World-Wide Matel

I was surprised at the calm in the isolated Nukhayb region.  Maybe there just are not enough people to form hostile groups.  Sunni and Shiite live together in harmony.  They intermarry and even share the same Mosques.  Another explanation is good management.  The area is guided by Sheik Lawrence, named for the famous T.E. Lawrence of Arabia.  (Local pronunciation eliminates the initial “L” sound and his name is usually transliterated as Lorans).  

We spoke to Sheik Lawrence at length during a gathering of local leaders at the Nukhayb “Government Center”.  The 17 city council members present were all Arab Bedouin men in traditional Arab garb, several of the men are Sheiks of some level.  

Lawrence is a man obviously in control, to whom the others clearly deferred.  He stands out from his fellows who were dressed in the traditional flowing robes, since he wore a western style blazer and slacks.  He also clearly understands English and showed that he understood before the translator spoke.  He is well connected in Iraq and internationally.  He is kin to the Saudi royal family and has connections all over the Gulf, a member of the provincial council of Anbar and can get appointments with anyone he wants in Baghdad.  As a result of all this, Nukhayb gets its share of money from the central authorities.

In our foot patrol through the town, we saw a reasonably well maintained and prosperous place, with smiles and waves from most everyone we encountered.  Area children were well clothed, healthy and happy. For a small community in the middle of nowhere, this town doing very well.  What were the problems?

In one word: rain, or lack thereof.  No rivers run through the region.  The six wells in the region supply only drinking water. Agriculture depends almost entirely on rainfall.  By this time of the year, the wadis are usually green with new shoots and the shepherds can take their flocks there for food.  This year has been bone dry.  When the vegetation doesn’t get water to grow, the goats and sheep, which make up the bulk of the local economy, suffer.  

I could not get an estimate of the numbers of sheep and goats that I thought was really reliable, but the number of 150,000 came up as consensus figure herded by around 200 nomadic shepherds in a fifty kilometer radius around Nukhayb.  Raising sheep and goats is always a precarious business.  In the roughly one in five “good” years, there is sufficient grass for the animals.  2003-4 was like that.  Other years present varying degrees of hardship.  One of the old men in the meeting told us that currently it costs around $150 to raise a sheep until it is ready for sale, but sheep fetch only around $100 on the market.  Without access to free range, sheepherding is distinctly unprofitable.

During the bad years, the Iraqi government used to subsidize or provide grain.  According to the old men at the meeting, during the time of Saddam Hussein, the government supplied two kilos of grain per head per month.  With this guarantee against failure, my guess is that shepherds expanded their herds, which made them ever more dependent on government subsidies and had the additional pernicious effect of overtaxing the carrying capacity of the land.  We have a classic tragedy of the commons situation, since the land is not held privately, exacerbated by the moral hazard of government ensuring against failure.  Sustainable sheepherding would probably require a significant reduction in the numbers of sheep.  This is not the solution the local people embraced, however.  They requested that our ePRT either provide the subsided grain or pressure Iraqi authorities to do so.

I am afraid that we have neither the resources nor the inclination to go into the subsidizing of environmental degradation business.  We told them that we check into offering some emergency help, which will consist of advice and medical and vitamins, which will help ensure that the sheep that do survive are healthier.  The viscous circle of drought, weakness and disease is in play.  As the animals get weaker, they are prey to more and varied types of worms and parasites.  We can help reduce these maladies.

In the longer run, Sheik Lawrence thought digging wells for irrigation would help mitigate this recurring cycle of crisis.   He mentioned that he had seen developed well-based systems in Jordan and Saudi.  Ground water in the Nukhayb region is ONLY 220 meters below the surface he claimed.  Farther to the west, it is deeper under the surface.  He mentioned that they had plans for central pivot irrigation systems, but lacked the experience and expertise to make them work. 

Fortunately, our ePRT agricultural expert, has both.  Dennis also thinks that some of the local soils could be extremely productive if the proper irrigation techniques were used.  We offered to let Dennis help, should it be appropriate.   Preliminary steps would be identifying soils that will make irrigation worthwhile and actually digging the wells.  Lawrence said that during the time of Saddam Hussein, there was lots of talk about digging wells, but not much action.  How have things changed?

This morning I heard something weird.  The sound on the roof was rain.  Maybe it is not too late for some of those sheep ranchers.  We didn’t get much … so far, but it doesn’t take too much out here.  It already had the good effect of washing some of the dust off some the date palms and eucalyptus trees.  They are now a more actually green instead of that dusty greenish color.   I would like to see the greening of the wadis.  

Another unexpected thing you find in the deserts are proto-watermelons.   You can see them in the picture above.  Those little green balls are the ancestors of the big ones we know and love every summer.  They are yellow, not red, inside but otherwise look like mini-watermelons, which is more or less what they are.  

They grow wild in the middle of the desert.  I would have thought something like a mini-watermelon would grow near water, and it seems profligate to produce a water filled globe in this desiccated landscape, but the roots evidently go down deeply enough to tap what water is available.

Speaking of the unexpected, I just wanted to post this picture from the traffic circle in Nukhayb.   That’s right.  It is a bunch of teapots around and eagle.  I don’t know what it means either, but somebody went through a lot of trouble to make it.

My home… this is.  Above is the VIP tent at Mudaysis. 

Sleeping on a cot in a tent is never comfortable.  A modern cot is made out of synthetic fabric that has the peculiar capacity to draw away and dissipate body heat.  This would make cots great hot weather equipment, but the fabric evidently can accomplish its mission only on cold days. You wouldn’t believe how cold it gets in Iraq.   I was equipped with my thin sleeping bag.  Even wearing everything I had with me, I was freezing.  The first night was the worst.  We experienced one of those rare days when it was overcast all day.  Usually, you can count on the warmth of the sun to clear the cold from your bones, but for the record on New Years day 2008, the sun shined weakly or not at all in Mudaysis.  Temperatures hovered in the 40s at midday.   At night the clouds cleared permitting a drop into the 20s.  I have never been so cold for so long.  Coming from a Wisconsin native, who went to school in Minnesota and served tours in Poland and Norway, this might sound strange.   I certainly have been more intensely cold, but not for two days solid.  In the cold climates, really cold places, we heat our dwellings, wear warm clothes and hunker down inside warm buildings when it gets really cold outside.

Necessity is the mother of invention. On the way to chow the next morning, I noticed lots of discarded cardboard boxes.  I took a couple back to the tent and made the thermo-mat you see in the pictures.   The boxes were ironically labeled – KEEP FROZEN.  Cardboard, as every bum & drifter knows, is a good insulator.  It really made my second day in the cold tent a lot less unpleasant. 

We traveled to this God forsaken high desert in the SW corner of Iraq along the border with Saudi Arabia to meet with the local sheik to talk about problems the drought is creating for local agriculture.  There is usually not a Marine camp here.  The Marines are stationed temporarily at Mudaysis to protect pilgrims going on the Hajj.  They arrived just before the Hajj began a few weeks ago.  We take it for granted because we see it so often, but it remains truly remarkable how the U.S. can project power anywhere on the globe.  Even here in the middle of what could pass as a science for a movie about Mars, we can set up and supply a camp, complete with hot meals, its own fire department and fully functioning command operation out in the desert.  Heated tents for visitors, however, is evidently beyond our powers.

Below are my friends Reid & Dennis at the chow hall.

This is the potential free trade zone (FTZ).  It looks the same no matter which way you look.  Lots of room for expansion & nothing to stand in your way.  BTW – This land has not been cleared.  This is more or less what it looks like in its natural state.  About 1/2 mile from here the landscape turns green near the river; beyond that nothing grows.  The change is very abrupt.

I thought that we were to look at a potential free trade zone at or very near the POE.   The Governor of Anbar and the Mayor of AQ had other plans and perhaps better ideas.  They showed us their choice for a future FTZ some twenty-seven kilometers to the east of the POE along Hwy 12 outside the village of Karabilah.   Please see the nearby map.

They understand that a FTZ need not be right on a border (Brazil has a FTZ located in along the Amazon River very nearly in the geographical center of that vast country, for example.) and that it is more of an administrative concept than a physical infrastructure.  In other words, it makes much more sense to locate the FTZ where it makes business sense rather than next to the POE just because there is a POE.  The Governor and the Mayor were thinking right.  This FTZ is currently a large area of nothing but dirt and sand, but this pile of dirt and sand has the advantage of being near roads, the railroad, water resources and electric power lines.  The governor envisioned at least three stages of building the FTZ, correctly pointing out that there was room to expand should expansion be required. Like everyplace else around here, there is plenty of free parking. We will be getting the details of the FTZ soon, such as the number of hectares and the precise location.   An important question beyond these technical ones would be, “what do we envision being made in the FTZ?”  Most FTZs are home to assembly industries, where value is added to imported materials and finished products are exported.  This particular FTZ does not have access to abundant supplies of inexpensive labor or raw materials with significant potential for value added.   The principle local industries are cement & phosphate production along with various types of agricultural enterprises, especially sheep.  These products are not highly processed. 

There was some discussion about specialty agricultural products, such as cut flowers or high quality vegetables that could be processed in the FTZ and then shipped fresh to markets in Europe or the Middle East.  (Fresh cut flowers are profitably shipped from places like Kenya to Amsterdam on a daily basis.)   Iraq certainly has the soils, water and climate (complementary to Europe’s) to support such endeavors.  The infrastructure piece missing from this equation is a good airport.  These high value perishable items are usually shipped via air transport.

It looks bleak now.  In fact it makes me wonder why we call it  REconstruction.  There doesn’t seem to me me “re” here. But things take time and all accomplishments require someplace to start.

I was back at the POE at Husaybah for the first time since I attended the opening about a month and half ago.  Last time I was here there no commerce flowed through the POE.   There is still not much.  The trade coming through consisted of bongo trucks (short flat beds) and vans piled so full and high with produce and goods that their bottoms scrap against every high point in the pavement and a particularly high speed bump could present an impassible barrier. 

The big rigs, eighteen wheelers, are still not coming through.  We thought it might be for security reasons, but the we were assured that the guys at the POE were ready, willing and able to handle them.  For now, the Syrian side seems to be holding up the big truck transit.   I could not find out the ostensible reason but it seems to be a minor or a technical issue rather than a policy statement.  As of now, it doesn’t make much of a difference.  There was not a line of trucks waiting to come over.  The POE on both sides is small and the roads narrow, which leads to another POE problem.

The POE in Husaybah is currently like a roach motel for big trucks: they can check in, but they cannot check out. The roads leading from the POE to the rest of Iraq are too narrow.  Big trucks can drive along them, but if they do nothing else can move in the other direction.  The solution to this problem seems simple: widen the road or – preferably – build another as a bypass for the heavy trucks.  Of course, the simple solution is not the easy solution because it smacks of effort and costs money, but this will have to happen.  The expedient solution, the one that I predict in the short and medium term, is simply for the trucks to force other traffic to drive across the adjacent desert.  The desert is flat and has a consistency a lot like pavement anyway.   I suppose trial and error will even help identify the best routes for the roads, whenever they are actually built.

The POE manager also complained that he did not have enough room to park vehicles waiting for inspection or secure vehicles that have been impounded or just need to be stored for whatever reason.  I am no expert, but this is also a problem I just cannot understand.  Much of western Iraq looks for all the world like a giant parking lot.  In the short term, all anybody needs to do is put up a fence around a suitable area of it and call it an impound lot.  If you didn’t want a fence, an earth berm would probably do the job, maybe even do the job better, since it would be harder to break down and drive through than a chain link fence.   

My general impression is that the POE is just too small for the traffic you could reasonably expect to be coming through when peace and prosperity takes firm root in Iraq.  Fortunately, along this stretch of the Syrian border topography is very forgiving for procrastinating planners & prospective pavers.  Nature has provided acres of flat, hard packed surfaces with few obstacles to block anything rolling across.  There are no significant obstacles to making this POE work besides human inertia, lethargy, perfidiousness and plain cussedness.   This can be overcome.

The guys currently stifled by the lack of parking and roads across a landscape that is essentially one giant parking lot are the same ones who devise elegant and imaginative solutions to much tougher questions of distribution of the goods and services they want and need.  If people want to make this work, it will work.