Picture below is from the Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma City.
I stay out of specific politics on this blog, but now that both candidates have come down to nuanced but similar policies of staying in Iraq as long (or as short) as the need exists, I feel a little freer to ask what the hell is wrong with the American media?
During the bad days in Iraq, not long ago, they were writing the American obituary. They had no trouble finding and quoting experts telling why we couldn’t win in this sort of environment. Now they cannot seem even to notice success. Isn’t that an extraordinary story? In the heart of the Middle East, on a battlefield chosen by Al Qaeda as their key front for their war against civilization, in a place where they proclaimed the beginning of their new caliphate we have driven them to virtual extinction. As they cower in their spider holes, fearing the arrival of our Marines or our Iraqi allies, their frustration is palpable. This was supposed to be their victory, not ours. They thought they had the weight of events on their side; they were mistaken. Why is this not story worthy of investigation and exposition by our esteemed journalists?
My experience with journalists informs me that many, perhaps most, work from their existing models and do not actively seek out information that disconfirms them. They have a narrative that is generally accepted by other people in the media and that tends to constrain their perceptions. This is not something limited to journalists, but they are particularly susceptible precisely because they think they are not.
The narrative that their conventional wisdom accepted was that Iraq was mostly lost and that we were in a holding pattern heading for a long term failure and withdrawal. They fixed the various data points around their narrative and the stories more or less made sense back in 2006. This narrative is now unraveling but the MSM has yet to figure out a new one to replace it. It is not a conspiracy, but it is a syndrome, a kind of a group-think. It will take a lot of changed facts and a couple of courageous leading journalists to break out. We have the changed facts on the ground; what we need now is the courage.
BTW – I was reading one couragous journalist today. People who have been here recently know a lot more. Stay away from those pundits and bloggers who have been to Iraq years ago … or never.
I spend some considerable time complaining about the weather here in Iraq and who can blame me if you look at the pictures of the nearly opaque red air? But Al Asad has pleasant weather much of the year. November is very nice around here. Winters are a bit chilly, but never cold and usually clear. It is churlish to complain all the time.
You just have to adapt. For example, in the summer it is much too hot for any strenuous activity during the middle of the day. The local Iraqis are active early in the morning and in the evening. They hunker down in the shade in the middle of the day. This bimodal activity optimal is probably the origin of the siesta. If you follow a similar pattern, (IF you can) you too are okay.
I have been getting my running in before 0700. This time of the year, it gets light around 0430 and it is very nice at 0600. I get up in the morning and look out the door. If I can see a reasonable distance (i.e. dust is not so bad) I go out and run. There is an interesting aspect of the dust that I only figured out (maybe) recently. On some days the dust is not so bad at 0600, but it gets thick and unpleasant by around 0700. Some of this has to do with the nature of wind. The wind tends to pick up around dawn. I suppose it is because the earth heats differentially as the sunlight hits. The wind picks up dust and a short time later it is a mess.
But not all the dust is natural. Much is kicked up by our own activities. Around 0600 the trucks & heavy vehicles start to roll in earnest; each creates a tail of dust and cumulatively there is a lot of dust. All this dust has to go someplace and it doesn’t settle very fast. Most of the roads are paved with white gravel and I am pretty sure our activities are the source of much of the whitish “moon dust.” The red dust comes from farther away. Our weather maps show massive clouds, sometimes covering almost all of Iraq. The most recent attack of the red dust originated in the western deserts of Iraq and in Syria. This kind of weather pattern is usually associated with a northeastern wind.
Our local activities can create local unpleasantness, but the real dust storms are those caused by Mother Nature. Of course it is not all Mother Nature either. People have abused this land for >4000 years. Much of this dirt would have been held down by the roots of plants had humans and goats not uprooted them. I blame Dennis, our AG Advisor, for the current problem. He has been here nine months and still not managed to cover the hills with grass and reverse the mistakes of the last four millennia.
BUT today is nice. The air is clear and the morning was cool and pleasant. We are supposed to have at least three days of this before the next clouds of dust obscure the horizon. I have to get my running in while the running is good.
I made the three and a half minute trek to the highest mountain in Al Asad, an elevation of at least 30 feet, and took the pictures. This is as good as it gets around here.
We are experiencing the mother of all dust storms. The dust is more red than usual. Satellite maps indicate that the storms are starting in Syria. I wonder if that qualifies as a Syrian incursion into Iraq.
Below is me in the dust storm.
I went out to stand in the dust as you can see in the picture (or almost not see). You have to be in on the experience after all, the bad ones too. The dust stings your nose and eyes. I can only imagine how it would be to be exposed to it all day w/o shelter. It quickly dries out you mouth. We are not suffering too much, however. Our new headquarters is fairly well sealed since it was renovated. This is a big change from the old building and a quantum leap from the tents. During previous dust storms, it just rained dirt inside our building. Today I can observe it out the window with some measure of detachment.
Coming out of the shower this morning was interesting. Of course, we don’t have showers or toilets (what the Marines call heads) in our cans. I am lucky in that my can is only a short distance from the showers/heads, so I can make the trip in flip-flops and running shorts. I don’t usually bother to dry off very much. It is unnecessary. Stepping out into the Anbari summer wind is (as a Marine colleague described it) like being sprayed by a giant hair dryer. Today I had the added experience of fine red dust blowing in the wind. I was coated like a Christmas cookie by the time I got back in. I exaggerate only a little.
This is us coming back. This gives you some idea of the distances involved.
On the plus side, dust storms reflect the sun’s heat, so it is a lot cooler sheltering under the dust blanket. But it cannot be good for you. I didn’t go running this morning. I don’t think it is healthy to run in this pea-soup of dust. I was thought I would be encased in concrete with cement lungs, probably in mid-stride, turned into stone sort of like after seeing the Medusa, but when I look at the dust blowing around, I understand that it would probably be the much more attractive terra cotta. Maybe that is how those famous Han Dynasty soldiers came to be.
BTW – I submitted by essay re success in Iraq to the official State Dept blog (blogs.state.gov). They broke it up into bite sized pieces and have not yet published the whole think, but please have a look.
The Police Chief says that he tells everybody about his problems in hopes that the weight of his persistence will convince someone to solve them.
The Rutbah region that is his area of responsibly is vast and thinly populated. It includes the Syrian and Jordanian border areas and the POEs at Waleed and Trabil, the village of Akashat, Nukhayb as well as the Saudi border region and POE Ar-Ar. It takes a lot of police officers, vehicles and fuel to patrol a place like this. Unfortunately, Iraqi government resource allocation decisions are based on population w/o sufficient concern for area.
The chief says he has only 280 IP out of authorized strength of 620. He doesn’t expect to see more any time soon. His patrol fleet consists of sixty-one pickup trucks of various sizes, Chevys and Fords. Even when there is fuel to keep the trucks rolling, they are often inoperable. This is a land of axel-busting roads, when you are lucky enough to find a road. He says that he has people trained to fix the vehicles, but they lack parts and tools to do the job. They used to have their vehicles fixed at Al Asad, but that service recently stopped.
Hammurabi
The Hammurabi Academy, located on Camp Ripper, has trained around 400 Iraqi police from Western Al Anbar since it was founded in July of last year. Classes are small, with a student/instructor ratio of around 7/1. Only leaders are trained. They are supposed to go back and pass their information to the ordinary police, so it is a train the trainers proposition. They learn a variety of tasks such as basic investigation, logistics, administration and evidence gathering techniques. It is not exactly CSI-Iraq, but it is a start.
Colonel Stacy Clardy of RCT 2 set up the academy to produce a leadership core for the Iraqi Police (IP) of our district. It is important to recall that back in July 2007 Al Anbar was just coming out of the terror of the insurgency and significant fighting still raged. My first helicopter landing in Al Anbar was on a soccer field, where I was informed insurgents had rounded up and murdered the local police some months before. These kinds of things were still fresh in the memories of recruits back then. It took courage to volunteer to be an Iraqi cop and I suppose that they must have felt a little relieved to get some training on Camp Ripper, protected by U.S Marines. Now they talk about moving the academy off the base and that will probably happen by next year.
The Marines host the venue, provide some logistics and act as advisors. Most of the funding comes from the government of Iraq and gradually, as equipment is replaced, the Hammurabi Academy is evolved into an almost wholly Iraqi institution.
My impression was that we had U.S. instructors teaching classes with interpreter. I was wrong, or at least out of date. Most instructors today are Iraqis who speak directly to the classes in Arabic. One of the successes of the last year is precisely the development of the human capital to make this work. Iraqi police of the past were often good at being cops in many ways, but not so good at following the rule of law & evidence. Now they are becoming a modern police force.
Below are solar street lights in Rutbah, a CF project. They work okay, but are not, IMO, aesthetically pleasing.
The Regional Engineer of Rutbah is a modern man with little patience for religious extremists or excessive tribalism. He hates what Saddam Hussein did to his country. He told me that in some towns essentially no new schools were built between the end of the 1970s and the liberation, despite big population growth. As an engineer, he decries the general lack of maintenance. Instead of building infrastructure, Saddam bought expensive weapons systems from the Soviets, French & Chinese (the U.S. supplied only 0.47% of Saddam’s stuff). The fruits of big buying spree litter the deserts around here, MiGs that never fired a shot in anger, tanks that never went anywhere. They decided it was better to abandon them than to fight a real enemy.
It was worst during the sanctions. When Saddam had less money, he spent what he had on palaces, but enough of the past.
Rutbah’s future depends on water. As I mentioned earlier, water is in short supply in the region. There have been some grandiose plans occasionally touted to pipe water over the desert from the Euphrates. It is a long way to pump water and it is all up hill. Beyond that, the Euphrates has been running lower because of dams in Syria and Turkey. In The long pipeline solution is proposed by people who do not understand geography, hydrology, gravity or politics. Besides those things, it is okay.
Below – They have more success with sunflowers than I did.
Fortunately, according to the engineer, the solution to Rutbah’s water woes lies only eighteen kilometers away in Al Dhabaa wadi. He says that twelve wells already exist and that hydrologists have mapped out the groundwater. There is more than enough for a city twice the size of Rutbah. Eighteen kilometers is only around 11 miles. Why, I asked, were people complaining about water when water was so easy to get?
Some of it goes back again to the lost decades of the Saddam tyranny. There are no reliable pipes to bring from the wells across those eighteen kilometers to thirsty Rutbah and much of Rutbah just doesn’t have access to water pipes period. They were never built. Our friends says that Rutbah had good zoning laws, but they were enforced sporadically so that there are some pretty big buildings sitting on some pretty dry land. Well, it is not completely dry. There are no sewage lines either, but what is soaking into the ground is not something anybody wants to drink. Retrofitting whole neighborhoods is extremely costly and time consuming. It may be years and it may be forever before these things are done. Given the ramshackle quality of these buildings, it is probably a better idea to start again from the ground up, but people already occupying these places are less enthusiastic about this sort of solution.
The other reason for the water shortage involved the great bane of Western Iraq – fuel. In this, perhaps the world’s greatest repository of liquid hydrocarbons, fuel for pumps and/or electricity to run them is inconsistent. When the pump goes on and off, it begins to lose siphoning pressure. After a while it is sucking up air or mud. Steady and predicable is what is needed. I don’t know that much about pumps. It doesn’t seem to me that should be such a problem, but the engineer tells me that indeed it is and he seems to know about these things.
In any case, on the one hand, Rutbah’s water problem is solvable and solvable soon in the general case of water for the city. On the other hand, it may be solvable never in the specific situation of some construction that went on w/o the benefit of zoning. Life is tough all over, tougher for some. It is mostly a matter of organization and choices. Most of the choices are simple; some are not easy.
Above is our ride home. Ospreys are good for longer trips. It is still a thrill to ride, but the joy wears off when you hit some turbulence, which always seems to happen on the way to and from Rutbah.
I don’t know why anybody likes soccer. It is about as exciting, IMO, as watching grass grow. But Iraqis like the game a lot and we get some significant public relations mileage out of building and/or rebuilding soccer fields.
The soccer field is in back of the kids. In Iraq, you don’t even get to watch the grass grow on the soccer fields. All they do is smooth out that dirt and put in a kind of a sub base. We are going to fix this soccer field up. The local kids are excited about it. When we got out of our cars, they all came running over.
The kids in Rutbah are a little less spoiled than some others. They were friendly w/o expecting too much candy. It is funny because kids are similar all over the place. We asked them if they got to use the field very often. They said it depended on whether bigger kids came along to run them off. I remember exactly the same experience. We used to play football in Humboldt Park. We got to use the flat, good places to play until some bigger kids came and ran us off. On the other hand, we would run off any groups who were smaller than ours.
Now that I think about it, the big kids never actually had to run us off and we never actually had to run off any littler kids. You would see the group coming and make a general estimate of their total mass. If their total mass was greater than ours, we would pick up our ball and run away. Kind of an interesting system. Prepares you well for adult life.
In any case, we have done soccer fields before and will do this one in Rutbah. I told my guys that I want to see it done before I leave and that I want a few drought tolerant trees nearby, so that people can sit in the shade and not only have to watch soccer. The kids will be happy.
Recent deadly bombings around Iraq, one involving State colleagues, reminded us that this is still a dangerous place, despite the astonishing progress Iraq has made over recent months. I was reminded on a local level during a foot patrol.
The crowd in general was okay, but one guy (he is not in my picture, BTW) was obviously none too happy. I won’t go into details. Suffice to say he was supposed to get compensation for a mistake but when he went to the local authorities to get it they ripped him off, he says. In these situations all you can do is smile and keep in talking/letting them talk, while trying to figure out how to get away. My colleague, Sam, is an excellent interpreter and was able to keep the guy from going too crazy. I am glad the guy had a chance to seek justice and it will probably be good public relations, especially if he is treated fairly. It does, however, point up the dangers inherent in our work and why we must not become complacent. I always worry about some weirdo in the crowd or a guy with a PBIED.
It is very important to go among the Iraqi people to show them we know they are not the enemy, that we are not afraid and that we want to hear what they have to say, sweet and bitter. I bet they will be talking about this particular engagement for a long time to come. The Iraqis present were also surprised and concerned over this man’s anger. I believe our interpreter Sam and I did our duty representing our country in a favorable light and the Marines calmly addressed the situation. Nevertheless, this was a wake-up call about how fast a situation can deteriorate. We have reviewed our security procedures and our team members and I will be much more circumspect in the future.
Nobody is afraid to complain to us. They are usually reasonably happy with Marines and somewhat unhappy with local authorities. While we take some pleasure in being popular, we have to avoid the impression that we are the problem solvers in contrast to local authorities. We will be gone soon. The local authorities will abide and the people have to learn to abide with them. In many ways, they are asking too much too soon from their governments, most of which are newly established after the defeat of the insurgency, but the people are generally on the right track and their requests are legitimate. People always ask about fuel and electricity. They want their streets to be clean and their homes to be secure. Most of all, they want no longer to live in fear. They are also concerned re water. It is a desert, after all.
The picture below is a fort built by the British in sometime around 1927. The British ran Iraq as a League of Nations Mandate until 1932, when Iraq became an independent monarchy under King Faisal, of Lawrence of Arabia fame. Even after independence, the British maintained bases here. I don’t know if this was among them. In fact, most people don’t think much re this fort, but it is still in use as a police HQ. The British built to last.
When the fort was built there was nothing around it but desert. Rutbah’s claim to significance is that it is a “wet spot” that gets around 4.5 inches of rain a year, and it had a well. The Fort guarded the road that connected Amman with Baghdad and the oil pipeline. If you didn’t have to stop for borders or checkpoints, you could drive from Amman to Baghdad in around 16 hours. Rutbah and the fort are around the half way point. It goes to show how much has changed. Back in 1927 the fort was in the middle of nowhere. It is still in the middle of nowhere today, but around 50,000 people live in and around Rutbah.
I can only imagine how isolated it must have been in the 1920s. I can picture those Brits with their khaki and pith helmets. My friend Tim R bought me a pith helmet as a joke. Of course I cannot wear it here, but I wish I could. They are really good for keeping you cool. Air moves easily inside and if you soak them in water the evaporation over a couple hours really helps lower the temperature inside. They are very good for hot and dry places, which is probably why they were so popular. But they have the unmistakable connotation of old-fashioned empires. Both pith helmets and old fashioned empires are out of style these days.
When I was trying to confirm that date of the fort, I ran across this interesting article about Rutbah a few years ago. It sounds familiar. Above is a new mural on the police station wall. Our ePRT helped pay for it. I read in this article that this once had a Saddam mural. We painted over it. All these murals kind of look alike. I don’t like them, but I suppose the blank wall bothers people.
You don’t learn from experience unless you pay close attention. Failure focuses the mind. We ask what went wrong and identify improvements. As often, however, we don’t fix the problem but try to fix the blame. This absolves everybody else and lets us all continue business as usual. We can find individuals who made poor decision, but the only way to systematically improve is to look at the whole system and analyze the interactions. If you have a dysfunctional system, changing the players doesn’t help.
There is a currently popular saying that “doing the same thing and expecting different results is the definition of insanity.” This is simplistic. It is possible to flip a coin ten times in a row and get all heads, but still expect the probability of the next toss to be even, at least after checking the coin. A good system with good people may produce poor results. That is why you study the processes. If you can identify the factors the led to the result and they are not likely to recur wholesale changes are unjustified.Success brings less soul searching than failure. We point to good results and are unenthusiastic about checking to see if they were deserved. But just as it is possible to fail for reasons beyond our control or factors unlikely to recur, we can succeed for the same bad reasons, so success should be as closely scrutinized as failure. There is no shortage of talk about failures in Iraq, although much of it is designed to fix the blame not the problem. As it becomes clearer that we are succeeding, we should learn from what went right and how it might be transferred elsewhere. I have a couple ideas from my own point of view. Keep in mind that I have personal knowledge only of events in Western Anbar and so I emphasize factors and people acting here. My list is not comprehensive.
Leadership
Had Abraham Lincoln had stuck with General George McClellan, or the American people elected “Little Mac president in 1864, we might well need a passport to cross the Potomac. Leadership changes the course of human events and a change in leadership was essential to the turn around in Iraq.
It does not follow, BTW, that previous leadership was incompetent (remember fix the problem, not the blame), just not appropriate. McClellan was a superb general. In a defensive posture, he was great. He just didn’t grasp what he had to do to win and didn’t have the temperament to do implement it. That task eventually fell to Ulysses S. Grant. Lincoln found his general in a man who had been unsuccessful in his earlier endeavors but had the appropriate skills, talents and temperament to handle this job.
General David Petraeus was the right man for the new strategy in Iraq in 2007. He wrote the book on counter insurgency and recruited a first class-team to help him with the changes. He also had the support the new Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, to make the needed adjustments.BTW – the COIN Manual is itself a great example of the flexible strategy it advocates. It is a living document, almost a wiki. As new experience is analyzed and digested, it changes and evolves.
The right leadership with the right strategy was essential to success, but causality is never so uncomplicated.
Marines
The USMC was employing the “new paradigm” in Al Anbar before it became part of a new strategy. Marine commanders were well familiar with the theory and practice of counter insurgency, but as importantly the Marines in Al Anbar constituted a learning organization. As experience about what worked and what didn’t passed through the organization, Marines adapted and improved their responses. The Marines have a long history with counter insurgency and working with indigenous forces going back at least to Presley O’Bannon on the shores of Tripoli, where they earned the Mameluke sword Marine officers still carry. And they have been a learning organization all that time.
Another advantage is the Marine’s rotation system. Marines tend to come back to places near their last deployment bringing with them their experience enhanced by the perspective of their time away. Beyond that, when Marines go back they share their experience with their colleagues coming out, both formally and informally. It is hard to envision a better system for learning and adapting. Many of the Marines in Anbar today were in Fallujah or Hadithah during the bad times a couple years ago. More than others, they see the progress and understand what still needs to be done. Those who are here for the first time have heard and internalized the stories.
Beyond that, Marines in Anbar did what they do well: eliminating bad guys & breaking their stuff; making friends in that unique Marine Corps way; adapting & overcoming. When the surge came, the Marines were ready with a receptive environment they helped create.
A Time for Peace
“To everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven … a time for war and a time for peace.” (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8). Early in the conflict, proud and martial Anbaris allied with Al Qaeda and other insurgent forces to fight against the American invaders. It was an understandable, if mistaken response, but by the close of 2006, they were tired of war; they had come to understand the folly of working with retrogrades such as Al Qaeda and their sense of honor was satisfied and slaked by the casualties they had suffered and those they had inflicted. Al Qaeda told them that the Americans would cut and run. Marines don’t. Anbaris learned to respect CF forces. As importantly, they came to understand that CF forces had come to respect them and it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
PersistenceYou cannot achieve success if you do not stick around long enough to achieve it. Difficult and unexpected circumstances in Iraq provided many excuses to give up. Leading experts, pundits and even members of the U.S. Congress told it straight-out that the U.S. was defeated. They were wrong, but they could have been right if we had acted on their advice. In other words, a lack of resolve on our part would have made their prophecies self-fulfilling. In the event, the U.S. stayed for the turn around.
Luck
Risk can be controlled but never eliminated and pure uncertainty lurks beyond all the risks we can calculate. Even the most exquisite plans must run the gauntlet of random chance that can devastate a perfect plan or vindicate a dreadful one, which is why we have to analyze the process and not judge strictly by results, as I said above.
Early in the conflict, many things turned out worse than we reasonably anticipated. Now things have changed. Our enemies turned out to be poorly organized. Often incompetently led and ideologically myopic, they made stupid mistakes that turned local populations against them. Fighting an insurgent enemy can be like playing whack-a-mole. It is a frustrating game, but it is easier if the moles are not very clever. I don’t want to take this too far. Many of our opponents are committed, deadly and dangerous and even in small numbers a ruthless adversary can inflict severe suffering, especially if their goal is to attack civilian populations. But these very tactics erode their support.The big piece of good luck is the flip side of some very bad luck for the rest of the world – soaring oil prices. Iraq recovered its previous ability to produce oil almost at exactly the time world oil prices spiked. During Saddam’s time, Iraq earned oil revenues of around $20 billion a year. Experts anticipated revenues at this time of around $35 billion. Last time I heard, they were looking at $80 billion and the number keeps on growing. Oil money lubricates and more and more often Iraqi funds can pay for the needed infrastructure upgrades and improvements in Iraq.
PRTs, ePRTs and the Holistic Approach
Of course I have to talk about my own stuff. You cannot win a modern war by military means alone. COIN Manual says that some of the best weapons do not shoot. Military units have long had Civil Affairs (CA) teams and Commanders’ Emergency Response Funds CERP. These improved conditions for Iraqis and certainly saved many lives. Building on this success and experience in Afghanistan, in November 2005, Secretary of State Rice established Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Iraq. In January 2007, President Bush announced the establishment of embedded PRTs, who work directly with military units such as Regimental Combat Teams.
These were civil-military teams of experts who engaged provincial and local Iraqi officials as well as ordinary Iraqi citizens. Some of their work was old fashioned diplomacy, meeting people, talking to them and listening to concerns. But unlike diplomats in many other contexts, PRT members have access to concrete resources. This development aspect, helping rebuild or in many cases just build for the first time is not entirely new, but putting it together with the interagency team of experts that made up a PRT is breaking some new ground.
PRTs are led by a senior State Foreign Service Officer with a deputy from USAID or a military colonel often as an executive officer. Included on the team are experts on budgeting, industry, law and agriculture, among others.
In rebuilding Iraq, damage from the 2003 invasion is often the least of our problems. Iraq has been in a state of war and/or sanctions for nearly thirty years. Many things decayed during that time and other things that could have been done never were. The Saddam Hussein regime did minimal or no maintenance on the plant & equipment. The whole country suffered the kind of socialist mismanagement seen in former communist regimes, but with an additional layer of sanctions and war. It might have been better if some of the facilities had been destroyed by CF bombs and could be rebuilt from scratch.The physical damage can be repaired more easily than the damage to human capital. The late despotism actively destroyed most aspects of civil society, anything that might insulate the people from the dictates of the state. In former communist Europe, it was possible to find functioning civil organizations, as the fiercest aspects of Stalinism were generations in the past. In Iraq, the destruction was more recent and in some ways more though going. Ironically, sanctions and isolation helped finish the demolition Saddam started. The only viable non-governmental structure left were family/tribes and religion.
Iraq has a significant, if now distant, tradition of reasonably competent officials. PRT experts work to revive this and build on it. Iraqis are responding very quickly, considering the conditions.The most popular expert in Western Al Anbar is our agricultural advisor. Iraq was once a bread basket and still has wonderful soils, available water and a skilled population. Unfortunately, some of the best agricultural lands has been abused for thousands of years. Saddam’s mismanagement exacerbated it, but I digress.
COIN talks about the need to clear, hold & build. CA, CERT & PRTs have helped build physical infrastructure as well as relations. The Iraqi people increasingly have a commitment to their own future and freedom. They will not easily give it up when terrorists come calling.
What They Said Can’t be Done
The U.S., CF and Iraqi accomplishment is astonishing, especially when you consider the near-death experiences of 2006. The Middle East is more secure w/o the murderous Saddam Hussein in power and it is immensely better off than it would have been had we failed in 2006. I believe this will be seen by future historians as a paradigm shifting event. For awhile many people feared that the initiative had passed to the bad guys or at least to the forces of chaos. The apparent disintegration of our position in 2005/6 seemed to confirm that impression. It was never as bad as it seemed or as bad as it was portrayed in the media, but the trend was unmistakable. Today we have come out of the darkness into a new morning. It is still a little too dark to see clearly all the features and it is still full of challenge and fraught with dangers but also full of opportunities. For the last generation and arguably since the end of World War I or the Sykes-Picot accord, this region has been unstable and dangerous. Maybe we can help make the future better than the past.
Below is one of our local friends. The big black ones are not as dangerous as the little yellow ones. I didn’t check closely, but it looks like this one is harmless because the stinger is broken.
We don’t have to buy coffee and there is no shortage of cookies and other sorts of treats. Generous Americans send piles of these things. Sometimes they go through organized groups; others just send things on their own.
I especially like the Duncan Donuts coffee. The guys at the Civil Affairs unit have a big coffee making machine. They fill it every morning with the Duncan Donuts brew and let me have some. The only thing I have to do in return is be nice to them. There is lots of sharing around here. I will not miss the dust and heat when I leave Iraq, but I will miss the friendliness and feeling of shared mission.
Of course there are limits to generosity. Our ePRT has a couple of non-tactical vehicles, which we use not too often. We let others use them when they are needed. When word got around that there were “free cars” available, the situation got a little out of hand. We still let people use our vehicles, but now we keep the keys in the desk drawer and require that they ask.
