We Meant Well

by Peter Van Buren

  The International Committee of the Red Cross in 2009 estimated that more than 40 percent of Iraqis still did not have access to clean water.21 Back at our sewer plant, I said good-bye to the Engineer and promised to visit again if there was any news. The Engineer, smiling, was still optimistic that foreign help would intervene. He planned to learn a few words of English, and maybe Japanese, to be prepared.

  Democracy in Iraq: A Story of Local Politics

  Since God first created sand, Iraq has been organized politically and socially by tribe. Essentially a series of semiautonomous, interlocking extended families, a tribe could potentially encompass many thousands of people spread across the country. In the words of a common Iraqi threat, “We will seek revenge and my tribe is not small.” A head sheik led each tribe, with subtribes run by lesser sheiks, typically blood relatives. The sheiks prided themselves on long claims to power. One of the biggest big shots I knew proudly displayed in his home an elaborate family tree tracing his lineage through the Prophet directly back to the biblical Adam.

  Rather than fight such a long-standing system, Saddam co-opted the tribal organizations that undergirded Iraq, manipulating the local sheiks toward his own ends by giving power to some, money to others, and depriving those who crossed him of both. This system worked so well that after the United States liberated Iraq, instead of holding local elections as the starting point for converting the country into a democracy, we appointed sheiks as local leaders, with the promise of elections to follow, someday. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

  Having appointed the sheiks, the United States then set about rebuilding a democratic Iraq, using the sheiks as conduits to push reconstruction money into local communities. The goal was to hide the US role and make it seem like all the projects were local efforts, something we made ourselves believe while no one else did. Corruption was a problem. Since the sheiks suggested projects on behalf of their communities, coincidentally they tended to benefit personally from those projects, manipulating the local people toward their own ends by giving power to some, money to others, and taking both from those who crossed them. The sheiks controlled the territory like Mafia dons, owning the big-scale projects, picking them apart, and selling off trucks and generators for profit. We tolerated this. Every gesture we made toward the sheiks was justified as a short-term but necessary expediency and every gesture toward the sheiks undermined the broader concept of real elected government.

  The sheiks all wore many hats, filling the power vacuum post-2003 and exploiting sectarian differences as we fumbled around trying to create Greater Georgebushistan (peace be upon him). The sheiks were easy to deal with as they wanted our money, understood authority and violence, and could in the short term get things done. Most sheiks had a fan spread of business cards to offer you, depending on circumstances—sheik leader, general contractor, procurement guy, generic businessman, whatever you needed.

  When money became scarce for local initiatives (the periodic swing in Embassy emphasis between big projects and grassroots efforts seemed to take place every few months), the sheiks would begin to fight among themselves. In the Rasheed area, a crummy scrap of land outside Baghdad controlled by thugs even during Saddam’s time, district council chair Sheik Aman was removed from his position under threat of death by Sheik Yasser, who then replaced him. During a TV broadcast Sheik Aman waived a court decision he claimed returned him to the chair and at the next meeting, displaying a flair for the dramatic and an interest in physical persuasion, he grabbed the council’s official seals and stormed out. Sheik Yasser promptly held a news conference to denounce Sheik Aman for stealing the council seals. If there were limits to corruption, both men were still trying to find them. The position of district council chair was important because the United States, after creating these bodies, also used them to distribute money. Boring Iraqi district offices morphed into smoke-filled back rooms. “My favorite description is the bar scene in Star Wars,” one ePRT member recalled, invoking a description to be repeated by every subsequent ePRT member. “Our district council chair was the Tony Soprano for the area. At meetings, he’d say ‘You will use my contractor or your work will not get done.’ It was all about money.”

  In time-honored custom, the two sheiks sought reconciliation by turning to a powerful middleman to mediate, local Iraqi Army General Ali, who commanded an entire tank division and so qualified to host the meeting. A successful reconciliation allowed both sides to not have to seek revenge to restore honor, as tribal custom would have required. Reconciliation proved successful enough that these two men shook hands and embraced. The General suggested making Sheik Aman a kind of council member emeritus, preserving his pension while upholding Sheik Yasser’s position as the new chair. It seemed like a happy ending.

  However, Sheik Aman showed up at the very next meeting acting as chair, claiming that under democracy he had the support of the people (i.e., a bigger tribe). After a distant relative of Sheik Yasser’s was killed accidentally when a magnetic sticky bomb accidentally affixed to the underside of his personal car went off, Sheik Yasser realized the need for an extended visit with family members resident in Jordan. Democracy is messy, said Don Rumsfeld. My next trip to the council chambers revealed new pictures of Sheik Aman everywhere on the walls posing with previous US military units, as well as with General Ali and his full tank division. Members of Sheik Aman’s tribe searched everyone entering the chambers. Sheik Aman assured us the precaution was entirely for our security.

  The meeting began with reports about electricity, water, and trash removal. The lack of electricity impeded water delivery because pumps were not pumping. Fuel to power generators that supplied electricity to the water treatment facilities remained scarce. Whether or not fuel was siphoned off prior to delivery or after delivery, the lack of electricity crippled essential services. Irrigation canals that used to deliver water to treatment facilities now provided only intermittent service. Farms went without water because pumps lacked the several hours of uninterrupted electricity needed to enable them to push water the distance necessary. Funding for trash collection had been delayed several months and the garbage was piling up. Sheik Aman asked for comments. One of the council members started to speak but was cut off by the sheik, who stated that comments were being solicited from the public and not from members. There were no comments from the public because the public was neither aware of nor invited to the meeting.

  Other council members spoke to us about the lack of any investigation by security forces after a bomb blast knocked out the street wall of the council building earlier that week, not that anyone was blaming Sheik Aman, who had been curiously called away just before the blast. What the living council members and Sheik Aman could agree on was a general sense of unease. US financial support was fading for the smaller, local projects they fed upon. Government of Iraq funding for necessary capital improvements was nonexistent, and even funding for critical essential services was unreliable. Adding to this was the sheiks’ worry over their precarious position as unelected local officials appointed by the US forces—all a hearty recipe for desperation. The council might attempt to seize US government–funded project assets just to create income, we were told, nothing personal. The council worried that US disengagement coupled with the absence of central Iraqi government initiative would cause an already boiling pot to spill over. On that we could agree, and hands were shaken and kisses kissed to end another successful reconciliation. Everyone hoped to be around for the next one.

  Milking the US Government

  Counterinsurgency theory said that it was desperation and poverty that drove people into the arms of al Qaeda. Young men, faced with no economic prospects, no way to marry and raise a family, would be easy to recruit as suicide bombers. What else did they have to live for, the theory went. Leaving aside the possibility that some people became insurgents not because they lacked fast-food jobs and iPads but because they hated the presence of a foreign invader in their country, the Army
and the State Department forged ahead with ideas for job creation. I, for example, inherited an Army effort to build a distribution network (“value chain,” in propaganda-speak) for milk in our area. The previous Army unit had dropped a couple of million dollars into the project, taken some pictures, and then rotated back to the States, heroes, no doubt. The current Army unit had little taste for dairy, and so the whole project fell by default onto the ePRT and me.

  We were going to change the way farmers sold milk. From year zero, Iraqi farmers in our area had raised a cow or two each. The farmers kept some of the milk for themselves, selling the excess to their neighbors. Lacking refrigeration, transportation, and an organized distribution system, each area instead sought a delicate balance between the number of cows, the number of people, and the need for milk. It worked well enough for everyone but us. Without checking with the farmers, we decided to modernize the whole milk chain to create jobs. Farmers would sell their milk to our newly built centralized collection centers equipped with refrigerated tanks, and the centers would then sell the bulk milk to dairy-processing plants, also built by us. The processing plants were expected to sell to the farmers’ neighbors, who would surely be waiting around wondering what happened to the friendly farmer who used to bring fresh milk around daily.

  Once the Army determined the war needed milk collection centers, they went around looking at locations, like a couple with a new baby house hunting. Putting the equipment into an existing building would obviously be quicker and easier than raising a new structure. The Army was told of a building that had supposedly been a Saddam-era dairy plant and went out to take a look. The neighborhood guy who met them explained they did not want the place. He said the plant had been a chemical weapons factory. No one had cleaned inside or removed anything, so maybe it was better the troops didn’t knock around, stir up the dust, and check inside the closets. The good news, the man said, was that nothing deadly had been manufactured at the plant since 1998. The Army wisely decided to build the milk collection center elsewhere.

  As I took over the project, the collection center in Mahmudiyah was 90 percent complete and a ribbon-cutting ceremony was scheduled in a week. The center had been 90 percent complete for months, with the ribbon-cutting ceremony calendared several times. A 5,000-liter tank stood ready to hold milk collected from local farmers. But when we asked our Iraqi partner Sheik Sal about his plans for the business, such as the number of employees he’d hire, the price he’d pay farmers for their milk, and how the milk would be transported to the processing plant, he was unable to answer any of the questions.

  The second Army-funded milk collection center, near Yusufiyah, was also ready to open. Our partner there, Sheik Naj, was also unable to answer any questions about operating the business, except for the one about the number of employees he intended to hire: zero. Neither man had the capital to purchase trucks for hauling the milk, to buy supplies, or to pay for the milk purchased from the farmers. This was troubling. That the Army had addressed none of these issues prior to committing millions to these centers was doubly troubling. It was relatively quick and easy to build a collection center, but slow and difficult to talk farmers into changing their way of selling milk (input) or to line up buyers for the finished product (output). Starting to think about the input and output that bookended our projects only after we had spent millions of dollars on the easy parts was like crying over spilled milk. Capital was the big issue, as without money to buy the farmers’ milk at a higher price than the farmers could get directly from their neighbors, no centralized collection center could succeed. Our reconstruction planning had not considered this, so we had centers that would likely remain dry until the sheiks sold them off piece by piece after we had gone.

  Still committed to the project, we visited our two milk collection centers every six weeks to see if any progress had occurred, perhaps spontaneously. On one visit, the Yusufiyah plant was padlocked shut. The kids hanging around said the owner wasn’t there. (Kids were always hanging around everywhere; few attended school in rural areas, and those who did went only half days because boys and girls were not allowed to go to class together as they had been under the mostly secular Saddam regime. The new Islamic Iraq we midwifed in 2003 couldn’t afford to double the number of schools, so it was girls in the mornings and boys in the afternoons.) The kids told us they hadn’t seen the owner in weeks.

  The second center was still not operating, but it was open and I was able to look inside the place for the first time. A few weeks earlier, after the contractor notified us that the work was done, we had sent out one of our inspectors, in this case a bilingual bicultural adviser (BBA), an Iraqi American who supposedly had a degree in engineering. I say “supposedly” because I later learned that in the rush to staff up for the Surge, the State Department had hired him and others like him sight unseen, having engaged a third-party company to conduct brief phone interviews with the candidates. No credentials were checked, which perhaps accounted for the vast numbers of not bilingual Iraqi Americans claiming to have PhDs (they were paid more for advanced degrees and so said they had them). Our BBA had signed off on this project as complete and in good order.

  I do not have a PhD in engineering and so noticed immediately that there was a hole in one of the milk tanks large enough to fit my index finger. The milk-weighing station (milk is sold by weight, not liquid volume, to account for the butterfat) was rusty, another bad sign since the $500,000 we spent on this center was to have included stainless steel. The owner had not even put up the English “Milk Collection Center” placard we bought him, with an eye toward a nice photo op. When I confronted the sheik on the overall state of the facility, he simply smiled and asked for more money to build a fence.

  Outside, another group of kids were entertaining themselves by throwing rocks at a three-legged stray dog. You can tell the strays’ age by their missing limbs, ears, and hunks of fur, like rings on tree stumps. The dog was trying to sleep, and every time the kids got close with the rocks, the dog would get up, move a little farther away, and flop down again. The kids never moved closer and never hit the dog. The dog never moved any farther than necessary. Each side accomplished nothing but the time did pass.

  We went out another time to inspect one of the milk collection centers and ended up in the living room of the sheik who’d been given the facility to run. His house, modest by any international standard, was quite nice for rural Iraq. The house was concrete, two stories, squat, with the kind of thick walls you put up if you didn’t have a PhD in engineering but wanted to make sure the thing lasted. As with every other building in Iraq, wind, weather, and time had beaten the stucco to a grayish tan. The floors were cool tile. The carpets were outside on the clothesline soaking up the day’s sun. The building was old, and past lives clearly lingered.

  The sheik casually wore his Glock in a Bond-like shoulder holster. I had read online that under long-established tradition, an Iraqi would not typically shoot you in his own home; in many years of traveling this was the first time I’d staked my life on a cultural convention from Wikipedia. An AK-47 (the law allowed every family to own one) with a full clip leaned against the wall in an adjacent room. I was weaponless but accompanied by seven heavily armed soldiers, who took up defensive positions inside, outside, and around the living room, after searching the house, of course.

  The search had brought out the sheik’s mother, who said she typically didn’t leave the back room when male guests arrived. Since the soldiers had wandered in on her anyway and we were foreigners, she must have thought “Why not?” and sat on a chair at the edge of the room. The sheik’s father, also armed, soon joined us and took a chair facing me. With the house searched and the group assembled, tea was served, scalding hot, 70 percent sugar, in tiny glasses with a metal spoon in each. I knew then that long after I left Iraq the sound of metal tinkling against glass would rip me out of wherever I found myself and return me to this country. The sound was as tied to a place as any image in my
mind.

  The father was animated, happy to have guests to whom he could relate the last hundred years or so of Iraqi history. From the others’ reactions, I could tell that this was not the first time he had run through this overview, and I remembered my own grandfather’s wandering stories around the Sunday dinner table. The father was a practiced storyteller who explained how the family had controlled the land we and our milk collection center sat on since the Ottoman Empire, having seized it from the previous owners in a bloody struggle. One nice thing the Ottomans did was to create the first codified land ownership system for the area since Hammurabi, and most property deeds today in Iraq date from Ottoman times. So thanks to them, the father said, for titling the land to his family.

  He moved on to the British, who took control of Iraq from the Ottomans. His own father had not had much good to say about the British, but they had dug the large irrigation canals in the neighborhood, and so perhaps something positive came out of all that. This was interesting because the example always held out for us in the PRTs to emulate was the colonial British, who conquered the world with good administrators. Their officers were highly educated, committed, conscientious, hardworking, and conversant in the local language—regular Flashman in the Great Game characters. More tea was served. We skipped quickly through about forty years to Saddam. Two relatives had been killed in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. The less said about Saddam, the old man muttered, the better, and we proceeded to the latest set of invaders—me, for all intents and purposes. He had good words to say (I was a guest), but he playfully added that his impression of America might be improved even more if we gave him a new generator for the house. Eyeing the weapons and fearful of having to drink more tea, I pretended to jot a note: next invasion, bring more generators.