Tag: foreign service

My father was a veteran of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and always spoke well of the experience.   I enjoyed the fruits of the CCC labors, as trees they planted came to maturity just in time for me and I have always had a special fondness for the whole idea of the CCC.  As a long time Federal worker, I am acutely aware of the limits of government, but the CCC was a big program that mostly worked. When I had my initial talk with our Ag guy Dennis, I told him that I wanted us to make a CCC style contribution, albeit a smaller one, to soil, water, flora & fauna of Iraq.  He has come up with a big project. 

Our area of operations is dusty desert with a ribbon of green along the Euphrates River.  We do, however, have a beautiful lake, called Lake Qadisiya, which I wrote about in an earlier post.  The waters of the lake provide for irrigation and produce hydroelectric power.  In this hot, dry climate, substantial amounts of the water are lost to evaporation.  The hot sun plays the dominant part, but dry winds have a significant supporting role.  A belt of trees planted perpendicular to the prevailing winds would, according to Dennis, reduce evaporation loss, trap blowing dust and generally ameliorate the local microclimate.  Date palms, being the most common tree around here, we thought of them.   The date palms have the added advantage of supplying marketable fruit in the short term, so they are the promise of the future and a blessing for today.

I was a little skeptical of the efficacy of such a scheme.  In the more moderate environments where most of us live, such things are less necessary or effective, so it is beyond my experience.  But Dennis has his PhD in Iraqi soils and I have to believe he knows what he is talking about.   Reid, our civil affairs person, confirmed it with a negative example.  He was assigned to Diyala Province during the 2003 Operation Iraqi Freedom.  He noticed the incongruous presence of what looked like rice paddy infrastructure in the desert and came to understand that there had indeed been rice there before the 1980s.   Extensive groves of date palms had protected and improved the micro climate, preventing dehydration and increasing local humidity enough to allow rice cultivation. During the Iraq-Iran war, Saddam, fearing that insurgents or Iranian agents could hide among the trees, destroyed the groves and consigned vast acreage to the desert.

This will be a big project, one we can begin but never hope to finish, a generational task like the work of the CCC.  We are talking lots of trees to do the whole job, more than we can reasonably achieve, but it is better to start now than to wait for the perfect opportunity that will never come.  In time perhaps what now seems so improbably will come to look inevitable.  It makes sense.Although once established, the trees will create the conditions for their own continued success, they will require irrigation to get them started, so it would be not enough to just get some guy to plant seedlings every two paces as you might be able to do in more benign environments.  The investment required to do this is well beyond our means, so we will be looking for partners.   The near term pay off in terms of the dates we hope will entice local cooperation.  It is easier to convince someone to do something by promising a cash crop in a few years than offering the satisfaction of having done something good for a future generation, but people are motivated by both and we will present a balance.

Maybe I should also include some windmills to tilt at.

Anything you have “too much of” is not a problem; it is an opportunity.  In Iraq, junk opportunities abound.  In an earlier post I talked about the strange cases of sophisticated jet fighter planes strewn randomly around the desert.   They are just some of the more unusual components of a very large junk pile that is Iraq.

Debris piles are nothing new here.  Until 200 years ago, people were only vaguely aware of the great civilizations of Mesopotamia.  French and British archeologist were much more interested in learning about them than the people nearby and it was not until they got here that anybody started to study the big mounds of dirt and rubble that formed the most prominent hills in an otherwise pancake flat landscape between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The ancient Mesopotamians built with mud brick. When structures were no longer worth repairing, they just smoothed them down and built on top, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Over time, town elevations increased. Each layer from a different time, so keeping track of precisely where particular artifacts were found makes a difference for the chronology. Before the 19^th century archeologists arrived, people plundered the mounds for treasure and building materials, but rarely paid attention to the context.  As a kid fascinated by ancient history, I was puzzled that anybody could be so dismissive of the past.  I am beginning to understand, if not accept that perspective.

Heaps of junk and garbage are everywhere.  Most is the detritus of recent civilization.  Modern people produce more rubbish than their ancestors did and the materials are different.  Mud bricks made of dirt, pottery shards made of dirt and artifacts made of dirt are not that different from the dirt they are piled on.  In fact most people probably thought they were just dirt piles.  Nevertheless, trash of all kinds persists in the desert.  In humid climates, metal rusts; wood rots and minerals dissolve.  Above all, growing vegetation soon covers any garbage pile, integrating it into the living environment or at least obscuring the view. Not here.  In Anbar integration processes anticipate the advent of the next ice age to do their work and bide their time until then.

Trash heaps are so ubiquitous that you stop paying attention, even if digging in them might reveal history.  I suppose the native population of the region just became inured to them, as I have.  The first nearly complete Soviet MiG lying in the desert is interesting.  After a while they become about as remarkable as a derelict car on blocks outside a trailer park.   The types of junk below the fighter jet in the pecking order of interest fall even faster.

We need to make a distinction between junk, trash, garbage and scrap, BTW.  Scrap can be very valuable, especially with prices rising as the worldwide demand for metal climbs.  The Iraqis may not be sitting on a gold mine, but their scrap heaps are mines for all sorts of other metals.  The Iraqi government figured this out and outlawed the export of scrap.  They want to keep it here. Rebuilding Iraq will require lots of girders and rebar.

Some of the best scrap is the wreckage of war.  Good metal goes into weapons systems.  Wreckage of war is maybe not exactly right.  Saddam enriched Soviet, French and Chinese arms merchants buying war materials that he never properly used.  Everybody would have been better off is Saddam had just brought scrap from the Soviets or the Chinese and dumped it directly w/o the intervening steps.  There is no American scrap in Saddam era scrap piles. 

The widely held misconception that U.S. firms armed Saddam is …a misconception.  In actual fact, the U.S. supplied only 0.47% of his vast arsenal.  That is ZERO point four seven and that is why there is no pre-2003 U.S. scrap.  But we are making up for it now.  Our big bases feature big junk yards, but the difference is that U.S. owned scrap can be exported, so these junk yards are going concerns.  Iraqi scrap stays here.  

Iraq lacks the capacity to reprocess its iron mountains.   This is an opportunity, not a problem.    I can only imagine how fast a mini-mill company like Nucor could turn that junk into useful building material, but if they built a modern factory in Iraq, what would they do when they had worked through the supply?  There is already an overcapacity of steel production worldwide.  Since Iraq has no significant iron ore deposits and these giant piles of scrap will not last very long if efficiently processed, perhaps it makes more sense to export the scrap and import the metal.  Somehow I doubt that good sense solution will be the one chosen.   Everybody wants to be in the steel business. Unfortunately not everybody can make money at it.

Above is a picture of part of my forest in Virginia, my 178 acres of private landowner contribution to the world’s forests.  The picture is from 2006.  the litte trees in the front are much bigger now.  They grow up so fast.

Today I had the usual meetings and paperwork, but mostly I caught up on my reading.  I found an interesting article on Iraq  but I promised myself not to think only about Iraq.  And a good news article about trees puzzled me.  According to the report, developing countries are leading that way in planting trees.  They evidently planted a billion trees last year.  UNEP spokesman Nick Nuttall speculates “… they more intimately understand the wider benefit of the forests from stabilising water supplies and soils up to their importance as natural pharmatives as well as the importance of trees in combatting global warming.” How nice and PC.  What was puzzling about this was that I remembered that Southern U.S. landowners plant more than a billion trees EVERY year and it does not make the news at all.  I found out that the U.S. produces around 1.6 billion seedlings a year – every year.

When you look at the big picture you have to wonder why something is so extraordinary in some places and routine in others. How best to make it routine worldwide?  The key but prosaic explanation is private property rights. In twelve southern states we routinely, every year, plant a billion trees and because somebody owns them. If the what the UNEP guy says about that intimiate understanding in developing countries is true, you have to wonder how they got in that treeless mess in the first place.

It is also one thing to plant the trees and quite anther to be ABLE to protect them. Big PR events and passionate speeches are great theater, but the best way to protect forest resources is through the protection of property rights. That is because when all the speeches are done, the party is over and the activists have moved on to the next cause, if you have property rights somebody still cares intensely and personally about each acre of trees. It is no coincidence that the worst cases of predatory logging occur on lands that are publicly or communally owned or where property rights are not well respected. It is a classic case of the tragedy of the commons coupled with the predatory mentality of transient firms, the cupidity of bureaucrats and the corruption of governments.

Property rights, protected by the rule of law, are crucial to the most kinds of progress. If you look at a list of the most pleasant and prosperous countries of the world, they vary in terms of types of governments, ideology, geography and culture. What they all share in common is that every pleasant and prosperous place protects property rights.

Strong property rights protect forests, human rights and other living things. I know this goes against some conventional TV-inspired wisdom, but it is clearly the case. That is not only the experience of the southern pine states, but also of the U.S. in general as well as Europe, Australia and other countries with strong property rights protection.

Lest somebody make the extrapolation, protecting property rights to private forest land does NOT preclude the establishment of public parks or preserves. In fact, it enhances it. You can logically set aside special places that need to be protected only if don’t declare everything special. When everything is special, nothing is special and any talk or protection is just talk and no more. Many corrupt countries have on their statute books beautiful and comprehensive laws to protect natural resources, but you cannot find these rules manifest anywhere on the ground.

In fact, I have noticed that in general the very best sounding laws are in places where the rule of law is not protected. They can enact what they want, because they know they will not have to carry it out.So protect forest property rights and enforce the rule of law and you will have forests now and forever. It will not have the same PR impact, but it will ensure forests for today and tomorrow.
As for the new tree planters, keep it up. Make it a routine so that it doesn’t even get noticed by the media. A word of advice to the UNEP and the governments involved in this noble endeavor. If you want those seedlings to grow to be healthy mature trees, make sure you protect the property rights under them.

I got my TV connected a few days ago and for the first time in almost two months started watching the news again.  There was a lot of debate about whether or not the surge was working.  While my experience in Iraq is deeper than it is broad, I have observed a few things since I got here that apply to the wider Iraq debate.  I will not reveal anything sensitive and what I am writing here is my personal opinion.  Those of you who know me can discount/compensate for my biases.  All others are on their own.

From my point of view, the surge in Iraq has worked.  My team and I can go places and do things were impossible just months ago.  The Marines who were here before tell me about the unbelievable changes and I can see for myself people rebuilding and putting their lives back together.  We are well received by Iraqis.  Kids come out of their houses to wave at the convoys.  They clearly are not afraid of us.  It is abundantly evident that this place that has just experienced war and war is a terrible thing to experience.  The bad guys can still murder and do damage, but they are increasingly marginalized.  Iraq will not be as peaceful as Switzerland any time soon, but there is a chance now.  It might be the best chance this place has had since the time of Hamurabi to establish a reasonably stable country where rule of law prevails.

Achieving this, however, required and continues to require strong measures.  Security must come before development and security is established and maintained by force.  In an functioning society, force is less obvious and required less frequently, but even Mayberry has a sheriff and a jail.

Here in Anbar the Marines cooperated with local leaders to establish security.  Insurgents and AQI ruled in most of this place last year.  They could not be persuaded to leave.  They needed to be pushed out.  Not all insurgents were terrorists, and some – most – can be reconciled with civilized societies, as I wrote in a previous post.  Others are just bad.  No earthly redemption is possible.   They need to be removed and the sooner the better because their influence is like a pathogen.  Many people who would be good and honest people are corrupted by contact with them.  You are saving lives by removing them from the population.  I know this is very unPC.  It is also true.  Even in our established societies, we have the Jeffrey Dahlmers and the Ted Bundys.  When the institutions of society break down it gets worse.

What works to establish security is persistence.  The Marines patrol.  Most of the time when they patrol nothing happens.  But it is a numbers game.  Sometimes they find things and their presence disrupts the bad guys and makes them nervous.  In addition, As the Iraqi people see the Marines in routine roles they get accustomed to them and more cooperative.

Most insurgents or terrorists are not fanatics who want to die.  In fact, they are often a little on the lazy side.  Many do it for the money or the excitement.  When success is easy, lots of people want to get involved.  When it gets harder or dangerous, they stay home and find better things to do.   That is why a simple strategy like an earth berm is a useful counter insurgency measure.  Obviously, they could just climb over the berm, but they usually don’t because it exposes them to detection and they are just too lazy to hump their equipment over the top.

The Marines have done their part.   It is now becoming the task of others.  Our PRT is part of that “diplomatic surge”.   We can help but it is ultimately up to the Iraqis to finish this job. Iraq is potentially a prosperous country.   I cannot predict the future, but it seems to me that Iraq can become a reasonably democratic and stable place, if we put in the effort.  This is not a pleasant place, but I would be unhappy if I got pulled out before I had the chance to try to finish my job.

Hunks, Monks, Chunks & Drunks

They told us before we came to Iraq that we would end up becoming one of those things above.   The first two are easy here in Al Asad, the third not so much and the last one probably not at all. There are lots of gyms around here and Marines take full advantage of them, so pretty much everybody qualifies as a hunk by civilians standards. They have a 1000lb club (which means lifting more than 1000lbs in a combination of bench press, dead lift and squat).  It is a big club. 

 I don’t know about monks.  Life is austere but the similarity ends there.  Becoming a chunk is possible because of the availability of free, high calorie food, but the Marine culture and the time in the field eating unappetizing MREs militate against it.  Turning into a drunk is practically impossible, since you cannot easily get alcohol and anybody under the influence would stand out.  

It is getting cold around here at night and in the early morning.  Today the prediction is a low of 38.  That is not so cold, but none of the cans have indoor plumbing.  You need to go to a separate building.  Going to and – especially – coming back from the showers will be a chilling experience that many may avoid.   So I expect there may develop a fifth category: skunks.

Iraqi Weather

Speaking of cool, Iraq is not a tropical country.  In summer it is hot (120 degrees is common), but here in the western desert it gets cool during other seasons.  In the last month, the weather has been perfect, around 70 in the afternoon to around 50 at night, but I hear it will be cold soon at night, although usually warming up in the afternoon.  I am ready. I got my coat from Cabalas in the mail a few days ago.

I had an interesting meteorological experience on thanksgiving.  I was on my way to run outside Camp Ripper when I saw a strange dark cloud coming my way.   It was dust.  I decided not to run and instead hunkered down (and got my camera).  The dust did not blow in the wind.  It infiltrated like fog.   It just got darker, colder and harder to breath.  It stung my eyes, but not that much.  The strangest thing was that there were cold raindrops in the dust.  The whole thing had kind of a sinister feeling.  I always assumed that rain would wash the dust out of the air, but evidently not.  Then it passed and it was clear again.

“The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits over the harbor and the city on silent haunches and then moves on.”  What Carl Sandburg said about fog goes for dust, but dust is a meaner, dirtier cat.

Phases of the Moon

I never paid much attention to the phases of the moon but I do now because it matters.  We have no street lights here at Al Asad and it gets darker than an average modern urban American thinks possible.  The walk from the chow hall or the office to my can is very difficult on a moonless night; when the moon is full, as it is today, it is amazingly well lit.

The picture shows part of a dog pack that patrols the hills near Haditha. There were about a dozen of them, but most went behind the ridge before I got my camera out.  It is not related to my story below.  I needed to put in a picture. I did not have any other use for this one and I wanted to pose a wild dog question that I have been thinking about.  Feral dogs all over the world seem to have cury tails and are often a kind of tan-yellow color.  Wolves and foxes do not have curvy tails, nor do most domestic dogs.  I wonder why it is that feral dogs do.  Anybody know anything about that?

As I looked out the window where the local council was going to meet, I noticed an old guy in a fine suit walking slowly across the bridge.  I thought how he looked out of place.  I figured he was a city council member.  As he approached the guards, I got a better look.  He was a sophisticated looking guy, tall with strong features and very well dressed.  He looked like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. with a full mustache.  I noticed his shinny black shoes and impeccable dark suit.   It is so dusty here; how did he keep his shoes & clothes so clean.

He was not a city council member and he was not coming for the meeting.   It turns out he was ostensibly the legal owner of the building where we were meeting.  He was trying to file a claim for rent and ultimate restitution, but he had been unable to complete the paperwork w/o a recent picture of his property and he has been unable to get a recent picture because of security.   He waited until he saw the Marine patrol come by and then he walked from his nearby home in hopes that he could get a hearing and a picture.  It worked.  His nice suit and demeanor got in him past and we can get the pictures.

As I looked around the room, it clicked.  This place had been a restaurant, probably a nice one.  Broken bulbs gloomily festooned the now defunct garden that was now used as a big urinal.  The storage room was the kitchen; we were meeting in the main dinning room. The shattered windows overlooked a beautiful bend in the Euphrates and a little park, with a defunct soccer field.   I had seen all these things but not connected them. 

This poor old guy was the once and & perhaps future owner of a fine restaurant and garden on some prime real estate.  He was polite and spoke English.  Fixing the place up looked like a lot of work, but there did not seem to be structural damage.  In fact, I could not figure out how the place got so busted up in the first place.   It was not battle damage, probably vandalism and looting.

It was poignant watching him furtively look around, no doubt recalling happier times, maybe dreading the work he would need to do to get the place repaired, maybe looking forward to it.  He had been a prosperous man and with any luck he would be again. 

Remember in those 1960s TV SciFi shows & how they always featured a post-apocalyptic world that is not really so much destroyed as just devoid of people and busted up?   I found a place where they can do remakes of those classics.

The Al Qaim train depot sits in the middle of a flat desert with tracks stretching to infinity in both directions. The building was new when it was abandoned because of the war; in fact I don’t think it was completed.  Now it is quiet and empty, the vast cavernous inside space ruled by pigeons that spook when you come in, the sound of their wings echoing off empty tile walls.

I kept on waiting for an alien to step out from behind a pillar and cue the Outer Limits control voice:   “There is nothing wrong with your television set.   Do not attempt to adjust the picture.  We are controlling transmission…”  None showed up; all we heard were pigeons and the wind.

BTW – toward evening, I ran a little on the dirt road along the tracks that leads to the depot. The pigeons were sleeping, but I could hear the wild dogs howling in the distance.  It gets dark fast around here.  It was still very light when I started and almost dark 20 minutes later.  I cut my run short because I hoped to avoid getting shot or torn apart by wild dogs.  Neither of these things was a strong possibility, but these are the things you think about when it gets dark in a place like this.   Besides, breaking a leg on the dark rough trail was a danger, so why take chances? This place really has all the needful things for a whole SciFi series.

The depot is structurally intact.  It looks like what damage it suffered is superficial vandalism and neglect. It seems to me, since there is no town nearby that the whole place is vastly over engineered for its probable use, but maybe it was built with future growth in mind. When they built Dulles Airport, it was ridiculed for being in the middle of nowhere; today it is in the middle of a thriving business district.  Some things take time to catch up.  

The railroad was built to serve the local state-owned enterprises. There is a cement factory and a phosphate plant within distant sight of the depot (with a lot of desert in between).  Farther down the tracks was/is a rail repair yard, currently occupied by the Marines.  The rail line was supposed to move heavy materials produced at the plants, such as phosphate and cement to other parts of Iraq and markets in the Gulf and the Med.  The passenger depot would bring in workers from other parts of Iraq and presumably take them back home when they could no longer tolerate life in the desert.  

It was not a bad plan as far as central planning goes.  Locating the phosphate and cement plants near sources of bulky raw materials made sense.  Of course they were managed in the typical socialist way.  That, coupled with local proclivities for flexible accounting methods, meant both facilities soon became massive boondoggles. With decent management and planning, however, this complex probably could make a profit and  contribute something useful to Iraq’s future.  The cement is good quality and there is a large unmet demand.  (Producing cement, BTW, is energy intensive and releases prodigious amounts of CO2.  You literally bake CO2 out of the rocks at high temperatures.  Cement is not an eco-friendly building material, but there is not much wood around here.  Maybe they should import eco-friendly southern pine.)  I have to learn a little more about the phosphate plant before I have an opinion on it.  I hear that it will not make as good an investment, so keep your checkbooks in your pockets for the time being. 

It is a common misconception that every working factory is worth saving.  Often the expense of rehab and various legacy costs associated with previous management give them zero or even negative value in comparison with starting from scratch in a green field (or in this case a brown heap of dirt).  Sometimes the scrap value exceeds the working value, but who knows?  Such decisions are beyond my pay grade.  It might work out just fine.  Maybe the train depot on at the edge of forever will not be forever empty.