Tag: foreign service

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.

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.

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.

Pesky Flies

One advantage of having a lot of dust hanging in the air is that it reflects the hot sun.  Al Asad has been unseasonably cool, but daytime temperatures still reach into the upper 90s and we now are bedeviled by little flies.  You can tell when a guy hits a cloud of them.  He starts to move his hands like windshield wipers.   Marines often take off their caps to swat at the little pests, really to not much avail.   They look like American flies, but they are smaller and they seem to be attracted to your mouth, nose and eyes.  Maybe it the moisture they seek.  I don’t think they bite; they just try to land on you.

Most of the endemic Iraqi bugs crawl on the ground.  They can be nasty and poisonous but they cannot easily get around  and we don’t generally have a flying bug problem, except these flies.   I am hoping that they are seasonal and that their season is short.  I recall that there were some around when I arrived last year, but not in the kind of numbers we are seeing now.   Let’s hope it doesn’t last.

Iraqi Money Finally Flows

 In the picture along side are USMC T-shirts for sale in the Hit marketplace. 

On a more optimistic – and unexpected – note, Iraqi government money has started to flow into Western Al Anbar.   We hope that this phenomenon does persist.  Exactly what is happening is beyond my pay grade, but we have seen more than $100 million of Iraqi money funding a variety of projects, the kinds we (Coalition Forces) used to have to finance.   It is about time and I hope this is a turning point.  I am increasingly frustrated that the American taxpayer is getting stuck for things that the Iraqis have the money to do themselves.   We are all about helping, but I don’t want to be left holding the bag.  This Iraqi money flow is a good sign.   Our job is not done, but I think we might be seeing the beginning of the solution.

Memories:  Monty Python & Eddy Arnold

Yesterday’s cigar and movie night featured “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”  I don’t do cigars, but I did go to see the movie.  Most of the guys watching the film were not even born when it was made.  It makes me feel kind of old.   Monty Python has developed into a cultural feature.   Many people quote Monty Python lines w/o knowing really knowing their source.   The pace seems slow when I actually watch Monty Python today.  I am just waiting for the signature lines.   “She turned me into a newt … I got better.”   Monty Python has successfully jumped into the next generation. Whodathunkit?

Not so well remembered these days is Eddy Arnold who I-Tunes inform me recently died.   He was my father’s favorite singer, with his renditions of “Cattle Call,” “Sixteen Tons,” & “The Green Leaves of Summer.”   During the 1970s, he briefly parlayed his limited fame into a gig as spokesman for Log Cabin pancake syrup.

That Eddy Arnold’s passing would have gone unnoticed by me except for I-Tunes, which  after analyzing my esoteric & eclectic music tastes reached into Iraq to tell me about it and made me aware of a very interesting marketing strategy.  My guess is that the number of Eddy Arnold fans has dwindled to a vanishingly small number.  I doubt if there would be living fans enough to justify the re-release of an album and in the pre-internet world nobody but family and friends would have marked the man’s shuffling off this mortal coil.  But internet can identify and cheaply reach even a small number of fans and the cost of search out and reproducing his hits is almost zero, so suddenly there is a market for everything.

Even a huge record store could hold only a few thousand of the most popular recordings.  I-Tunes features millions and it doesn’t matter if they sell only rarely since there is essentially no inventory carrying cost.  Nothing is ever lost or becomes so obscure it cannot be found.   Who knows, maybe Eddy Arnold will touch as whole new generation with “The Last Word in Lonesome is Me.”  Maybe not.   I have to admit that even I am not going to plunk down the $0.99 for one for the old country boy’s hits and even I-Tunes doesn’t feature my favorite Eddy Arnold album “Our Man Down South.”

17 Mai

Today is Norwegian constitution day.   Congratulations.  I neglected to congratulate the Poles on May 3 for theirs.  Let me add that now.   Speaking of memories, I like to remember “my” countries.

We are having a conference about our work in Iraq.  Many of our partners will be coming, including NGOs and contractors.  Below is the keynote speech I plan to give to open the conference.   BTW – when I ask why we are in Iraq, I am very literally talking about the people at the conference, not about the more general question.

The conference will be in a few days, still time if anybody has suggestions re how to improve the speech please send in a comment.

Why Are We Here In Iraq?

More precisely, why do the taxpayers of Indiana, Wisconsin or Texas or Oregon give us the big bucks and the budgets to keep our boots planted precariously on the yellow dirt of Western Iraq?

Our job is to make Western Al Anbar unpleasant for the insurgency and help make the society here unreceptive to a renewal of the violence.  To do that, the people of Western Al Anbar must be reasonably self sufficient and plausibly content.  This is our job, our overriding goal.  Other goals we might have are paths to this ultimate objective or tools for its establishment, but let’s not mistake them for the final destination.

I am pleased that in working toward our ultimate goal that we can often do good.  You might call the good we do here a “collateral benefit”.  I take great personal satisfaction when one of our water projects can restore the productivity to Iraqi soils or when our grant to a rug factory provides job opportunities to local women, but by themselves those good things are not the reasons we are here. 

All our efforts must be aimed at building Iraqi self-sufficiency and producing solutions that can be sustained with the goal of making this place untenable for the insurgents.   In order to do that, we have to be careful not to be distracted by our personal desires to do good or just to help.  Those things are beyond our mandate and – frankly – often beyond our ability to understand or really influence.  And besides all that, we cannot be generous with other people’s, in this case the taxpayers’, money.

Why do I say all this and risk starting this great conference on a sour note?  Because I am tempted just like you are to try to do good and it is only too easy lose sight of the mission.  I have to remind myself – and I want to remind all of you – that what is important in our activities is to help the Iraqis to do things for themselves, not to do things for them.  All the good we do, all of our achievements, will be as meaningless as that yellow dust that blows around in the wind of Anbar if we don’t make ensure that our accomplishments are sustainable by the Anbaris themselves. 

We want to help.  We might see that  it will take only a couple thousand dollars to outfit that school.  We all might get frustrated that the Iraqi government just cannot seem to get its act together and do what needs to be done.   We are tempted just to do it – to do “good”.   When you feel that impulse, just say NO.   Activity is not the same as accomplishment and we should never measure our success by how much we managed to spend or what we have caused to be built but rather by how much we encouraged our local partners to do, spend and build themselves.  Sometimes doing nothing to alleviate  a particular problem is our correct response.

Sometimes things are going wrong not in spite of, but because of our best efforts.

With that caveat out of the way, I want to say that I think we are accomplishing our mission.  We are achieving sustainable progress and I am gratified that we are also helping the people of Western Anbar.  Local governments are increasingly taking the initiative and responsibility for their own affairs.  The Iraqi authorities are poised to spend part of the mountain of cash they have acquired because of higher oil prices right here in Anbar.  At least we hope that is in the works.   The help we are giving vocational training is supplying the types of workers Anbari firms will need to secure a more free-market future and micro-finance loans are helping build those firms.  Courthouses are open and judges are hearing cases.  During this conference, we will hear about all those things and more. 

When you compare the situation in Iraq today to what it was couple of years ago, even a few months ago, the progress is truly astonishing.  Back then, some really smart people declared that we had been defeated in Al Anbar, that Iraq was a lost cause. Some even thought that we should just give up and go home.  Well, some other people just don’t give up so easily.  Today we are talking here about securing the success Coalition Forces and our Iraqi allies have achieved.  They did and are doing their part.  We – all of us – now have our roles to play going forward.  We can help achieve something exceedingly rare in history.   We can tell our grandchildren how we had the chance to help a country at the brink of disaster turn away from chaos and make the future better than the past.  

In the telling and retelling, we will exaggerate our own roles in this enterprise.  If we have succeeded in achieving our goals of a reasonably democratic market oriented & stable Iraq, posterity will be indulgent.

Thank you all for coming.  I look forward to learning from all of you.

Above is Jane Stillwater, a self described hippie grandmother from Berkeley.   She dislikes President Bush with a passion, but she loves the Marines.   She is one of the few journalists we have seen out here in Western Anbar, so I have to give her credit for seeking the truth about Iraq. That is her above in Hit.  You can see her blog at this link.

Below is a town council meeting in Hit.