Author: admin

If you look at the picture, you will notice that I am sitting on air.  I had not planned to be in the picture or even to have a picture at all.  The guy with the scarf asked us to take his picture and then they said that I should be in it too.  I was significantly taller than the guys standing and thought that me standing next to them and the other guys sitting would look odd.   So I tried that expedient you see there to fit the space.  My solution was not optimal.   You could probably call the picture, “Hunchback of Haditha.”  All I need is some bells to ring and the Charles Loughton accent to say, “Why was I not made of stone like thee?”

A visit by the governor is spectacle to behold.  He holds court for local leaders, who ask for help with their various projects and often get positive answers.  The Governor seems generous, but generous politicians are threats to liberty & prosperity, not to mention property.   They can give away only other people’s money and when they do that they create dependency among both recipients and the ones who are footing the bill, creating a layer of bureaucracy and probably corruption in the bargain. Politicians love to give away money and people love to get it, but the analogy is like someone borrowing your watch so that he can tell you what time it is.   We suffer from an outdated paradigm of the “good” ruler, who is generous with his people.   In a democratic age, their largess earns both praise and votes.

The situation is even more dangerous & pernicious in a place that is cursed with the largely unearned wealth bestowed by hydrocarbons deposited underground during the age of dinosaurs.  Governments can easily commandeer this wealth and make themselves arbiters of distribution, buying loyalty and creating dependency almost with impunity.   I think we need to be careful in supporting the politics of personality.   A brighter future will involve the rule of law and even the rule of bureaucrats.  It will mean that politicians do not have need – or have – the personal power to grant such favors.

In a Haditha market piled high with fresh produce, consumer goods and groceries, shoppers and shopkeepers alike waved and smiled.  I talked with a few guys (pictured above.)  They told me that security in the macro sense had improved remarkably in the past year.  Their current complains were petty crimes and burglaries.    I asked a local IP major about what the merchants said.   He told us that he was aware of this situation and that it was being remedied.   The break ins, he said, were isolated events.   Patrols of both the IP and the Marines make it harder for criminals to commit crimes and local merchants have formed a neighborhood watch, which is scaring away the petty criminals.

The major went on that such neighborhood watches had been common before the war, but had fallen into disuse until recently.   He thought that the IP could handle security in the region w/o the Marines, if not now in the very near future.  But he allowed that he wanted the U.S. forces around to continue to help with rebuilding and reconstruction.

We also toured a hospital.   It was much like the ones I saw in Eastern Europe, but not as nice.  It was almost comical to go through the office area where it seemed everyone was smoking.  Someone quipped that this was the smoke-therapy ward.  A pharmacist gave us a list of drugs and materials he said he was lacking.  One of my colleagues with a medical background noticed that they did not have even very simple physical therapy equipment.  The general problem, however, is not lack of equipment but lack of trained personnel to use the equipment that exists or could be provided  Several people told the same story about Iraqis who go to other countries to get medical treatment only to find that many of the doctors are from Iraq.

What if you saw these guys driving down the street in your general direction? These are our allies.   They help protect both us and our Iraqi friends.   We should not judge only by appearances.

We should also be careful with words.   Mujahideen, for example, is a term that to most Muslims means a hero.  The guys in the picture are probably Mujahideen, fighting as they are against the terrorists, who sometimes call themselves Mujahideen.   The more apt word for the terrorists like Al Qaeda, however, is takfiri, which is the bigoted kind of guy who kills Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

All this is more than a semantic difference.   We should not falsely honor bad guys by calling them Mujahideen or Jihadis, nor should we dishonor these terms by associating them with terrorists.  That is what the bad guys want.  If a group of low life Americans took to calling themselves “true patriots” would we feel constrained to use that term ourselves when describing them?

Marines who were here a couple of years ago told that this was a truly unique experience.   We walked through the marketplace in Haditha.  The same place that had been a no go zone was now a thriving place, where we could just walk around and talk to shop keepers.  Some of the shop keepers complained about petty crimes and burglaries.  A local police commander claimed that the situation was under control.  In any case, nobody wanted to go back to the bad old days – not so long ago.

As I walked through the city, I noticed a lot of people with red hair.  I do not know what explains this anomaly or even if it is an anomaly at all.

BTW – “hadith” in Arabic describes oral traditions relating to the words and deeds of the Prophet.  The town of Haditha has a lot of traditions associated with it and most of what Americans associate with the place is probably bad.   It is not like that anymore.

The Mameluke sword is patterned after one given to Marine 1st Lt. Presley O’Bannon during the First Barbary War in 1804.  Maj General John Allen told the story.  We went to Fallujah to present Mameluke swords to the sheiks of leading western Anbar tribes. The Sheiks were delighted with the honor and genuinely appreciated the tradition and the story of how Arab tribes had fought alongside the U.S Marines on the shores of Tripoli in that distant time and hoped the relations would continue offering (in jest?) to help liberate Afghanistan with their new swords.

After recounting the great success the alliance of the Marines and the tribes has achieved in Al Anbar during the last year, one sheik commented that 2008 must be the year of the rule of law.  Rule of law must supersede tribal law, he said, and rule of law must keep Iraqi together as one nation.  I have heard these sorts of comments on many occasions.  The Sheiks of Anbar, with their martial outlook and tradition of defending Iraq, evidently consider themselves the custodians of Iraqi nationality.

A recounting of the heroism of the Al Anbar tribes followed.  They recalled the dark & bloody days of late 2005 when it was not unusual to find headless bodies laying by the road.   They talked about how the push against AQI had started in Al Qaim and then spread east.   That is one reason why Al Qaim is relatively farther along in peaceful development than places in the east of the province.  All the sheiks promised that they would never allow AQI to reestablish itself in Al Anbar.

The sheiks reflected the widespread belief among Anbari that their province has significant unexploited oil reserves.     They wondered when/if American firms would be in Anbar to tap this oil.  They said that they prefer American to European or others, since the U.S. is a reliable partner.

Above is Major General Gaskin, commander of CF in Al Anbar, with sheiks.

All the sheiks appreciate of their relationships with the U.S. and specifically with the Marines.  Local leaders observably feel personal affection for current group of Marines.  However the sheiks understand the transient nature of our assignments and are receptive to new friends.  Social meetings such as this one are one of the keys to success in winning friends and influencing people in western Al Anbar.  

The swords were a nice touch that united the warrior traditions of Al Anbar with those of the USMC.  

The Marines from RCT2 do not have mixed feelings about leaving Iraq.   They are going home after a job well done and they are happy to be done with Iraq, at least for the time being.  Marine units are self contained.  They take what they need with them and when they get back to North Carolina they will have most of the same duties, friendships & relationships.  It is not like the FS, where we move as individuals, but as an individual left behind by the group I am in a melancholy mood despite the joyful noise all around me.  My friends are leaving and I probably will never see them again.

We have been living close together.  We sleep in the same can cities, eat at the same chow hall & fly on the same helicopters.  You do not have any friends at home that you do not have at work and there is nobody you know that everybody else doesn’t also know.  Work merges with personal life and there is no genuine privacy.  While this has its costs, this situation creates a strong feeling of shared purpose and community, but as a civilian I am adjunct – someone in the community, not of it.  I usually do not feel this very acutley; today I do.

I hear stories about retired military guys hanging around bases.  They use to commissaries and PX not so much to save money as to maintain their affiliations.   The military is a very encompassing culture.  It is hard for anybody to just give it up.

The new guys from RCT5 seem great.  I met some of them at PRT training courses in Washington in September.  Everyone has been supportive and friendly.  I am sure I will have equally productive relationships with the new team.  The Marines design their system so that individual personalities will not affect the integrity of the unit and the mission, but people still matter.  I know I will make new friends among the new Marines.   I have already started, but I still can be sad that my old friends are leaving.

Even the oldest people around here cannot remember a winter so cold.  It snowed in Baghdad for the first time in 83 years, according to the records.  One of my contacts told me that it got down to -13 c in Al Qaim.  The picture above is from Rawah, near the Euphrates.   It never snows in Rawah … but it did, and some even stuck to the ground for a short while.

I am happy with this weather.  It gets fairly warm in the afternoon.  It could be a bit warmer, but not too much.   As running weather, it is nearly perfect and our cans have heaters.  I pity some of the poor Iraqis, who are unaccustomed to this kind of cold and whose houses are designed to withstand only heat.    I remember my freezing time in Mudaysis.

Maybe this cold winter will mean a cooler than normal summer.  I am not particularly excited about experiencing a colder winter, even if the icy blasts impress and chagrin the locals.  For me, this doesn’t seem very cold.  Our lows have been around 29 f degrees and it gets around 53 during the sunny times in the afternoons.  If you wear dark clothes, the sunlight feels like liquid warmth on your back & the sensation of radiant heat is very pleasant in the cold, dry air.   I would be content if this summer was the coldest in memory.  I am not counting on such luck, but I would appreciate even a modest reduction.  Of course, during the summer the highs and lows will be about the same as those I mentioned, only this time they will be in Celsius.