Trails Around a Featureless Camp in a Featureless Desert

The dates of these posts are out of order.  I didn’t have Internet.  I could not take pictures of the buildings in camp or the running trails, but imagine a parking lot paved with crushed stone surrounding a maintenance facility and you got it.

Below is the hall outside my quarters.  This is how it looks day or night. I am on the second floor.

Yesterday and today I ran around the trail that follows the perimeter of the camp. It is five kilometers long.  (Although I doubt the veracity of that claim since it is obviously taking me too long to run around it). The surface is good for running and the terrain is phenomenally flat. It is not a hard run, but it is boring. You can only tell how far you have come by looking at your watch. I suppose after a while I will notice differences.  Maybe not, since I am running at night. Actually not night, but it gets dark at around 5pm. The trail is well lit, so there is no unusual falling hazard or chance of smacking into stationary objects. 

The full moon was out today, which made the run more pleasant, as far as it is possible. It gets warm during the day, but is nice and cool in the evening. The weather has been great. If the place was more interesting, it would be really nice. Compared with this place, however, Al Asad is paradise. Well, maybe not paradise but much nicer.  

Below is my room.

My discomfort is exacerbated by the jailhouse conditions of the cans. We are in a warehouse stacked on top of each other, literally. There is no connection to the outside and the window has the perpetual dull glow of artificial light. You cannot tell the nighttime from the day w/o looking at your watch. I like to be able to see the natural light.  I saw a Sci-Fi movie with Sean Connery. I think it was called “Outland” about a mining colony on Io, one of the moons of Jupiter. It is that kind of place.

Oh Sleep, it is a gentle thing; beloved from pole to pole

I have given up sleeping, or put more correctly I don’t sleep much during the nights.   I still have not adjusted to the jet lag and the conditions.   I wake up during the night, impatient for the dawn.   Today I got up at yesterday I got up at 530 and went running.  Today I got up at 330 and wrote on the computer.   Actually, I went to the MWR where they have a wireless internet connection, which is why I can post this entry. 

This sleeping problem is unusual for me.   I am usually more adaptive.   But this is a weird place.  If I had to mention one problem it would be the air conditioning.   You cannot turn off the vent.  Cold air blows in unremittingly and there is a steady draft, more like a 5 mph wind, throughout the can.

Anyway, I have been sitting here for a couple of hours.  I have written some entries which I will post when I hitch them up with pictures.  

Later today I have to make a presentation.   Despite my fatigue, I am confident that it will go well. I am ready to go.   I feel tired all the time but not acutely so.  I can easily make it the next couple of days.   I will be glad to be out of here.  

I should leave the Middle East to those more in tune with its idiosyncracies.  I don’t understand its politics or habits.  Who builds a ski slope in one of the world’s hottest places?   It is unnatural in the most basic sense.  The pleasure palaces are like Las Vegas on steroids.  Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.  There is a problem of unearned wealth all over, but there is so much more of it around here.  It is the classic rent seeking behavior.   The locals provide little of the management and almost none of the labor or technology that produces the resource.     

Wealth w/o effort is a moral hazard and the easy flow of oil explains lots of the troubles.   This is the only region of the world w/o any real democracies.   If the rulers can live off revenue pumped out of the sand through the efforts of others, they don’t have to consult the people who might actually produce something.   The wealth can  be used to placate or out flank opposition.  Even more perniciously, such easy wealth destroys initiative and honest work.   Why should anybody work for chump change when he can jump on the oil bandwagon of at least live off its droppings?

There will be momentary pinch now that the price of oil is falling off from it unsustainable highs, but we will not learn the lesson.   The low prices drive out alternative fuels and bankrupt innovators.  Then the price of oil goes up again.   We need a carbon tax and now is the time to put it on.   We have to take the pain in the short term for a better future.  

Well these are the extent of my predawn thoughts after the days and nights of poor sleep.  I believe I will wander over to the chow hall.  It opens soon for breakfast.  My IPOD has just begun playing “Hotel California.”  Fitting.

Flying to Doha

I am at home today getting ready to go to Doha tonight, where I will meet colleagues to work on our strategy paper.  I am unenthusiastic about the journey.    It is something like 16 hours on Qatar Airlines in an economy class middle seat.  It is officially a United flight, so I hoped that I could use my United miles to upgrade, but this is evidently not possible with a code share like this.

I don’t have many complaints about flying and I think that all that gnashing of teeth about passengers’ bills of rights is exaggerated.   Travel sucks by its very nature.  You just have to get used to it.  Most of us (me too) are unwilling to pay extra for business class seats, so we get stuck in the cattle car class.    In other words, we get what we pay for.    It will be an ordeal. 

Many people think diplomats travel first class. No, our government is not that generous. We fly economy unless we upgrade ourselves.  They used to have a rule that we could fly business class if we had to be on the plane for more than fourteen hours.  No more, except if you can claim that you have to go to work immediately on landing or you can assert a credible disability.   Being too tall to fit comfortably in the seats doesn’t qualify.   

I sat next to a fat guy on my last trip home.  He wanted to put up the arm rest so that he could flow into my seat too.   He complained about the injustice of air travel when I told him no.    Being fat is increasingly being classified as a disability.   A Canadian court has ruled that airlines have to give a free extra seat to the will-power challenged among us.   By that logic, they should have to give more leg room to anybody over 5’10” tall, maybe extra luggage space to those who just have to bring along more stuff than they can use.   Maybe a passenger bill of rights would handle all these permutations and produce a kind of Malthusian solution.  If we do it completely, it will drive the price of flying so high that almost nobody will be able to afford to fly anyway and it will be pleasant for the survivors. 

I don’t think Doha will be much fun.  We have to stay in the camp the whole time.   They say that there is a running trail around the camp that is around 3.5 miles.  The nice thing re Al Asad was that the base was big.   There was not much variety, but it spread over twenty-two square mile and I had more space than I could run over.   3.5 miles is actually enough for most of my runs these days, but the idea that there is no more bothers me.  I like to know I could go farther if the spirit moved me.   I can take the limited horizons for two weeks.    I hear that they have a pool in Doha.   It is like a holiday camp.   That is the way I am taking it.   The weather should be nice this time of year. 

Selling Them the Rope

It reminds me of that old horror movie where the babysitter calls the cops to ask for help with a stalker who has been making threatening calls.   When they manage to trace the call, however, the find out that it is coming from inside her house. 

My search for the root problem of America’s image abroad has brought me right back home. That some of the most scurrilous attacks on our values & institutions come from within our country will come as no surprise to anybody who has seen a Michael Moore movie.   Yesterday night I was watching “American Dad” with the boys.   It is simply horrible.   This episode could have been funded by Al Qaida.   It portrayed American officials as torturers who liked to do it so much that they would sponsor a telethon to raise funds to continue it.   Unfortunately, this is not an anomaly.  Much of the Sunday night lineup is like that.   “American Dad” is preceded by “Family Guy.”  This one has some very funny vignettes, which are the Trojan horses that get the propaganda through the gates, but the overall theme is that the average American “family man” is a selfish, stupid, pervert who thinks only in terms of his own short term gain, short term because he is too dumb to plan much beyond tomorrow anyway. 

People accuse me of being an old crank when I complain about these things.   Some even imply that I am against free speech.  This is unfair.  Free speech is useful because it allows us all to judge the good from the bad.   Free speech means that people have the right to voice their opinions, whether they are reasonable or stupid.  But not all speech is equal.   We all have the duty to assess the contentions of others.   I would not censor those things I mention above, but I do think intelligent people have to point out how stupid, misguided and harmful they are.   It is not just good fun and it is not just satire.   These are consistently hateful and misguided attacks.  Just because we have to tolerate it doesn’t mean we have to like it or support it.

People usually claim more sophistication than they manifest.  Most don’t pay attention to the news and few people in the world could pass even a simple multiple choice test about American foreign policy.  American cultural products, however, sell well overseas.   We export a lot of good quality material.   But it comes with a heavy leavening of the sort of crap that coats our television sets so many nights and what do you think gets the higher ratings?   It is not hard to understand why a lot of people worldwide would dislike us if their media images of ordinary Americans come from “American Dad,” “Desperate Housewives” & reruns of “Jerry Springer.”   We Americans presumably have real world comparisons to counteract the media images, yet we still harbor prejudices about Americans from different places.  What about people who don’t know Americans in person?

Perception is reality.

Imagine if you watched a television series made by the cultural elite of another country that consistently portrayed their leaders as horribly corrupt, bigoted & vicious, and their ordinary people as stupid, shallow and dishonest.  Imagine if all the false and pejorative stereotypes you had heard were confirmed by their own media … repeatedly.    What would you think?   Defenders of this trash say that you would be really impressed that our hypothetical foreign friends were so open that they welcomed this kind of attack on themselves.   Would you really?  Does holding the tolerant high ground make you immune from real world ridicule?  Or does it just invite offense as the next insult tops the previous?  If your spouse ridiculed you and pointed out all your faults in front of your friends every time you went out, would that improve the reputation of your family?  The best you could get is someone who calls down a plague on both of you. 

It is like the story of the drunk who smashes into his wife’s car parked in the driveway and comforts himself with the idea that the other car is as wrecked as his. 

A good test of fairness, BTW, is substitution.   Watch one of these “satires” and substitute for the American any other nationality, ethnic group or affiliation.   How long would an Arab “Family Guy” stay on the air?  Is it still funny or is it just plain mean and bigoted?

Hard Times & Rich A-Holes

The economy is in unmistakable decline and it is astonishing how fast perceptions change.   Although my investments have tanked like everybody else’s, I have to caveat that my personal exposure to the downturn is not immediately significant and  while I suppose the value of my forests has declined, land endures and gives you a feeling of secure permanence not possible with paper assets.

Below is Pentagon Mall in Arlington.  Nice food court.  Still crowded.

I have some prejudices that I should also state up front.  I don’t like ostentatious displays of wealth and I observe that the culture has coarsened in the last few decades.   People are no longer self conscious about bragging about their wealth.   There are all sorts of programs on TV where rich celebrities brazenly show off their riches.   Nearer to home, the Northern Virginia countryside is studded with giant houses with expensive cars parked outside.   I am glad that affluence has spread so widely in America, but the spread of opulence is not so welcome.     It is even worse that much of this opulence was bought on credit.   I don’t know if we are at the end of the long economic boom that started in 1982, but after twenty-five years of good times (with tame downturns), we have forgotten what hard times look like.   The long run of good times has also decoupled wealth from work in a pernicious way. 

Rock stars, and their equivalents in the corporate, sports or entertainment world, make such piles of money so quickly that it degrades the hard work of ordinary people.   Add to this a capricious legal system that can reward someone for his own stupid behavior or bankrupt a prudent person and you have a really noxious cultural stew.   Rock stars, big bosses, big payout plaintiffs and millionaire sport stars are rare.   But they cast a long shadow and their influence is enhanced by a media that loves them while exposing all their flaws and weaknesses. 

It bothers me that entertainers can do drugs and treat the people around then like crap and still be admired for their ability to bring in the money.  Need I mention executives in private jets going to ask Washington for a hand?  I find it offensive that sports stars can literally be criminals and still rake in the big bucks.   (Green Bay’s great halfback, Paul Hornung, was suspended at the height of his career for betting relatively small sums on football games.  He also, BTW, earlier had to do his service in the army and play football while on weekend passes.)

I don’t object to people having money in general.  In fact, I support it. Making money is a laudable goal.  If you are earning money you are probably producing something other people need or want.  But those who earn the big bucks should be circumspect in what they do with it and how they behave in public. 

The irony of today’s conspicuous consumption is that it is to some extent based on the egalitarian idea that we are all the same.   Greater wealth, whether that comes from money, talent or just good luck, SHOULD bring greater responsibility.  But if we are all the same, those who just happen to have more have no special responsibilities. There was never a golden age where the rich & famous behaved in a really responsible way, but it has indeed got worse.    

Below – Rowing practice outside GWU in Washington.

I recently read a biography of Dean Acheson.   He traveled in some rich and privileged circles and the book gave me some insights.   In those days, students at the best universities lived in relative simplicity.    The established rich to some extent hid their wealth and played down their consumption.   There was a general acceptance that young people should experience some sort of Spartan-like upbringing.    The good man taught his son that he was special and had a special responsibility.   If this was often hypocritical, at least is was the acknowledged norm.

Hypocrisy, after all, is the tribute vice pays to virtue.   In our lifetimes we have elevated hypocrisy and judging to the level of major taboos.   We want people to be genuine and be themselves.  The problem is that when people only aspire to be themselves, they set their sights way too low.   We should all want to be better than we are and this means that we are not as good today as we hope we will be tomorrow.  It also means that some people are not as good as others. We can make distinctions.  We must make distinctions. We need to be more judgmental because our non-judgmental ethic has let the a-holes off the hook.  It has allowed crass low-lives to assert that they are just as good – better – than most others because they have cash.  Tom Arnold said of himself and his then wife the attractive Rosanne Barr, ‘‘We’re America’s worst nightmare: white trash with money!”  YES!  That is a nightmare and it has become much more widespread.  Let’s wake up from this nightmare. I expect that when you get more than others you also take on more obligation to act responsibly.  If that is an elitist idea, I embrace the concept. 

Since the onset of the current economic crisis, we have heard more talk about thrift and prudence.   It is no longer considered clever to have borrowed and deployed money you couldn’t pay back.   I hope that people will soon come to look down on and judge negatively huge displays of wealth and so devalue them.  In hard times people should be ashamed to parade their good fortune.  There are better things to do with your money than buy bling and attend gatherings of the rich, famous and beautiful.  I have no illusions that such things will go away, but I would be content to have it less in our faces. 

PTSD, Iraq & the Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Most of the time when the shooting starts, State Department evacuates Embassies and gets its people out of harm’s way.  We were sent to Iraq in the opposite direction with the risks well-known and acknowledged.   This represents a big change that State is still trying to understand.   They are trying to find out more about how such an assignment affects the people involved, so the high stress out briefing I went to today at FSI has a double purpose: to help us reintegrate and to get some ideas on what happened to us over there.

They told us that employees often have more trouble coming home than they did going over.   Life is the war zone is exciting or at least active.   You feel like you are doing something special and that you are a big deal.  At home, you are just an ordinary guy.   You must also reintegrate the people you love.  Things have changed.    Experts identify a whole range of situations ranging from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to more mild forms of just feeling a little strange.    PTSD, BTW, is not rare even among people who have not been to war zones.  We were told that 5% of men and 10% of women NOT deployed in overtly traumatic conditions will still suffer from the symptoms. 

I was lucky.  I experienced few traumatic events and I think I have reintegrated fairly well.   I do feel some of the things they mention in the course.   I have a little trouble focusing and I lose track of the things I am doing more than I remember doing before.    But I think that is also the simple result of the ordinary changes I am going through.   I am still waiting for some of my clearances; I still don’t have my remote access and I am still not settled into my new job.  More precisely, I am kind of between jobs since I have the CENTCOM assessment taking most of my time when I am trying to check into my new job.   I will spend the next couple of weeks in Doha, which postpones the real start of my new job.   Anyway, whenever compare the first weeks of a new job to the last weeks of a past successful one, it will inevitably seem more confused and chaotic. Presumably you get better at your job so the end is better organized than the start.

An experience like Iraq reveals (if not builds) character. We all agreed that some people should not be allowed to come to Iraq and that our eagerness to get willing people at the posts lets some of them through the filter.   Some people are not emotionally robust enough for the stress and many are not physically fit enough.  You don’t have to be Arnold Swartzenegger, but you do have to wear body armor, carry your own gear, and jump out of helicopters & into MRAPS.  You also have to be able to take the temperatures and the pounding that comes from ordinary life and travel in Iraq.

The experts say that people returning from posts such as Iraq are sometimes crabbier, less engaged and they think life is less colorful or interesting.   This passes in normal cases.   I also don’t think this is a problem for me (although maybe I don’t notice my crabbiness.)    My time in Iraq made me appreciate more the things I had here in America.  I had a network of support in the family and I did a few things right, w/o even planning it.   My forestry interest tied me to something long term and rooted (literally) and the blogging was an excellent outlet.   The experts say that telling your story helps calm and put your mind straight.  I guess it is like the old man in the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” who periodically feels the need to share (inflict) his experience with somebody else.

Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.

As a career FSO, I have come home several times.   I was happy to get out of Iraq.  I loved the job and worked with great people on an important job.  I regret leaving them and the sense of duty, but Iraq as a place holds no attraction for me.  Forget the war.  I like living trees and verdant hills.  I just don’t like barren deserts and I don’t like that extreme heat.  I felt no sadness leaving Iraq.  I really liked Norway and Poland and was sad to leave those places.  The hardest homecoming for me and the family was when we left Krakow.   That was an important job too AND I felt at home in Poland.   Beyond that, I came back to a job (in the ops center) that I didn’t like and beyond all those things, the family had some adjustment issues at the same time.   Even I could tell that I was crabby, troubled and troublesome back then.  I do agree with the general proposition that coming back is often harder than going over, probably because you think it should just be a piece of cake.

He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn.

(Maybe those who read Coleridge don’t really need the course.  He seems to have figured it out and expressed it better.)

Beech Woods & Humid Forests

In Wisconsin, beech trees are native only within the fog distance of Lake Michigan, so you find them in Grant Park along the lake but not a couple miles inland.   They are common in the Middle Atlantic States and in Central Europe.  It is hard to tell the European beech from the American.  The European comes in more horticultural varieties, so if you see one at the nursery it is probably a European beech.

Beech trees are shade tolerant.  They show up only near the end of natural succession and you find them in old well-established sites with rich and well developed soils.    When you see lots of beech trees, you know that the place has not been disturbed very much for a long time.   I am very fond of the beech trees along the stream beds.    This is my hardwood legacy forest.  You can see from the picture below that the young trees are beech.  They are the ones with the brown leaves. This is a good time to see them.  They stand out, since they characteristically keep their dead leaves until pushed off by the new ones in spring.   

Nobody will cut this forest as long as I am alive.  Right now we have some big beech trees, along with oaks, red maples, tulip poplars & ash.  In a generation the beech will be more dominant.  The big tulip trees will start die out.  The little pines you see in the picture above are volunteers.  They need to grow in the sun and none of them will reach maturity. The oaks will not regenerate in the shady forest but they live for centuries and will be around for a long time yet.   Beech and oak are both mast producers and provide good wildlife food.   The understory already has a lot of holly.  More will fill in.  

I am not leaving this forest completely alone.  When this land was part of somebody’s farm, they high graded (i.e. took out the biggest trees and left the little ones).    This degraded the quality of the stock and there are some old but small trees that are just sucking up resources.   Other trees were damaged by ice storms past.   I am cutting out the runts and the damaged trees to make more room for the robust young ones.    A well managed forest just looks untouched.

Above is spring of this year.

Arbitrary Coherence

I am reading “Predictably Irrational” about how we often make decisions not based on rational criteria w/o knowing it.   I have been interested the effects of irrational choices and random chance in decision making for many years.  If you recognize your bias and sources of uncertainty, you can make better decisions.   The down side of recognizing these limitations is … recognizing these limitations.   Everybody likes to believe they are rational and responsible.  It is also very hard to come to grips with the uncertainly inherent in all decisions.   

Uncertainty is part of ALL decisions.   If everything is cut and dry certain, there is no need for a decision.   You can just go with an ordinary rule of thumb or habit.  I don’t really decide to put on my seatbelt or brush my teeth in the morning.  I just do it.   You don’t want to make complicated decisions about every little event.  It would drive you crazy. But the habits and routines that easy life also can be traps.

Theory in decision making is starting to catch up with what many persuaders and decision makers have known intuitively for years.   Take the marketing example when a store offers good-better-best in a product line.    Markets know that given three choices, most people are likely to choose the middle one unless they have a strong prior preference. Clever marketers have the highest margin on the middle one. But how does this work?

It has to do with setting an anchor.   All values are really arbitrary. What you pay for a product is what you and others are willing to pay.  There is no “real” value.   How do you know what to pay?  By comparison.   But that comparison doesn’t need to be rational.   When you go out to buy something, you often don’t know what it is “worth.”   If the merchant can fix a price of say $100 in your mind, when he offers $100-10 or $90 you think it is a good deal.   If you had been fixed on $80 it would be a bad deal.  That is why the three choices work.  Few people buy the cheap one and almost nobody buys the most expensive.  The comparison makes you think the middle one has the reasonable price.   We do that all the time with everything. We base our estimates on relative prices and we are arbitarily consistent among them. It is a good idea sometimes to ask yourself what it is you really want and make decisions based on them.  This is easier said than done.   Effective people do it better than the success-challenged, but nobody is as rational as he thinks.

A lot of life is habit and random chance.  But if you recognize what you cannot control, you can have better control over the other things. If you recognize the role of chance, you can arrange your affairs in to take advantage of the probabilities. They say luck is where preparation meets opportunity.   

I recently finished “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell.   He wrote “the Tipping Point,” which was a very good book and “Blink,” not so much.  I didn’t find much new in the book, but Gladwell puts it together well and tells good stories.     Gladwell, IMO, takes the analysis a bit too far.  It is true that there are more people who COULD do particular jobs than CAN do them.   This is the story of life.   More things always can happen than do happen.     No doubt the real winners have lots of advantages and luck.   Very often, however, you can find these only in retrospect.   There is dynamic where successful people both take advantage of opportunities and create them.     The other problem with outliers is general is the small numbers lead to deceptive conclusions.    It stands to reason the very few or the one at the very top required lots of talent, advantages and a string of extraordinarily good luck.   These guys are by their nature unrepresentative.    There is often no useful lesson to be learned. 

I read the biography of Eisenhower a while back.  He was a moderately successful officer, but expected to retire as a colonel at best.  Then the war came.   Eisenhower and many of his classmates rose to high levels in the army.  Had they been born five years later or five years earlier few of them would have been so successful and none of them would have reached the five star ranks.    You cannot really use that information and it has no predictive value.    Nobody could plan Eisenhower’s career.   It would be more useful to study the moderately successful over a longer period.   Those are the guys who would be in a position to jump ahead IF the opportunity came.

None of us is around long enough to get what we “deserve.”  In the FS, my guess is that if you had a career spanning 200 years, you would probably end up where you belong, as random chance variations might even out.  I think the variation tends to go mostly in one direction, however.   I know some ambassadors who could have been unsuccessful if not for a single lucky break that made other breaks possible, accreting small advantages until they became big ones.     On the other hand, there on people on whom lucky breaks are wasted. 

Gladwell says that success depends on practice (he says it requires around 10,000 hours) and talks about the lucky breaks that gave various top   performers the opportunity.   This is probably true, but not everybody is willing or able to put in those long hours.  Hard work matters too.

Stability Operations

I got stuck in back of an old fashioned at-grade crossing on the road to Quantico.  This is not something you see too much anymore.    I didn’t like the wait, but there is something cool about watching the freight train roll by.   I watched dozens of truck trailers go by loaded on flat cars, as well as the usual box cars and containers.   Rail is a more efficient way to move freight.   It saves energy and gets lots of trucks off the road.

I went down there again to take part in a stability workshop to help the next group of Marines prepare for their time in Anbar.   I told them what I could, but my Anbar is not the Anbar they will face.   There will also be a lot fewer Marines.  We have been drawing down over the past year and will continue to do this, so one of the big questions was what will happen when the Marines are gone or mostly gone.   I don’t know how much of my experience on the ePRT will transfer in this specific situation, but I shared what I could. 

We were successful over the past year.   I think the key to success was the close cooperation between the Marines and our ePRT members.   I couldn’t explain formal reasons for that.  I think a lot  of it was the serendipity of personalities that meshed well.   I also had the advantage of having an office across from the Colonel on the command deck.  We had plenty of opportunities to run into each other and talk informally.   We agreed that ePRT members must be full members of the team.  That meany going out with the Marines and among the Iraqis.   We are not fighters and we should not take unnecessary chances, but it is our job too to be out there, not hunkered down behind the wire.   

We, Marines & ePRT members, also developed good relations with the Iraqis because we got there at the right time and I think we genuinely got to like at empathize with them.   Most at least.  I told the group that I don’t know how to make that happen, but some attitudes help.

Sometimes perception is reality.   When ePRT civilians were seen in talking to people in marketplaces or on the streets, it gave the Iraqis a feeling that things were getting safer.    Sometimes just being there is the accomplishment.   If you hang around long enough and behave well, people just get used to you.   There is no magic, just persistence.

Iraqis in general are not hostile to us, but it is a hard situation when foreign troops are hanging around your country.   We need to show respect for the Iraqis and demand respect from them.  Failure on either side of this equation is a mistake.   We have to recognize that Iraq was once better than it is today.  That was a long time ago, but people appreciate it if you recall it to put the current situation in context.  It also gives hope for the future.   Eye contact is very important.  A simple think like taking off your sun glasses goes a long way.    I shared these and other little insights.   None of them is very profound, but taken together they form a decent tool set.

Partnership is the key: partnership of the ePRT with the Marines and partnership with the Iraqis.  Nobody accomplishes anything alone.    If you work with others in this kind of way, you usually don’t get exactly what you planned, but what you get is usually better.    Anyway, that’s the gist.

Follow this link for more details.

One more thing, somebody used an analogy of taking Lipitor to describe a quick fix solution, i.e. somebody takes Lipitor for cholesterol w/o addressing the root causes.   I disagree with the analogy.  I started taking Lipitor a few years ago and it did a good job of lowering my cholesterol.   I think of it as a ham sandwich surcharge.  For pennies a day, I get to eat many of those foods I like.  I see it as a sustainable solution.     I requested a different analogy.