wonder if that qualifies as a Syrian incursion into Iraq.

Below is me in the dust storm.

I went out to stand in the dust as you can see in the picture (or almost not see).  You have to be in on the experience after all, the bad ones too. The dust stings your nose and eyes.   I can only imagine how it would be to be exposed to it all day w/o shelter.  It quickly dries out you mouth.   We are not suffering too much, however.  Our new headquarters is fairly well sealed since it was renovated.  This is a big change from the old building and a quantum leap from the tents.  During previous dust storms, it just rained dirt inside our building.   Today I can observe it out the window with some measure of detachment. 

Coming out of the shower this morning was interesting.  Of course, we don’t have showers or toilets (what the Marines call heads) in our cans.  I am lucky in that my can is only a short distance from the showers/heads, so I can make the trip in flip-flops and running shorts.  I don’t usually bother to dry off very much.   It is unnecessary.  Stepping out into the Anbari summer wind is (as a Marine colleague described it) like being sprayed by a giant hair dryer.  Today I had the added experience of fine red dust blowing in the wind.  I was coated like a Christmas cookie by the time I got back in.  I exaggerate only a little.

This is us coming back.  This gives you some idea of the distances involved.

On the plus side, dust storms reflect the sun’s heat, so it is a lot cooler sheltering under the dust blanket.   But it cannot be good for you.  I didn’t go running this morning.  I don’t think it is healthy to run in this pea-soup of dust.  I was thought I would be encased in concrete with cement lungs, probably in mid-stride, turned into stone sort of like after seeing the Medusa, but when I look at the dust blowing around, I understand that it would probably be the much more attractive terra cotta.   Maybe that is how those famous Han Dynasty soldiers came to be.

BTW – I submitted by essay re success in Iraq to the official State Dept blog (blogs.state.gov).  They broke it up into bite sized pieces and have not yet published the whole think, but please have a look.

Posted on

COPS

Meeting with Rutbah Police Chief

The Police Chief says that he tells everybody about his problems in hopes that the weight of his persistence will convince someone to solve them.

The Rutbah region that is his area of responsibly is vast and thinly populated.   It includes the Syrian and Jordanian border areas and the POEs at Waleed and Trabil, the village of Akashat, Nukhayb as well as the Saudi border region and POE Ar-Ar. It takes a lot of police officers, vehicles and fuel to patrol a place like this.  Unfortunately, Iraqi government resource allocation decisions are based on population w/o sufficient concern for area.

The chief says he has only 280 IP out of authorized strength of 620.  He doesn’t expect to see more any time soon. His patrol fleet consists of sixty-one pickup trucks of various sizes, Chevys and Fords.  Even when there is fuel to keep the trucks rolling, they are often inoperable.  This is a land of axel-busting roads, when you are lucky enough to find a road.  He says that he has people trained to fix the vehicles, but they lack parts and tools to do the job.  They used to have their vehicles fixed at Al Asad, but that service recently stopped.

Hammurabi

The Hammurabi Academy, located on Camp Ripper, has trained around 400 Iraqi police from Western Al Anbar since it was founded in July of last year.  Classes are small, with a student/instructor ratio of around 7/1.  Only leaders are trained.  They are supposed to go back and pass their information to the ordinary police, so it is a train the trainers proposition.  They learn a variety of tasks such as basic investigation, logistics, administration and evidence gathering techniques.   It is not exactly CSI-Iraq, but it is a start.

Colonel Stacy Clardy of RCT 2 set up the academy to produce a leadership core for the Iraqi Police (IP) of our district.  It is important to recall that back in July 2007 Al Anbar was just coming out of the terror of the insurgency and significant fighting still raged.  My first helicopter landing in Al Anbar was on a soccer field, where I was informed insurgents had rounded up and murdered the local police some months before. These kinds of things were still fresh in the memories of recruits back then.  It took courage to volunteer to be an Iraqi cop and I suppose that they must have felt a little relieved to get some training on Camp Ripper, protected by U.S Marines.   Now they talk about moving the academy off the base and that will probably happen by next year.

The Marines host the venue, provide some logistics and act as advisors.   Most of the funding comes from the government of Iraq and gradually, as equipment is replaced, the Hammurabi Academy is evolved into an almost wholly Iraqi institution.

My impression was that we had U.S. instructors teaching classes with interpreter.  I was wrong, or at least out of date.  Most instructors today are Iraqis who speak directly to the classes in Arabic.  One of the successes of the last year is precisely the development of the human capital to make this work.  Iraqi police of the past were often good at being cops in many ways, but not so good at following the rule of law & evidence.  Now they are becoming a modern police force.

Posted on

Water, Water Everywhere but Not a Pipe to Link

Below are solar street lights in Rutbah, a CF project.  They work okay, but are not, IMO, aesthetically pleasing.

The Regional Engineer of Rutbah is a modern man with little patience for religious extremists or excessive tribalism.   He hates what Saddam Hussein did to his country.  He told me that in some towns essentially no new schools were built between the end of the 1970s and the liberation, despite big population growth.  As an engineer, he decries the general lack of maintenance.  Instead of building infrastructure, Saddam bought expensive weapons systems from the Soviets, French & Chinese (the U.S. supplied only 0.47% of Saddam’s stuff). The fruits of big buying spree litter the deserts around here, MiGs that never fired a shot in anger, tanks that never went anywhere.  They decided it was better to abandon them than to fight a real enemy.

It was worst during the sanctions.  When Saddam had less money, he spent what he had on palaces, but enough of the past.

Rutbah’s future depends on water.  As I mentioned earlier, water is in short supply in the region.  There have been some grandiose plans occasionally touted to pipe water over the desert from the Euphrates.   It is a long way to pump water and it is all up hill.  Beyond that, the Euphrates has been running lower because of dams in Syria and Turkey.   In The long pipeline solution is proposed by people who do not understand geography, hydrology, gravity or politics.   Besides those things, it is okay.

Below – They have more success with sunflowers than I did.

Fortunately, according to the engineer, the solution to Rutbah’s water woes lies only eighteen kilometers away in Al Dhabaa wadi.  He says that twelve wells already exist and that hydrologists have mapped out the groundwater.  There is more than enough for a city twice the size of Rutbah.  Eighteen kilometers is only around 11 miles.  Why, I asked, were people complaining about water when water was so easy to get?

Some of it goes back again to the lost decades of the Saddam tyranny.  There are no reliable pipes to bring from the wells across those eighteen kilometers to thirsty Rutbah and much of Rutbah just doesn’t have access to water pipes period.   They were never built.  Our friends says that Rutbah had good zoning laws, but they were enforced sporadically so that there are some pretty big buildings sitting on some pretty dry land.  Well, it is not completely dry.  There are no sewage lines either, but what is soaking into the ground is not something anybody wants to drink.  Retrofitting whole neighborhoods is extremely costly and time consuming.   It may be years and it may be forever before these things are done.  Given the ramshackle quality of these buildings, it is probably a better idea to start again from the ground up, but people already occupying these places are less enthusiastic about this sort of solution. 

The other reason for the water shortage involved the great bane of Western Iraq – fuel.  In this, perhaps the world’s greatest repository of liquid hydrocarbons, fuel for pumps and/or electricity to run them is inconsistent.   When the pump goes on and off, it begins to lose siphoning pressure.  After a while it is sucking up air or mud.  Steady and predicable is what is needed.   I don’t know that much about pumps.  It doesn’t seem to me that should be such a problem, but the engineer tells me that indeed it is and he seems to know about these things.

In any case, on the one hand, Rutbah’s water problem is solvable and solvable soon in the general case of water for the city.  On the other hand, it may be solvable never in the specific situation of some construction that went on w/o the benefit of zoning.   Life is tough all over, tougher for some.  It is mostly a matter of organization and choices.  Most of the choices are simple; some are not easy.  

Above is our ride home.  Ospreys are good for longer trips. It is still a thrill to ride, but the joy wears off when you hit some turbulence, which always seems to happen on the way to and from Rutbah.

Posted on

Soccer

I don’t know why anybody likes soccer.   It is about as exciting, IMO, as watching grass grow.  But Iraqis like the game a lot and we get some significant public relations mileage out of building and/or rebuilding soccer fields.

The soccer field is in back of the kids.  In Iraq, you don’t even get to watch the grass grow on the soccer fields.  All they do is smooth out that dirt and put in a kind of a sub base.  We are going to fix this soccer field up.  The local kids are excited about it.  When we got out of our cars, they all came running over.

The kids in Rutbah are a little less spoiled than some others.   They were friendly w/o expecting too much candy.  It is funny because kids are similar all over the place.  We asked them if they got to use the field very often.  They said it depended on whether bigger kids came along to run them off.  I remember exactly the same experience.  We used to play football in Humboldt Park.  We got to use the flat, good places to play until some bigger kids came and ran us off.  On the other hand, we would run off any groups who were smaller than ours.

Now that I think about it, the big kids never actually had to run us off and we never actually had to run off any littler kids.  You would see the group coming and make a general estimate of their total mass.   If their total mass was greater than ours, we would pick up our ball and run away.   Kind of an interesting system.  Prepares you well for adult life.

In any case, we have done soccer fields before and will do this one in Rutbah.  I told my guys that I want to see it done before I leave and that I want a few drought tolerant trees nearby, so that people can sit in the shade and not only have to watch soccer.  The kids will  be happy.

Posted on

Hazardous Work Sometimes

Recent deadly bombings around Iraq, one involving State colleagues, reminded us that this is still a dangerous place, despite the astonishing progress Iraq has made over recent months.  I was reminded on a local level during a foot patrol. 

The crowd in general was okay, but one guy (he is not in my picture, BTW) was obviously none too happy.  I won’t go into details.  Suffice to say he was supposed to get compensation for a mistake but when he went to the local authorities to get it they ripped him off, he says. In these situations all you can do is smile and keep in talking/letting them talk, while trying to figure out how to get away.  My colleague, Sam, is an excellent interpreter and was able to keep the guy from going too crazy.  I am glad the guy had a chance to seek justice and it will probably be good public relations, especially if he is treated fairly.  It does, however, point up the dangers inherent in our work and why we must not become complacent.   I always worry about some weirdo in the crowd or a guy with a PBIED. 

It is very important to go among the Iraqi people to show them we know they are not the enemy, that we are not afraid and that we want to hear what they have to say, sweet and bitter. I bet they will be talking about this particular engagement for a long time to come.  The Iraqis present were also surprised and concerned over this man’s anger. I believe our interpreter Sam and I did our duty representing our country in a favorable light and the Marines calmly addressed the situation.  Nevertheless, this was a wake-up call about how fast a situation can deteriorate. We have reviewed our security procedures and our team members and I will be much more circumspect in the future.

Nobody is afraid to complain to us. They are usually reasonably happy with Marines and somewhat unhappy with local authorities.  While we take some pleasure in being popular, we have to avoid the impression that we are the problem solvers in contrast to local authorities.  We will be gone soon.  The local authorities will abide and the people have to learn to abide with them. In many ways, they are asking too much too soon from their governments, most of which are newly established after the defeat of the insurgency, but the people are generally on the right track and their requests are legitimate.  People always ask about fuel and electricity.   They want their streets to be clean and their homes to be secure.  Most of all, they want no longer to live in fear.  They are also concerned re water.  It is a desert, after all.