The soldiers knew what to say around their officers and the Army media: best thing about being in Iraq, great to see these kids happy, just doing our job, glad we could help. What they said afterward, spitting Skoal into an empty Gatorade bottle, was fuck these people, we give ’em all this shit and they just fucking try to blow us up.
Resorting to gifts to seem popular was quick and easy but, like most quick solutions, really didn’t help. Once you started down the path of easy answers, your methods tended to sabotage later efforts to try the harder way. In a counterinsurgency campaign, there were several ways to make friends, most of them slow and difficult, like building relationships within the local community based on trust earned and respect freely given. Each iteration of handouts caused you to lose respect from a proud group of people forced into an uneven relationship. Iraq was not the Sudan or Haiti, and while pockets of people were malnourished, overall few were starving. Even if they were, a bag with one or two meals in it was not going to make any difference. The Colonel who ordered these HA drops thought that they made him friends among the locals. He waited in vain for the groundswell of happiness set in motion to cause local people to start turning over to us info about the insurgents in their midst.
This time, the Colonel was wrong. This was not Dances with Wolves; we were not going to be adopted into anybody’s tribe. I remember when we tried to give away fruit tree seedlings a farmer spat on the ground and said, “You killed my son and now you are giving me a tree?” How many HA bags was a dead son worth? If a goal of the US effort was to help the government of Iraq achieve legitimacy in the eyes of its people, what sense did it make for America to hand out food bags? Violence did not taper off. No jobs were created. The rich sheiks who controlled the territory stayed rich and in control. Giving away free stuff reminded folks of Saddam’s own clumsy attempts to buy love. But you just couldn’t stop the Army when it was on a roll. One of the more useful things someone said to me was that sitting still is not an Army thing. The Army sees the world through the eyes of a technocrat: for every problem (the Iraqis don’t like us) there was a solution (give them food bags) that involved money (an incredible $1 million in this case). The Army was like that—they got something into their heads about making friends and before you knew it you’ve got $1 million worth of Chinese intellectual-property-rights-violating food bags on your hands.
The Doura Art Show
Doura had become one of the most violent neighborhoods in Baghdad, which made it a good location for a $22,000 art show courtesy of the US Army. The show in 2010 was the third such event the Army had paid for in as many years. Neither the art nor the neighborhood had improved. Doura, in southern Baghdad, once was a well-to-do, mainly Christian neighborhood and home to Baghdad’s art community. The area included a university and used to have many small bookshops and art galleries. It was no Left Bank, but as Iraq went it was pretty decent. Many of the artists had earned a living sculpting neofascist statues and painting cheesy murals for Saddam by day, while practicing their own, more edgy work at night. Baghdad’s minority Christian community felt comfortable living among this crowd and was accepted by the Muslim majority as neighbors.
Doura erupted in sectarian violence following the 2003 invasion’s near-total destruction of civil society. Shias, seeking the prime real estate in Doura, slaughtered the Sunni residents, and both sides attacked the Christians, killing many and driving the rest to seek refugee status in Syria and Jordan. The problems with Christianity post-2003 were not limited to Doura. Before the US invasion, Muslim farmers in other parts of Iraq had a relationship with their Christian neighbors. The Muslims did not eat pork. The Christians liked pork. The farmers allowed the Christians to hunt the wild pigs native to the area. The pigs, left otherwise unchecked, would destroy crops. With the Christian population dropping post-2003 the pig population grew uncontrolled.25 “We don’t even want to plant anymore because the pigs just eat it all,” said a farmer. “The Christians would bring their guns and they would hunt these pigs,” he continued. “Those were nice times. They used to stay at my house and we were friends.” Since the rise of Islamic sentiment unleashed by the invasion, more than half of Iraq’s Christians had fled the country—ironic, in that they had been residing in Mesopotamia more than five hundred years before the Muslims arrived.
In the face of such upheaval, the secular Doura art community, faced with no more paid work from Saddam and sensing a bad time, went underground. Following the initial round of Shia-Sunni violence, the Sunnis regrouped to reclaim their turf, supported by al Qaeda, newly arrived in Iraq. The cycles of revenge were their own version of performance art, replacing Doura’s previous avant-garde shows. Despite the challenge of the violence, with its juicy propaganda theme of different religions once living side by side, Doura was a popular target for our hearts-and-minds campaigns. And while the few remaining artists may not have had much left to say about religious harmony, they did still know how to throw a party. The Army poured money in to sponsor art shows. The shows produced good photos and happy news stories about the rebirth of Doura. Like the rest of this war, it was a great narrative, albeit untrue.
In 2007, the US military reported, “Only a few weeks ago al Qaeda had the Iraqi populace in Doura in the grip of terror but they’ve been pushed out and the people have returned to worship.”26 The rebirth turned out to be stillborn, as the violence never really went away. In 2008, you could have read about Doura’s next “rebirth” in the National Review, where the author oozed, “I realized I had never really been to this place—I just thought I had. This is the real Doura, a neighborhood and a people reborn—thanks to the bravery and sacrifice of the US Army.”27 Except darn, that rebirth did not take either. Only a little later, Doura became again “the most dangerous place in the world to be a Christian.”28 Undeterred, the Army decided to celebrate Doura’s rebirth once more in 2010. They gave the community $5,000 to open an art supply store, another $5,000 to buy supplies from that store to distribute to local artists, and then $12,000 to put on an exhibit to show off all that US-government-paid-for art.
The Army chose a private house owned by the artist who had received the entirety of the money for the two previous art shows and who got the $12,000 for this one as well. The art business must be good, at least for this painter, because his house was sprawling, two stories, with a swimming pool. For security, a company of US soldiers spent two days stationed there, sleeping by the pool. Outside the gates, hot and overgeared Iraqi Army soldiers ringed the house, supplemented by disheveled Iraqi police sprinkled with US soldiers who unluckily had not drawn pool duty. Each art show guest went through a metal detector and was hand-wanded for weapons. Helicopters flew overhead and armored vehicles blocked off lines of sight. After that, one was free to peruse the art.
We all wandered around inside, making happy purring noises. Two giant sculpted eagles, a throwback to the Saddam School, dominated the show. One was clad in fake gold, perched upon a Babylonian-style tower. A feminist art corner featured a reclining woman with a rooster perched between her knees (a cock, get it?). There was a giant screaming face that suggested Ralph Steadman’s work in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. One small bronze featured a male figure impaled by a telephone pole, likely gay iconography. Two large paintings showed an African woman with a fruit basket balanced on her head, crying out for velvet. The Army was happy. The Stars and Stripes reporter gushed:
The room was boiling hot due to the sheer number of people present. A canvas of variety, it was filled with people from many walks of life—sheiks, Iraqi Security Force soldiers, local businessmen and businesswomen, US soldiers, American civilians, Iraqi children. Such different ways of life, yet everyone was smiling and talking with each other like friends. What brought them all together would have been unheard of a few years ago, but because of the progress and stability in the area, an art show was able to go off without a hitch.… “This certainly shows the great progress that has been made in Doura,” … said Brigad
ier General Kevin Mangum.… “This used to be a rough neighborhood, and the fact that we can do this here, it is definitely an indication that things are becoming more stable.”29
That Doura was reborn (again) was dubious but the Army got some nice photos and the food was pretty good. The artist who received the $12,000 seemed happy. For a few hours, we all played along with the feel-good fiction as appreciative guests. The event, however, was nothing more and nothing less than smoke that blew away as quickly as we departed.
While I waited near the gate for the armored vehicle to take us back to the FOB, one of the Iraqi police officers pointed to the blond American woman in our group and said something in Arabic. Curious, the translator and I went over to chat with the cop. He apologized for what turned out to be a crude remark after the translator falsely told him the blond woman was my wife. Apology accepted. The cop then asked what was going on inside. No one had told him it was an art show, only that he was to guard the gate and refuse entry to Iraqis not invited by the United States. He was very worried about car bombs. Happy birthday, Doura.
Three Colonels
At the Embassy or at higher military headquarters, Colonels tripped over one another on the way to chow, but on a FOB there was only one. The Colonel on a FOB was the top dog and set the to-do list for the men and women under his command. He was like a mythical god, with the final word on everything, from who went out on patrol to the hours the chow hall was open to discipline matters. Getting along with your Colonel often meant the difference between an ePRT that had transport and security and one that sat around the FOB most of the time yawning. Humbleness, a rare State Department trait, seemed to be the most useful approach. FSOs who barreled in claiming their twenty years of service meant they were peers to the Colonel, with his own twenty years in the Army, failed epically. The ePRT as a State entity did not report to the Colonel and did not take orders from the Colonel, but it helped if he believed you sort of did; most of the diplomacy I practiced in Iraq took place inside the wire.
The first Colonel I worked with was a lot like the second. A muscled Southern white male ex–football player, full of sports analogies (this must have driven the al Qaeda spies listening in insane, wondering where the hell this “goal line” the Americans were always near was) and rugged man hugs, back slaps, and extra-firm handshakes for deserving man soldiers. Female soldiers also always did a great job—don’t want to offend the ladies—but they were hands-off, gotta watch that stuff. The Colonels’ children probably called them “sir” and they wished their wives would, too. The two Colonels were to profanity what Monet was to oils.
Both men chewed. For those who are not in the Army or who are not NASCAR drivers, “chewing” means chewing tobacco, inserting a wad of tobacco into one’s mouth, absorbing the nicotine, and every few minutes spitting out the brown juice generated. The nicotine coupled with the cud chewing could help keep you awake when needed. Since even the Army frowned on spitting on the floor, one spat into a cup or, more typically, an old Gatorade bottle. Many were the jokes about someone’s accidentally picking up and drinking the brown juice but no one had ever seen a real person do it.
Both Colonels thought of themselves as old-school Army, remarking at the drop of a moment’s pause on their days commanding tanks, leaping from planes, or firing big, clunky violent things. They could each probably name six or seven small animals they could kill by hand, and they preferred to have little to do with what they saw as the less vital world of counterinsurgency and reconstruction. The Colonels understood the need to give counterinsurgency its due, however, and so on their bookshelves, along with the never-read Sun Tzu (who may have been talking about the PRTs when he said “tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat”) and Clausewitz, were never-read volumes by this war’s celebrity warrior-intellectuals, David Kilcullen and John Nagl. General Petraeus’s never-read Field Manual 3-24 occupied a place of honor on their desks.
On my FOBs, the Colonels had various objectives, but the first was almost always the same: self-promotion. That was a fight we could most definitely win.
A storyboard memorialized every significant military event, and many contrived to appear significant. A storyboard was a one-slide PowerPoint presentation. What happened was that an event, real (such as an arms cache find) or manufactured (a giveaway of canned food to Iraqis so they will love America), took place. Many photos were taken at the event and a single slide with photos and some explanatory text was created and shown to visitors, superiors, media, whomever. The two Colonels loved them some storyboard and ensured that their own photos featured prominently on each display, regardless of their actual role. The lower-ranking soldiers who created the boards seemed to roll with this with a casual acceptance; maybe it was trained in basic.
Colonel Jim (first names must be brief and masculine) had an even better version of self-promotion. He arranged for every arriving guest to have his or her photo taken outside with him, Kim Jong Il–like pictures of forced handshakes. Then, while the Colonel chatted up the visitor, prints would be made, framed, and brought in. The Colonel would autograph two copies on the spot, handing one to the often incredulous recipient and directing the other be hung in the hall outside his office. The photos themselves were a hoot, as often the great lovable bear of a man that the Colonel was would have the photo taken with his arm around the guest’s shoulder. He would certainly lock in the embrace if the person was Iraqi (foreigners around the world love being hugged by large Americans). The most awkward hugs were with those who considered themselves much more important than the Colonel, such as media stars, but rarely was there someone who didn’t look at least a little bewildered in the images.
Colonel Jim had walls full of such photos, the military equivalent of a Hard Rock Café. He treasured black and whites of himself with his bosses, and one can imagine some sort of weird personal validation going on as the photos were lugged around the world and hung on each new command wall. They conveyed his importance, the way insurance salesmen put up family photos to appear neighborly. The military called these “I Love Me” walls.
Both Colonel Jim and his never-met twin, Rich (not Dick), were pretty easy to get along with but hard to work with. Getting along was as simple as reading the sports scores in the Stars and Stripes and having something to say about whichever team won. Working together was another matter. To be fair, my predecessors had not necessarily paved the way. One insisted his former military reserve service entitled him to special handling. At another FOB, the team leader almost matched the Colonel in his need for self-promotion, at least until performance review season was over, after which his needs turned to Internet browsing. In any case, neither Colonel had much good to say about State and saw us mostly as some useless but costly thing to protect, the equivalent of Washington’s dropping an expensive outdoor sculpture in the middle of the FOB and committing the Colonel to seeing it through the war unscathed. I was a fragile Henry Moore.
Colonel Jim’s vision for self-promotion was expensive projects that promised to turn the war around, as if only history would record each of them as another Midway. If his civil affairs team told him the area needed something to help with milk production, a milk-processing plant bigger than a hometown high school football field was commissioned (as in electronics, where size is measured in units of cigarette packs, here the unit of measure was an American football field). As disbelieving Iraqis stood by, a million dollars fell from the sky and a processing plant appeared in some field. Or a water cleaning facility or a hot-air balloon airport. The value of the project was always measured in the future tense. It was about the jobs it would create, the stability it would promote, the good feelings it would generate, and, though no one said it, the freedom it would give us to walk away after the photo session and move on to the next thing. If anyone happened to wonder aloud later whatever became of these older projects, well, hey, look at this new game changer we have going just over here …
Colonel Rich was a more prac
tical man who never saw the self-promotional value in large, expensive projects. They took too long, and you could spend months stalling for time with interim storyboards for the same half-assed construction site when it was completed projects that racked up points with higher headquarters. Besides, the fashion of counterinsurgency had changed, with longer hemlines and smaller, targeted projects the vogue. Through a quick assessment of the battlefield, Colonel Rich determined that the smaller projects were boring (another freaking sewer pump) and nonphotogenic. He needed a new strategy, in line with the administration’s childlike craving for successes to trumpet.
What could be better than free stuff? The Colonel hit on the idea of an almost endless series of humanitarian assistance drops. When this scenario wore out, the Army might partner up with some long-suffering Iraqi police unit and have it give stuff away while the Colonel stood behind and directed the action. After every Iraqi pantry within a couple of miles of the FOB was stuffed with bags of Army goodies, the Colonel adapted to the new conditions. He struck gold by sending out Army doctors to provide medical care in the field instead of vittles. The images were amazing—young blond, blue-eyed female doctors holding tiny Iraqi babies, Army women talking to Muslim women about women things, village elders thanking Army doctors for whatever was being handed out. The war was practically won those afternoons.
We Meant Well Page 10
