Tag: history

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With Malice Toward None & Charity Toward All

Deserts Bloom, Not

It rained in western Anbar, creating a unique sort of mud that is sticky, slippery and viscous all at the same time, but I have been waiting for more than a week and still I see no sign that the desert around here is going to bloom, as deserts do in some other parts of the world.   I figure all the seeds were dry roasted over the summer.  But some seeds we planted are growing and I am happy to report some success, which I would like to include in some of my posts.  We are involved in hundreds of projects.  I can include only a few examples.

Books Instead of Bombs

Our ePRT expertise and funds expedited the opening of a library in Haqlaniyah, near Haditha.  The local community provided the building and much of labor to get this up and running.  It is a project they wanted and a project they worked on themselves, so I believe it will be a sustainable success.  It has internet access and we are helping them buy 6000 books as a start.  Currently, it is a general purpose library, but we expect that it will evolve into a library serving mainly local school kids. 

The picture at the top is from the library opening.

Real Estate Booms

An unexpected (to me) success has been mapping and planning software one of our team members got free from the National Geospatial-intelligence Agency.  We have a slightly dumbed down version, not detailed enough to be a security threat, but good enough for the purposes intended.  The software and training on how to use it is getting an enthusiastic reception from local cities.  The software features GPS grid coordinates and graphic overlays of details such as district boundaries.  The ePRT further facilitated the process with QRF grants for two desktop PCs each to Haditha, Haqlaniyah and Barwanah to run the software, as well as Theodolite laser survey equipment. 

Urban planning and surveying is particularly important to these cities at this time, because population is rapidly growing as refugees return to these recently war torn towns and people from other areas move in seeking relatively lower land and cost of living in a more secure area.

Rising property values is a sign of success. People feel secure enough about the future to build a house and raise a family.  Iraq is probably one of the few countries not to be caught in the real estate crunch and I bet most of the loans are subprime.  

War Widows

My ePRT colleague LtCol Linda Holloway has been doing good in her own special way with war widows.  Linda is doing more good than she knows.  You can read about her at this link.

I have more stories like those above to tell, and I will be doing it in coming weeks.  They are part of a much bigger picture.

With Malice Toward None …

I think we should take inspiration from President Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, when our country was on the verge of ending our greatest conflict and looking to end a time of great hatred. 

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

This is not the existential conflict Lincoln faced, and I prefer not to be melodramatic, but I will because I think the point needs making.  When you hear somebody who wants to pull us out before we have finished our jobs, think about that picture above.  We provide the security that makes this possible.  The Iraqis will be able to take care of it themselves soon, but not today.  They need us and they want us.  Think of those smiling kids involved in an insurgency or a civil war, strapping bombs to their chests instead of book bags to their backs.  And some of them would not stay only in Iraq to carry out their nefarious deeds.  We are here for their freedom … and ours.

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The Citadel, Mamluks & Mohammed Ali

This entry is one of the late ones I mentioned.  This is the last of my Egypt entries.

Saladin built the Citadel and it became the home of Egypt’s rulers for the next 800 years.  You can see why it was built here.  The high ground commands Cairo.  All medieval fortresses have a similar feel and this one reminded me of those I have seen around Europe.  Europeans learned the art of making stone fortifications from the Muslims during the Crusades, but Muslim inherited much of the knowledge from the Romans and stone walls are stone walls.  Anyway, the feeling was familiar, except for the minarets. 

Mohammed Ali, ruler of Egypt not the fighter, added a lot to the complex, including the big Mohammed Ali Mosque.  He was an Albanian born in what is now Greece who evidently never spoke any language well other than Albanian.  It gets even more complicated.  He took power from the Mamluks, slave soldiers seized from the Balkans and Caucuses, among other places.   The Turks ran one strange empire.  Mohammed Ali invited the leaders of the Mamluks to a feast at the Citadel and then murdered them on the way out.  That is a dish best served cold.

The Citadel features an interesting military museum with lots of weapons and uniforms.  The big drawback is that it was restored with the help of the North Koreans, so many of the exhibits are comically propagandistic.  Although the list of recent Egyptian war victories is short, they managed to imply some or at least a few heroic stands.  The N. Koreans made a panorama of the Yom Kippur War that looks like the D-Day landings.  They probably copied the D-Day pictures.  They have a painting of the British in Egypt in the 19th Century showing a couple of guys who look like they came out of a 1990s GQ.  I bet that is what the N. Koreans used as models.  How dumb is it to ask the N. Koreans to help with something like this, but despite the propaganda veneer and the mislabeling of some exhibits, it is worth seeing.  Alex especially liked it.  

The Mohammed Ali Mosque is an interesting place.  It is Turkish, not Egyptian style, and looks like those you might find in Istanbul.  Mohammed Ali is an interesting and important historical figure.  He rescued Egypt from chaos, helped modernize the place  in the 19th Century and ruled for many years, yet we hear very little about him in our history classes.  I think he suffers from being a non-European leader when most history was written in and about Europe.  He also doesn’t get much support from nationalists or the new PC crowd, which venerates non-western leaders, because of his peculiar origins.  He was essentially an imperialist and sort of an adventurer, who could capture the imaginations of Victorians but leaves modern readers cold.

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Heliopolis

I was interested in seeing Heliopolis because I am interested in planned communities from the “garden city” era in the early 20th Century an era and concept that produced some of the most livable cities.  Many of the places where people want to live today, but usually cannot afford – Beverly Hills, Grosse Point, Chestnut Hill & Coral Gables – started out as garden cities.  Unfortunately, the idea fell out of favor with planners and architects by mid-century and we were building some of the ugliest and most dysfunctional communities in human history.  The hideousness was worldwide.  It is hard to believe that someone created places like Nowa Huta, Cabrini Green or Brasilia on purpose.  I think we can learn from successes and failures.

Heliopolis is still relatively more livable than the rest of Cairo, but the population and squalor of the larger city have overwhelmed it.  In theory you can walk around, but the Cairo driving habits make that dangerous.  The inhabitants and authorities are making efforts to clean up some of the squalor, but a prerequisite for a livable city is control of traffic & overcrowding.  Unless you do that, it is like cleaning the birdcage w/o feeding the bird.

The most interesting book I read on this sort of topic was “A Pattern Language”.  The authors went around the world to compile the factors that people want in their cities.  Galleries or porches are one of the important factors they found.  Heliopolis has them. Another factor was access to shops.  These are also present.  I think if they got the traffic problem under control, this place would be just fine.   From the guidebook I thought this would be a more pleasant place.  I guess in a city with nearly 20 million people packed so tightly together, that is something you just do not get.

Some of the shopkeepers & taxi drivers we met alluded to this.  They complained that their upscale customers were disappearing, drawn out of Cairo to the controlled and agreeable resorts.  At first, people went to the resorts when they visited Egypt.  More and more, however, they are just going to resorts that happen to be in Egypt w/o regard to the rest of the country.  The Red Sea resorts are where they are because the sun shines every day not because they are in Egypt.  They could be anywhere in the world.

The take away lesson from this is that if you do not provide people with the pleasant amenities they want, they will find them someplace else, and the most influential people will leave first.

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A Long Way From Graceland

Memphis was the capital of Egypt for hundreds of years.  Today there is nothing but palms trees and a big monument area in the nearby desert.   This is Saqqara.  In some ways it is more interesting than the pyramids at Giza.   The first pyramids are here.  At first they are just a pile of rubble, but then you get a step pyramid (pyramid of Djoser) that is the precursor of the pyramids we all know.

We got to Saqqara early enough to avoid the crowds.  In fact, we were just about a half hour ahead of a bus caravan of Germans.  They were hot on our heels throughout the area.  Going in tour groups has some advantages.  You get some lecture by the guide and the numbers help dilute the effect of the ubiquitous pseudo guides who show you how to get into a monument or point you to the clearly marked path and then want money.

I do not believe that the average guide furnishes accurate information.  Just listening to those around me I heard all sorts of conflicting stories.  The guides’ main goal is to make the listeners happy so that he will get a bigger tip, so he tailors history to suite what he thinks the audiences wants to hear or a narrative that is easier to tell.  I am not sure it really matters very much anyway.  I cannot believe I just wrote that.  Those who know me know that I am very particular about historical accuracy, but in this case the person is going to remember only that he saw something very old.  The details will be buried in the sands of time, shrouded in the mist of antiquity or lost like a drunk’s car keys on a dark night, depending on the metaphor you like best.   This is tourism, not scholarship.

After Saqqara we went to the probable site of Memphis. Layers of mud had covered the place, but they still sometimes dig out interesting things.   There was a giant stature of Ramesses laying on the ground and they built a viewing area around it  Ramesses was evidently the vainest man in world history.  He wrote his name on everything, including the statues of previous pharaohs, but this was supposedly really him.   We got to Memphis a few minutes ahead of the Germans, but that is about all the time it took to see the place. 

Our driver took us to a carpet “museum”, i.e. a place where they show you an exhibit of carpet making for a minute and then try to sell you carpets for the next hour.  Drivers get a kickback and I don’t begrudge them this.  We went to a papyrus museum yesterday, same thing.  And they tried to draw us into a perfume factory.  We were immune to these enticements, however, having already been already fleeced at papyrus and perfume museums near the Egyptian museum.

For me the most interesting part of the day was a visit to the Coptic area.  Copts still make up about 10% of the population.  The churches are reminiscent of the Romans & Byzantines.  I like that history.  According to the narrative at the museums, Egypt has more relics of early Christianity than anyplace else because the climate preserves them. Besides, Egypt was a center of early Christianity.  It is interesting to see how Islam so obliterated Christianity in all but a few pockets in what really was its homeland in Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor and of course the Holy Land itself.   

We wanted to go to a nearby restaurant, but the driver told us that we would get food poisoning if we even walked in.  He took us to an authentic tourist buffet restaurant.  Those Germans who, had been just behind us all day, were now in front and already sitting at the restaurant.  We had the Egyptian meal auf deutsch. 

It was a busy day.  Back at the Marriott we went to the restaurant that called itself Egyptians and called ourselves content.  Then a strange thing happened.  It rained.  People are accustomed to water flowing in the river and are a little surprised to see it falling from the sky.  The waiters were all exercised & talking about it.   After living in Al Anbar for a couple of months, I understand.I will post pictures of all the things above when I get back to Al Asad.

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First Day in Cairo

Above is Alex at the Hotel with Cairo behind

Egyptians have been very friendly.  Some are just the trying to sell something, but others seemed genuine.  We are staying at the Marriott, where I stay whenever I can all around the world.  The Cairo Marriot is more opulent than most.  It sits in a beautiful garden area on an island in the Nile in a palace built by the Egyptian Khedive to host Euro-Royalty during the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869.  Among the guests were Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Josef and Empress Eugene, wife of Napoleon III.  I suppose they had really nice rooms.  Today the rooms are typical Marriott.  I like that.  I feel at home. 

Outside the Egyptian Museum

Alex & I walked to the Egyptian Museum, which is just across the river not far from the hotel.  It is full of artifacts, perhaps over full.  The place has a little bit the feel of a warehouse, with artifacts stacked in rows.  After you have seen one mummy, you have pretty much seen them all, kinda dry and depressing.  But I enjoyed seeing all those things I have seen pictured in history books.  We saw the King Tut stuff, for example.

The desert preserves things that would have long ago turned into dust or compost in any other environment.  I especially like the little wooden figures showing ordinary life and people working in brewing, baking and textiles.  I prefer these kinds of things to the death obsessed culture of the tombs.  How they lived in more interesting than how they died.   The gold and art from the tombs is spectacular, but it was a waste of for the people of the time to literally slave away their lives to fill monuments to the dead.  I don’t much like the jackal-headed gods either.  

Old & new

We tend to think of Egypt only in relation to those who built the pyramids but there is a lot more. Roman and Greek history was always my specialty and I am more interested in Egypt under the Greek Ptolemy and the Romans.  This period lasted more than 1000 years, but we often telescope history and move from the pharaohs to the caliphs, with only a brief glace at Anthony & Cleopatra, usually even forgetting that Cleo was a nice Greek girl descendents from one of Alexander the Great’s generals.   Cairo was built on a Roman city called Babylon.  It is a little ironic that I had to travel FROM the country of the original Babylon to see one.  The Christian Copts, descended from the original inhabitants, still live on the site.

This is one of the narrowest buildings I have seen.

Parts of Cairo are pleasant, but it is never peaceful and walking around is not much fun.  Drivers pay no attention to crosswalks or signals.  You have to run for you life to cross busy streets and there are lots of busy streets.  As Alex and I waited to run across one busy street, some guys on the other side actually mocked us for being timid.  The funniest thing I saw was a bus turn a corner too sharply and three guys literally fell out.  They landed on their feet and just chased the bus to get back on.  Cacophony is the word to describe roads.  Everybody feels it necessary to beep his horn just like a bored dog has to bark at everybody who passes.  We did a lot of walking nevertheless.  It seems like everybody wants to talk and invite you back to their shop for free tea. Of course, it is not really free.  If you stop more than a few seconds, taxis pull up and ask if you need a ride   I have to admire their energy, but I would prefer to have a little more peace.

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Thinking About Historical Parallels

I read all of Joseph Ellis’ books except his most recent one, “American Creation”, which I am reading now, so I enthusiastically read his applied history article in the Washington Post about what George Washington would do in modern situations, including Iraq. Since much of what I know about the founding fathers comes from him, I assume Ellis knows more about that subject than I do. But I think he misses the boat on Iraq, where I might have the edge from being closer to the situation.

Whenever I find that someone whose opinion I respect has an opinon that differs from mine, I reexamine my own opinion. I have been thinking about this one all day. I believe Ellis made a false analogy, framed the question in an inaccurate way, which led to an (IMO) inaccurate conclusion, and it occurs to me that this framing issue is at the root of much reasonable disagreement about our current situation in Iraq.

Ellis compares the situation in Iraq to the war of American independence and puts us in the role of the British. “The British army and navy could win all the major battles, and with a few exceptions they did; but they faced the intractable problem of trying to establish control over a vast continent whose population resented and resisted military occupation,” he says. This is true, but it does not apply closely to what we are doing in Iraq.First let me address technical objections. The British were in fact defeated in a major battle with the help of the French. While they could certainly have renewed the fight, it was Yorktown that ended it. There is no conceivable scenario where Iraqi insurgents could trap & defeat an American army in the Yorktown fashion. Beyond that, Iraq is not as vast as the American colonies, especially given distance shrinking technologies available today and most of Iraq is essentially uninhabited. You really are concerned only with narrow bands of territory near the rivers or at a few desert oases. The part of Iraq that is not like this – Kurdistan – is the place where we never faced significant local resistance, which leads me to the second and more important point: the nature of the enemy. The Iraqi people are not the enemy and most of them are not resisting coalition forces. The biggest challenge is not that they are loyal to an insurgency but rather that they are not committed to any side in the conflict. Most people – logically – simply prefer not to be involved at all. They will passively support anybody who seems to be able to provide security and remain sitting on the fence until they have a better idea which side will prevail. In “American Creation”, Ellis himself mentions the analogous situation in Pennsylvania when Washington’s army was freezing & starving in Valley Forge in the middle of one of the most productive agricultural areas in America, while the British were living fat and happy in neighboring Philadelphia easily buying supplies from local farmers who preferred pound sterling to Continental script. He admits the possibly that the British could have won, since most of the countryside had mixed loyalties. It is a less sweeping analogy and perhaps one that could better inform decision on Iraq. Ellis never compares Washington to the terrorists who operate in Iraq, but I feel it is important to address this other incredibly obvious difference. Insurgents in Iraq target civilian populations – ostensibly their own people – even when, especially when, they have no military significance. In other words, for the insurgents civilian deaths are a goal, not an unfortunate side effect or regrettable necessity. A legitimate resistance does not do this. Washington did nothing like this, specifically refusing to destroy American towns even when they were “Tory”. The British also, BTW, did not engage in such acts, Mel Gibson’s “The Patriot” not withstanding. Civilians are killed in any war, but only terrorists make them the unambiguous target. Although most Americans live fairly conformist lives, almost all 300 million of us like to think of ourselves as rebels and dissenters. We view our history as a struggle or of “us” rebels again “them” in the establishment. I will not be able to dispel that myth, but I would point out that 300 million people cannot all be rebels (who are they rebelling against?) and that our constitution was created in 1787 and remains in force today, making it the oldest such living document in the world. Our government is the second oldest continuously functioning government (second only to our British cousins). These are not outcomes you would naturally expect in a country of rebels.

The paradox, the genius of America, BTW, is our ability simultaneously to embrace both change and order. No matter what the reality, our popular culture is sympathetic to rebels and underdogs and some people falsely view insurgents as falling into the same categories we reserve for some of our most revered heroes, although maybe a little tarnished. In fact, insurgents in Iraq are not rebelling against an establishment or an occupation. Rather they are trying to use force, murder and intimidation to dominate and control the people around them. The true rebels, the ones seeking real change, are those brave enough to stand up to the insurgents. They are the ones we should support and they are the ones we are supporting. Ellis implies and I want to say explicitly that somebody like Washington would never be involved with the kind of insurgency we have in Iraq. More to the practical point, there is no insurgency in Iraq that is in any way comparable to Continental Army. For all its fractiousness, there was ONE American’s independence movement, not dozens of little competing ones as in Iraq. While Ellis is one of my favorite historians and I certainly agree with his premise that we can and should use history to inform today’s decisions, I do not believe he has correctly applied it in this particular case. I hope you all read the linked article and will read some of his other books, but in the case of Iraq & the American war of independence we are finding more contrasts than comparisons.

Sorry to diverge from the style of the blog.  I am a former history major and I just cannot resist writing the occasional essay.  I will return to true action writing tomorrow.   BTW – I saw “Live Free or Die Hard” today.  Like all such movies, it strains credulity, but is worth watching if you like action.  As you probably know, “Live Free or Die” is the New Hampshire motto.  I wanted to live up there just so I could have that on my license plate.