One of the Marines saw a desert horned viper in the bathroom – the bathroom I use. He came out of the stall and there it was. Nasty looking thing. He said that it reared up. I did some research and they say that this kind of snake is shy. I am glad of that. They are also not very poisonous. I am glad of that too, but I am a little concerned about the “not very” part.
I understand that they are good for catching rats, but I am not happy to have such things around. I am afraid of snakes that can bite and I am not particularly fond even of those that don’t.
I have only seen snakes twice since I have been here. I am not eager to see them again. Next time I walk to the bathroom in the middle of the night in my flip-flops, I will be thinking about what I don’t see and how they might be watching me. Jeez. I am narrow-minded when it comes to snakes. I don’t like anything that can give me a venomous bite.
Yesterday the sky was blood red. I never saw anything like it. I thought of taking a picture, but I figured the camera couldn’t capture it. I would just look like I shot a picture through some kind of red filter. The red dust comes all the way from Syria. A person who knew enough about dust could probably tell you exactly where every storm started.
I cleaned out my can yesterday. In anticipation of my imminent departure from Iraq, I swept out the whole place and mopped the floor with Pine Sol. The red dust storm negated all that effort. You can shut the door and all the windows and you still cannot keep it out. This would have bothered me a couple of months ago, but no more. I have gotten used to it and now that I will not have to experience it much longer, the various textures and types of dust merely amuse me.
A few days ago we had a real wrath of God storm. Columns of dust blew toward us, accompanied by a fantastic show of lighting bolts that walked across the sky in all directions. When the storm arrived it rained mud for around ten minutes. Then it passed and rumbled away in the other direction.
The day before yesterday was a non-dusty nice day. I got up early in the morning and went out to run about 0600. It is already around 80 degrees at that hour. It feels like a warm October afternoon in Virginia; you just have to time shift. As I walked to the starting point and looked out over the low dirt bluffs, I appreciated the beauty of the sun and shadows on the different shades of khaki. I was seeing beauty in the dirt that I had not seen before.
O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware.
That, of course, is from the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” for no defensible reason, I once made the effort to memorize it. These lines have some application to the subject at hand. The Mariner for the first time can see beauty even of the ghastly water snakes.
Looking is a physical process, but seeing is an act of mental interpretation. I don’t think that I could see these colors and contrasts before. I still think that this is an unpleasant place, but the brown desert of Al Anbar is not completely devoid of attractions and splendor of its own. I wonder if I might have been here long enough. I guess I have seen the elephant.
The picture below is not related to the article. The Marines let me play basketball with them. It was the majors and above v the captains and below. I was on the old guy team and we won. Evidently experience and guile beats youth and energy. Maybe we were just lucky. I was just happy not to get hurt.
A lot has changed in Western Anbar since I arrived here almost a year ago and as my assignment comes to an end, I can appreciate them.
The first big difference is the physical appearance. Last year much of this province looked like what it had recently been – a war zone. Shops and homes were boarded up, in ruins or flattened. People looked shocked and sullen. Anbar is still not up to what most of us would consider acceptable standards, but improvements are phenomenal and the change palpable.
Along the whole Western Euphrates River Valley (WERV) and into the desert oasis cities of Nukhayb and Rutbah markets are open; streets are busy; the shops are full of goods; things are happening. We used to use a “banana index” where we looked at produce in the shops as a proxy for goods being available. Bananas available that were not green or brown indicated a decent distribution network. Today that index is overtaken by events, since shops are full. We now are thinking of going over to a “gold standard” since we now see gold and jewels in shop windows and assume that the owners must feel safe enough from both insurgents and ordinary crooks to be so confident.
Security is increasingly taken for granted by many people and now they are moving on to other concerns, such as economy, traffic and building their lives.We have much more freedom of movement. I didn’t do my first market walk until January of this year. Now we walk in the Iraqi markets on almost every trip, talking to people and finding out about their hopes and problems.
A year ago there were serious fuel shortages. While problems remain (many resulting from government controls on prices and supplies), the refinery at K3 in Husaybah is up and running. This seemed like an impossible dream when I first saw the place a few months ago. K3 produces naphtha, kerosene, benzene and heavy fuel oil. It is still not up to 100% production, but it is way up from … nothing last year. The crude oil, BTW, arrives from Bayji by rail. This railroad was not working and was not secure just a few months ago. I remember flying over the rail/highway route in a Huey, with the narration being that it could work, but there were lots of challenges. Getting the rail system up and running is another great accomplishment of the past year. CF are vacating a big rail yard in Al Qaim within weeks. (This is a little sad for me, as. Camp Al Qaim was the nicest of the FOBs in our AO. It had a great chow hall.) This will essentially clear the lines all across Anbar.
The rail network in Anbar is essentially intact, although there was heavy looting of stations. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Much of the equipment was old and the opportunity to replace it with much improved and new computerized gear will pay dividends in the immediate future. There is nothing to stop heavy materials such as phosphate and cement from travelling by rail, and within a few years Iraq will certainly take its place as a transportation keystone of the Middle East. We have also seen a reassertion of the pattern of centralized order in Iraq. When I arrived last year, I had more confidence in the ability of local authorities to get things done, and my perception of the society here was patterned more on my own previous experience than the experience of the Iraqis.
It is a common historical pattern. It happened on a bigger scale when the Roman Empire declined. As government order breaks down, localism comes to dominate. Last year, in the immediate wake of war, the people of Anbar had been localized. They were more dependent on nearby authorities and institutions such as family/tribe & religion that were simpler and closer. This looks like it was an ephemeral condition. As order returns, so does centralization.
We are seeing a reassertion of the top-down pattern, where the center controls the resources. Local authorities look to provincial authorities for resources and direction; provincial authorities look to Baghdad. Mayors are administrators w/o an independent power base. Everybody grumbles and does this somewhat grudgingly, but the system seems to be coming to life and working reasonably well, especially when pumped up by the steroid of vast oil wealth. This is not a completely positive development, IMO. I personally don’t like such concentrations of governmental power, but we have to recognize that Iraq will not be a bottom-up society, like the U.S. It is not what most Iraqis are accustomed to, not what they expect and it is not what they want. An ePRT like mine working at the sub-provincial level increasingly runs up against the power of higher-up Iraqi authorities. These are the guys who make the decisions and these are the guys we need to influence. I wonder if our time is not almost done, at least in our current incarnation. We did a good job and maybe this is it.
I am ambivalent about this. After all, it is a bureaucratic imperative to perpetuate itself. But a greater imperative is to know when your work is done and not hang around like a fart in a phone booth. When the western hero is finished, he rides off into the sunset; he doesn’t rent a bungalow in town and make himself a nuisance. In order to influence the Iraqi society and institutions, our organizations will need to mirror theirs, at least in an operational sense. We need to act at the nodes of power, principally at the provincial and national level, so our ePRT will need to be integrated with the PRT in Ramadi, maybe absorbed, and through them to our colleagues in Baghdad. This is coming. I work directly for the Office of Provincial Affairs (OPA) in the Embassy. My successor will work for the Team Leader of the Anbar PRT in Ramadi.
I just don’t know and I don’t think I will figure it out in my last week here. I will recommend changes in form and give my opinions. It won’t be my decision, but I cannot envision this team still being here next year in anything like its current form.
As it says in the Book of the Tao, “Withdraw, your work once done, into obscurity; this is the way of Heaven.”
As I get ready to leave post, I have some thoughts & lessons learned on my job here. Please indulge me.
PRTs and ePRTs were/are experiments. There was no script to run my ePRT. Its initial form was not well suited to our environment. We learned by trying new things, eliminating the failures and building on success. I could call it a plan, but it was more of a process. The first rendition of the ePRT was a version of the main Anbar PRT. We had experts on banking, budget etc. We were centered in Al Asad and in theory we would make forays into the hinterland. This didn’t work. Our ePRT is different. We had a lot more physical area to cover and a lot less need for specialists. A full-time banking expert is not so useful when you have only a few banks and none of them are really independent. We could and did bring in experts to consult on special projects, but we didn’t need experts; we needed presence.
Our ePRT is unique in its extreme decentralization. We adapted to an area of operations the size of South Carolina and its arduous & uncertain travel conditions by developing a system of embedded team members, who stayed with the battalion task forces in each of our five sub-districts. We effectively implemented this only in the last few months, as staff changes made possible in practice what we sketched out in theory late last year. The system got our team closer to the U.S. forces doing counterinsurgency and to our Anbari friend. You really cannot maintain a long distance relationship. We have come to resemble a robust network, which is exactly what is needed for thisplace and time. This is not a novus ordo secclorum and we certainly did not invent this organization type, but I am proud of the role my team and I played in adapting it for Western Anbar. I had something like this in mind when I started but I admit that I am a little surprised how well my team and our associates took up the vision and how quickly it became OUR shared vision.
I believe much of our success followed from this initial-state decision, which gave us closeness to our “customers” and ability to respond quickly and appropriately. All our towns now have functioning councils and mayors who have received training from us in governance, finance etc. Markets are open. Infrastructure improving. We have helped establish links with provincial authorities to help get Iraqi resources flowing to solve Iraqi problems. In fact, the thing that makes me happiest is how we have been able to reduce USG money as we have informed, persuaded and cajoled our Iraqi partners to use their own resources as supplement or in place of ours. This is the responsible and sustainable solution.(I will add a caveat. I think our particular network organization will need to adapt soon to change in Iraqi society and what I expect will be its return to a more centralized structure. As team leaders, we need to be more catalysts for the work of others than directors. I see what we have here today as transition and I don’t think my successor will just be able to pick up and carry on. He will need to adapt to the rapidly changing Iraqi reality, as I did, and our solutions will not be the same.)
My team members are known, respected and trusted by our CF counterparts and the Anbaris. I am familiar to many the Iraqis all around our AO and I believe my own optimistic diplomacy has encourage them. My team and I got out among the people and in this stressed environment just seeing and being seen in “ordinary activities” made a big difference. I was personally flattered at a recent engagement with a police chief. One of my RCT colleagues was about to introduce me, when the chief said “everybody knows him.” I had indeed met the chief on a couple of occasions, but we didn’t know each other well. What I think he meant is that people know of me, of us, at the ePRT. We stand out – literally – on the streets when we do market walks. I usually take off my helmet and my bald head stands around five inches higher than the average Anbari. We are seen and talked about when we buy kabobs from the local vendors, or when we play politician by meeting and greeting everybody along the way. Being there is important.
Western Anbar will not be like Switzerland anytime soon, but we did a good job in a tough environment. (I can tell you about the relative comfort level of almost every kind of military vehicle or camp type.) We helped establish prosperity and the potential for democracy in a place where neither of those things has grown much before. This is the biggest thing I have ever participated in doing, the most challenging and the most rewarding. I leave Iraq still glad that I volunteered and content with the part my team played.
This is FDR and King Saud in the Great Bitter Lake, Egypt, on 14 February 1945. Our relations with the Middle East go back to the birth of our republic, but our modern history with the region stems from relationships like this.
—–
There was no operational link between Saddam Hussein and the Al Qaeda attacks on 9/11. We have been fighting the organization – Al Qaeda – that planned and carried out the 9/11 attacks IN Iraq for the last five years. Iraq and Afghanistan are both part of the struggle against terrorism and success in one enhances success in the other. The surge could not have succeeded w/o factors such as the Sunni Awakening, but w/o the U.S. forces the brave Iraqis who stood up to Al Qaeda would have been beheaded and their families murdered. Causality is usually complex with mutually reinforcing forces at work. I don’t understand why it seems so hard for many otherwise competent journalists and analysts to hold all these ideas in their heads at the same time? Too often they are trying to find the one – clean – cause. This is just childish.
In Iraq our forces and those of our Iraqi allies are killing foreign fighters and terrorists trained, ordered and paid for by Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda a couple years back declared Iraq (specifically Anbar) the central front in their war against the West. They came to fight us in Iraq hoping to take advantage of the opportunities available to establish their base in Anbar. They boldly bragged as late as 2006 that they had indeed accomplished their mission and that from their bases in Iraq their screaming fanatics would spread their evil influence around the region and to Europe and America. We kicked their asses in Al Anbar. Now they are cowering in desert holes or laying dead there. Had we not done that to them, they would have succeeded in their goal.
Al Qaeda is an international organization that seeks to extend its influence wherever it can. It has to be confronted where it is making its moves. We can seize the initiative and fight them where they are, but we cannot always choose the places where we must fight them.
It is like the old story re the drunk looking for his keys under the street light. When asked where he lost them, he points across the street. “Then why aren’t you looking over there?” the passerby asks. “Because the light is better here.” We had to fight Al Qaeda in Iraq because Al Qaeda came to Iraq to fight us and and given the particular conditions of geography THIS was the most urgent fight.
During WWII, Franklin Roosevelt chose put more resources first into our fight against the Nazis, even though the attack against the U.S. came from Japan. He did this because Germany was the more URGENT threat. American generals in East Asia and the Pacific complained that they were not getting the resources they needed. They rightly pointed out that they were not achieving the results they could if they had more men, ships and firepower. But Roosevelt and Marshall knew that while we would need to fight both wars, Germany came first.
The same goes for Iraq and Afghanistan. Both are important, but Iraq was more urgent. As our victory in Iraq makes resources available, we can shift resources. Of course, we all need to remember that you cannot just flood resources at a problem. There is a carrying capacity for any place. It is not necessarily true that 1000 men can accomplish ten times as much as 100 men. We have to have APPROPRIATE numbers and missions.
There is a good garden analogy. If you want to grow beautiful flowers, you probably need to apply fertilizer. At some point, however, there is enough fertilizer and after that there is too much. It won’t make the plants grow any faster than they have the capacity to grow and it may even be harmful or fatal.
That is another reason why you have to understand the connection between Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as other places.
I would also point out that the situation in Afghanistan would be worse if Al Qaeda had been able to concentrate its resources on Afghanistan from the start. All those foreign fighters who died in the Western Deserts of Iraq would have been dispatched to the mountains of Afghanistan. And if Al Qaeda had a secure base in Anbar, there would have been a lot more of them.
Iraq under Saddam was a sworn enemy of the U.S. Today we have many friends here and a good chance that Iraq will become a reaonably democratic and stable place. This is good.
——
Terrorism is like piracy. In fact, the two often overlap. It is interesting that our country’s first significant overseas intervention was against the Barbary Pirates, activities and ideology were remarkably similar to some of the enemies we face today. Terrorists and pirates can never be eliminated entirely, but they can be controlled with diligence and vigilance. When pirates or terrorists control states where they can establish bases and safe havens, their depredation cannot be stopped. When their nests are cleaned out, you can control them.
BTW – We Americans often forget that Stephen Decatur didn’t have the final word against the Barbary Pirates. It wasn’t until the 19th Century superpower – the British – punished them so severely that they curtailed (not gave up) their evil ways. A lot of other social and technological factors were also at work. It was that complex causality thing again. No matter. The world didn’t thank the Brits much at that time, just like we cannot expect the gratitude of the rest of world for the service are performing to make the world safer for good people and commerce … and freedom.
Last year I wrote a post, which got some attention, re FSOs volunteering to go to Iraq & Afghanistan. As it worked out, we got enough volunteers, but not until a couple of cone heads grabbed national attention by bloviating in a town hall meeting about how they didn’t want to be forced to serve in either Iraq or Afghanistan. I understand that only few people made most of the noise, but the media picked up on their caterwauling. It was embarrassing the competent FSOs, who are worldwide available.
(BTW – FSOs were needed as part of the diplomatic surge that went with the military one in early 2007. Next time somebody says that we cannot expect to win in Iraq by military means alone, remind that Einstein that we knew it already & did something about it back when they were still whining that the war was lost. I really hate it when we get those sanctimonious fools pontificating about this when they don’t know what they are talking about. Diplomats and development people came in the immediate wake of the military, but I digress.)
There will be no repeat of that this year, since the State Department has announced that it has already got enough volunteers to fill the Iraq posts. I hear that there were several people trying to get my job. I could speculate about the many and varied reasons for this happy result, but I think that the most probable explanation is the prosaic one that people just got used to the idea of these sorts of assignments and realized that they too were part of a normal FSO career.
You have to have some tolerance for dust & danger, but that is certainly not the whole story. My year in Iraq let me do more of the fun parts of diplomacy than I anticipated. I was afraid that we hunker down behind the wire most of the time and have little contact with the people and culture of Iraq. No way. We were out and about all the time, as you can see from my blog entries. I have almost daily substantive contact with Iraqis. In fact, I think we have more regular contact with local people than many colleagues at more traditional embassies. Beyond that, we get to do the full range of diplomacy, almost like the plenipotentiary days of old when diplomats could get involved in almost everything and got to make decisions on the ground
The only down side is that this is the first time in my career that I did not get the great training that I took for granted. The FS generally does a really good job of preparing us to go overseas. (They gave me nearly a full year of full time Polish language and culture training before sending me to Krakow for example.) Filling this post in Anbar, under the emergency conditions, they couldn’t do that. Too bad. My biggest regret was that I didn’t have the full range of regional, cultural or language expertise, but my years of diplomatic experience made a big difference even w/o those things. State Department guys like me can make a real contribution in these situations.
State can learn some lessons from our experience. We may need to broaden our skill sets. I found my forestry experience and my vicarious experience (when Chrissy was president) on the home-owners association at least as valuable as some of more traditional know-how. In some ways it is back to the future to a time of the less specialized diplomatic corps.
Anyway, I think Americans can be proud of their FS. My colleagues serve in hard and dangerous places all over the world and this year, as in years past, they have volunteered to fill the FS positions in Iraq.
I suffered from Red Sky, which prempted my trip for a bridge opening in Baghdadi, so I was just thinking about and remembering times past and people gone. It can be a little melancholy, but remembering family gatherings also brings along many good memories and some interesting insights. At my family gatherings, we always had lots of beer. I don’t suppose that comes as much of a surprise in a German-Polish Milwaukee family.
Drinking Beer is a tradition in my family. I have been drinking beer since just a little before it was legal for me to do that. (BTW – in those days Schlitz was the leading beer. It soon went downhill as they fooled around with the brewing process. Now Schlitz is owned by Pabst and they are bringing back the old Schlitz formula.) As I travelled around, I learned to appreciate different sorts of beer. The Germans have a superb Beer culture, but the Belgians have a wider variety of beer and the Czechs are the world’s most dedicated beer lovers. I even learned to like English beer served at room temperature, which, BTW, is not warm.
Beer connoisseurs generally have little love of American beer. Paradoxically, American beers are among the world’s top sellers. In fact, this paradox is easily explained and doing so help s explain the general paradox of American culture, which is simultaneously coveted and reviled.
Major American beer brands developed in a large market with lots of diversity, choices and competition. Like other producers in such a market, beer makers had to appeal to a variety of tastes. Beer drinking is usually a shared-social event. The beer consumed must appeal to everybody in the group. It is a kind of consensus system that leads toward a lowest common denominator. The beer that everyone accepts will tend to be preferred over one that a couple people love but others cannot stomach. The more diverse the group in question, the less extreme the choices are likely to be. Five guys with similar tastes might agree on a very dark bitter beer; a hundred people from diverse backgrounds will not.
For example, most people find Budweiser (the King of Beers from St Louis) inoffensive, although few love it. Some people love Budweiser (from the Czech city of Budvar), but most people find it a little heavy and “skunky”. Beer lovers might object, but most casual beer drinkers prefer American Budweiser, which is even making inroads into the European beer market.
America is good at producing products with mass appeal, which annoys those who consider their own tastes better than the ordinary people’s. This means that many intellectuals and artists disparage the U.S. and its consumer culture, even as they live off its largess.
Adding insult to the injury they perceive, as the global mass market develops, the world is becoming more like America. This does not mean that people are copying America in all or most cases. It just means that the large mass market that helped shape American tastes and habits is now acting on people worldwide. In the beer world, for example, we see the ascendancy of Corona, which follows the same pattern as innocuous American mass brews.
BTW – when Corona executives took their beer to be analyzed by a chemist, he told them that their horse had diabetes.
Beer connoisseurs and lovers of distinction in all fields are encouraged by the counter trend, ironically made possible by globalization and new technologies made possible by the mass markets. It used to be called mass customization. In a very large and rich market, especially with the help of computer technologies, it is possible to assemble market worthy groups for all sorts of things. Maybe a million people would like to drink some dark and heavy beer, but if they are spread across the whole U.S. they were so thin on the ground that nobody could afford to cater to them under the old paradigm. Now there is more choice, as the marginal costs decline for producing variety and marketing it widely.
We have passed through the mass undifferentiated market to a mass customization, with more choice and more variety. The cooler of even local beer outlets now has a dizzying variety of brews. The days when it could be technically accurate to say “When you’re out of Schlitz, you’re out of beer” are over. The scary regimented socialism of the 1960s Sci-Fi never developed.
I am not sure we need all that choice, but that is not my choice to make. That is the way its going to be for beer and everything else.
We made an office call to the IP chief in Hadithah, and were fortunate to also meet the IP chief from Baghdadi, who was visiting his colleague. This is the third IP office I have visited recently. In all cases, the facilities were clean and well ordered and the individual IP officers in uniform, neat and professional looking.
Although they both chiefs maintained that they would need the Marines to help secure Anbar for a long time, it is clear that the IP in Western Anbar have become much more confident and competent. They are developing leads, doing investigations and catching bad guys mostly on their own with significant success. The chief told us that we should feel completely safe in Hadithah and that secure conditions stretched generally from Al Qaim in the far west to Hit in the eastern part of the province. They were less sanguine about Hit, Ramadi and Fallujah. .
They voiced the perennial complaint of many local officials anywhere in the world: they felt neglected by out-of-touch higher-up leaders and thought they could do a much better job if provided sufficient resources and allowed to do their jobs as they saw fit. They had some specific complaints, ones that we hear all over. The most persistent was that higher authorities did not provide them with enough fuel. According to what they told us, they get enough fuel each month for only a couple days of serious patrolling. They are also having trouble finding parts for their Chevy or Ford pickup trucks. What passes for roads in Anbar is tough on vehicles. Truth be told, however, we have noticed that the young police officers driving these trucks are sometimes very enthusiastic about driving and fearless of bumps, ruts and rocks.
No matter the challenges, however, security has clearly improved to the point that most people no longer have to think about security all the time. In Maslow’s Hierarchy, people need to feel secure before they can progress to other pursuits, such as building their lives and their businesses. They do and they are.
After meeting with the troops and giving out some coins, General Petraeus flew off to his next appointment. We went into the city of Husaybah for a market walk. The Mayor wanted to go along. I am not sure if he adds value or subtracts. The mayor is apparently popular. He spoke easily with his constituents and they spoke to him about their problems and hopes. While I enjoyed watching a good Iraqi politician in action, I tried to get away a bit and talk to citizens outside the glow of the leading local politician.
Husaybah is obviously doing okay. In addition to good produce in the shops, we saw lots of small appliances, clothing, rugs and even gold. They said the much of the gold is 21-24 carat, which makes the jewelry more expensive and, IMO, less attractive because it is more of an orange color rather than the shiny gold you get with more alloyed metal. This quality of gold is evidently the “gold standard” in the Arab world. Of course, not all of it was of the first quality; however, so much gold displayed in the windows indicates both a feeling of prosperity and security.
We are a couple of days into Ramadan, which affected what we saw in the marketplace. We were there about an hour before sundown and it was clear that merchants were preparing for a rush of customers who would show up when the sun dipped below the horizon. I bought some pickles and an assortment of baklava, of course to eat later and not in the street during Ramadan. The baklava cost 3500 dinar for a really big assortment of high quality product. (I personally don’t like the stuff. It is way too sweet and sticky, but plenty of our colleagues were happy to have it at chow when we got back to Camp Gannon II. It is a good break from Pop-Tarts). The pickles (made of assorted vegetables) cost 1500 dinar for a kilo. I do like those things and they were high quality.
I couldn’t find any kabobs that were ready to eat. As I wrote above, merchants were busy cooking things up and preparing for the post-sundown rush and many were just beginning to fire up their grills. LtCol McCarthy helped with some of the grilling, as you can see above. The grill, BTW, is wood fired. The flames you see are from the fresh wood. After it dies down to coals, they move it into the kabob cooking zone.
Above is a roofed market where they sold a variety of products. It reminded me of markets I had seen in Istanbul. Inside it was already a little too chaotic for me; I can imagine how it must be when the people crowd in after sundown. In this market too, you could feel the anticipation among the merchants. Among other things, they were selling spices, but – unfortunately – I didn’t find any pistachios or dried apricots, which is what I was really looking for. I don’t know how to judge this market. If I compare it to Istanbul, it is very much less. However, Husaybah is a much smaller and less important city. Maybe they do not have those sorts of things in general. It seems to have all the things that the local people could need.
Below – traffic is becoming a problem on the narrow streets. As you can see in the background, they have ATMs, but they seem to work only during working hours.
They predicted thundershowers in the afternoon. While I didn’t believe it would actually rain this time of the year (and it didn’t), it was a good idea to set off early in the morning. It took us nine hours to drive from Al Asad to Al Qaim, although some of that resulted from a problem we had with a tire and the slower speed we had to maintain because of the hot weather. It is much nicer in the morning anyway. The MRAP air conditioner can keep the vehicle reasonably cool until around 1400. We set off at 0615.
Our first stop out of Camp Gannon II was a new agricultural area. This desolate land will be opened up by new wells and a power line paid for with CERP funds. Our Ag-Advisor, Dennis Neffendorf, examined the soil and water and pronounced both superb, but that is not the only consideration.
According to all I can find out, the land here is clearly demarcated – i.e. ownership is clearly documented and widely accepted. This area evidently belongs to the Salmoni tribe and individual tribe members have their own allotments.
BTW – We understand that tribal politics is still very important and tribal identity very strong. When we help one tribe, others want their share.
Dennis tells me that last time he was at this location a couple of months ago it was mostly undeveloped area. Now we find that some houses have been started and ownership has been marked with neat stone walls. Planting season is late September to October. In these plots, they will grow wheat, other grains and potatoes. Dennis says that they can get 25 tons of potatoes per acre (although acre is not a measurement they use), which is comparable to a good yield in the U.S. A very large variety of fruits, vegetables and grains can be easily produced on this ground. This land is immensely productive when it is watered. The soil has excellent drainage, a plus for irrigation. It does not retain excess water and is not subject to excessive salinity or waterlogging. In any case, the water this far up the river is not yet heavily laden with salts and minerals.
As we crossed the Euphrates into Ramanna, we saw what the land mentioned above may look like in a couple of years. Everything is green and intense production is possible. Crops include wheat, sunflowers, potatoes, dates, pomegranates and citrus. This soil and climate (it is a big cooler here than in most other parts of Iraq) can grow almost anything except tropic plants such as bananas or mangos.
Look at the dates hanging from that tree in the middle. They look like five-pound sacks.
They grow a lot of fodder crops, especially alfalfa to feed to livestock. We saw some healthy looking Holstein cows and a lot of goats and sheep. The locals claim that the quality of their sheep is superior to all others in the area. We would expect them to say that, but that opinion is evidently shared by many others. There is significant export demand for sheep from the Al Qaim region.
We had to make an unexpected stop when one of our MRAPs damaged and overhead electric wire. I think that the locals are actually pleased when something like that happens, since we pay to repair the damage and usually make it better by elevating the wire so that it won’t happen again. I took this serendipitous opportunity to look around this green and pleasant area. It was still only around 0730, so it was pleasantly cool. The air had a living farm smell and the country roads were busy with tractors, trucks and pedestrians. This prime and unique farm land is as densely settled as an American suburb. I would consider it a bit crowded. It is astonishing to think that they can grow enough crops to support families and even have enough to sell, but that is true.
Kids smiled and waved at us, but we also got some disagreeable stares. This is unusual in my experience. One of the Marines told me that this area had recently been heavily insurgent, that not everybody around here was as favorably disposed towards Americans as we might like and that the relative absence of young men of military age was not mere coincidence.
Since we were running ahead of potential bad weather and we had to make up the time lost by our mishap with the wire, we didn’t have time to look as thoroughly at the farmland as we intended. We stopped at a field Dennis had visited a couple months ago. At that time, he said that it was covered with wheat stubble. Now it was cleared. Evidently they let the goats at it, as evidenced by the gratuitous fertilizer spread liberally on the dirt, and they had harvested straw.
The bones of the land and the irrigation system were easy to see. They use flood irrigation and fields are divided up into squares around ten yards square. You can tell the soil is fertile just by looking at it. It has abundant organic material and seems to be alluvial and/or loess, which makes it easy to work and provides good drainage.
Below is Dennis talking about farming
Below is a brick making operation. These are concrete. We saw many others making brick from clay. They employ hundreds of people.
After a brief look around, we headed off for Camp Tripoli, which is under construction and almost finished. Tripoli has a wonderful view of the river and of the verdant farmland along the banks. Otherwise, the camp has little to recommend it at this time. There is lots of moon dust.
At Tripoli, we had a chance meeting with a Mr. Raghibassi, who is an electrician. He said that he had met me on two previous occasions, but that they were big events and I probably didn’t remember him. He was right, but I think that I obfuscated enough to spare his pride. I should have remembered him because he had some very interesting things to say about electricity and power generation in general. I have his email. I will be in contact with him re and write more later.
We had an uneventful trip back to Al Asad. It didn’t rain, but a very interesting dust formation did blow in right after chow.
