We Meant Well

by Peter Van Buren

  Everyone Was Looking the Other Way

  The ePRTs had morphed into a mechanized mode in spinning up new projects. There was not a lot of thought expended, as our instructions were the more projects the better. The Frankensteinian NGOs we had given life to so they could absorb our money had started coming to us directly with projects rather than waiting for us to call them. Our ePRT came up with an innovative idea: instead of these so-called NGOs approaching us and our staff doing all sorts of paperwork, why not have them simply ask for the money directly from the Embassy, removing us from the loop and cutting our workload to almost zero? We had not been doing any due diligence anyway, so why not take the whole process to the next level? We submitted a QRF (Quick Response Fund) grant request for $19,720 to teach NGOs how to request QRF money. We’d sit back and watch the circle complete itself. The original project:

  Nascent NGO Training is designed to increase the efficiency and operational capability of newly formed NGOs. The training will consist of training twenty-five NGOs for three months. The NGOs will be required to write proposals and, if approved for QRF, the projects will be funded and implemented through the nascent NGO. The training will be deemed successful if the QRF committee approves twenty percent of the proposals.35

  This was too much even for the usually roly-poly QRF committee, which torpedoed the idea, saying, “QRF cannot fund a project to teach NGOs how to apply for QRF funding.” The ePRT edited the proposal ever so slightly, merely shuffling a few paragraphs around in a way that would make a grade school teacher reach for her red pencil, and resubmitted it. We didn’t even change the dollar amount. The embassy approved the project.

  The budget:

  Project manager

  $3,000

  Coordinator

  1,500

  Administrator

  2,400

  Trainer

  4,800

  Workers

  600

  Monthly reports

  300

  Rental of conference hall

  3,600

  Coffee, tea, snacks

  1,200

  Printing and copying

  1,200

  Certificates

  500

  Whiteboard

  300

  Flip chart

  320

  Who were all these people and what did they do? We did not know. We were offering great money for only three months’ work; by comparison, the average yearly wage in Iraq was around $2,000, while a skilled worker might make $10 an hour. Good to see we were generous in providing $1,200 worth of tea and coffee. We paid the money out and hired a project manager. Training was said to have commenced. We sent a local employee one time to observe, but the NGO’s guards (maybe they were the $600 workers we paid for?) prohibited her from entering the facility. I decided to make an unannounced visit to see our cash in action.

  The trip brought us to another world, in this case an abandoned Saddam-era sports facility. We did not immediately locate any NGO classes but did attract the attention of the usual large group of kids and unemployed men who were everywhere in free Iraq, passing the time of day. They told us the slums we saw to the right used to be dormitories for Saddam’s prized athletes, though squatters now occupied them. The squatters had run hundreds of wires from the nearest electrical poles, bringing pirated power into the complex. The lower floors of the buildings flowed with raw sewage, ripe in smell and buzzing with flies. The residents had walled off the former patios to make more room inside and had taken to throwing their household trash out the windows to collect in fetid piles between the buildings. It was 113 degrees, and the stench of garbage mixed with the heat in a bad way. A three-legged mutt growled, showed his teeth, and dug in, refusing to allow us to walk past. Knowing most strays in Iraq were rabid, we started to back away, as the soldiers with us primed their weapons. The impasse was broken by three shoeless boys who threw great chunks of concrete at the dog (one can guess what had happened to the fourth leg), scaring it away.

  We passed a burned-out city bus, which the boys told us had been blown up years ago and now served as home for the feral dog pack. From time to time, the kids said, someone set fire to the bus and temporarily smoked out the dogs. A mother in full abaya poked her head out of an alley, a child on her hip, and yelled at us to leave. This was pretty gutsy, considering our group included seven armed soldiers, but maybe she had seen us back down from the three-legged dog. Our translator asked if there was a class somewhere nearby and she said some people had taken over part of the sports complex and had money, so maybe we should go there.

  The sports complex was a short walk between garbage mounds away and could have easily been used as the set for the next Terminator movie. Here was the “conference hall” we had rented for $3,600. The floors were covered with sewage and almost every window was busted out. The hallways were filled with cats, dozens of them, and the walls were covered with giant drawings of musclemen posing, a Saddam touch. We saw light ahead and indeed it was the office of the NGO. Word had reached them that we were prowling around, and several people were frantically being frantic. Though it was after 10:00 a.m., there was no 9:00 a.m. class in session. We were told people were “late,” and then, as if by magic, a dude in tight jeans showed up with a brand-new HP laptop and announced today’s lesson would be about using the Internet. The frantically frantic people piled into the room and became the class. His Internet lesson seemed a bit contrived, as it consisted of his demonstrating how he logs on to Yahoo! Messenger, beginning with his writing the word connect in English for us on the $300 whiteboard.

  The devolution of counterinsurgency into counterreality was hardly limited to my ePRT, or to the State Department. My sister PRTs and the Army contributed their share by funding guaranteed-to-fail small businesses like car washes and brake repair shops, in an economy struggling just to take a breath. Social engineering in the form of an Arabic translation of Macbeth, with some of Saddam’s henchmen in bad-guy roles, or driving lessons for people who couldn’t afford cars to emancipate women outside Basra was only the beginning. Here are some other actual projects that all seemed to matter at one point in time.

  Pastry Class for Disadvantaged Women

  “This project will provide ten classes of instruction on baking pastries and decorating cakes to twelve women who are currently unemployed,” the description promised. “This small business opportunity will provide each student with skills to increase her household income, or may provide some participants with the opportunity for employment in already existing bakeries or pastry shops. A French Chef with experience in both baking pastries and in teaching pastry classes internationally will volunteer teach.”36 Who doesn’t like pastry, right? And how often does a French chef pop up in a war zone? Cost: $9,797.69. (If the French chef was volunteering le time, what was the $9,797.69 spent on? Perhaps a lot of cream?) The plan was that disadvantaged Iraqi women would open cafés on bombed-out streets without water and electricity.

  Artists Syndicate Play

  As part of a new initiative, we paid the Iraqi Artists Syndicate to produce a play: “Under the Donkey’s Shade focuses on an uproariously funny legal dispute that splits the people of a town into two groups. The matter in dispute is the value of shade cast by a donkey. The message is clear: Don’t quarrel over minor differences. Those who see the play will get the message that political reconciliation is critical as we head into national election season. A play’s just the thing to help the people focus on the importance of learning to disagree without being disagreeable.”37 A clear artsy path toward resolving Iraq’s seemingly endless cycle of violence, kidnapping, terror, and sectarian strife. Cost: $22,500.

  Children’s Calendars

  For community building and advancing civil society in rural Baghdad, publishing a calendar illustrated with Iraqi children’s art would do. The Women’s Association conducted an art contest for the district’s children. The kiddies were given a choice of public-service themes to address (
peace, neighborhood cleanliness, education, tolerance) in their art. Refreshments were served, and the twelve best works were printed on the 1,000 calendars made and distributed. The project was intended to help advance civil society and increase public awareness of common infrastructure problems.38

  The kids who drew the pictures all got free school supplies and art materials. From their perspective, what must all this have looked like? Most of the children involved were about ten or eleven years old (hard to know as Iraqis do not typically record birthdays and so most folks knew only approximately how old they were), meaning for almost all of their sentient lives their country had always been full of American soldiers and Americans had always landed in their lives with odd things like a calendar project and their older siblings had always faced the choices of being good witches or bad witches. No one in the world had a clue whether or not, looking at the finished calendar, some kid ready to give up suddenly realized he had a future. We’d like to think so, so we did. Cost: $18,375.

  Bicycles

  One PRT bought 225 children’s bicycles, some with training wheels, to give away as part of community development. On streets filled with trash, pockmarked with shell craters, and ruled by wild dog packs, riding the bikes was impossible. Some of the bicycle wheels were later repurposed for use on wheelchairs. Cost: $24,750.39

  Weight-lifting Equipment

  More community development, through weight lifting. Cost: $6,590.40

  Sports Mural

  A local artist was hired to paint a mural on the side of a gym—think oiled Steve Reeves musclemen. The purpose was to “provide an aesthetically pleasing sight upon entry, helping to bring a sense of normalcy for the citizens in the area and for those passing through.” Cost: $22,180.41

  Wheat Seed

  Although Anbar province is mostly desert, someone on our side decided the Iraqis would grow wheat there and bought the best, most expensive seed available. The locals, knowing the crop would fail for lack of water, sold the good seed for a profit, bought some cheap stuff, and watched the sprouts die in the field. Cost of I Told You So: priceless.

  Medical Gases

  A large medical gases factory to create jobs and improve health care was built south of Baghdad. It failed on both counts: the owner was unable to transport the gas cylinders past Army checkpoints because terrorists used such cylinders as bomb casings. Cost: $200,000.

  Internet

  In areas that got maybe an hour or two of electricity each day, we filled dilapidated classrooms lacking windows, furniture, and blackboards with new computers. We then paid for a year of satellite Internet service, without a clue who would pay after our money ran out. Cost: $12,000 per school.

  Baghdad Yellow Pages

  In a country with few landline phones and an almost toxic environment for business, someone decided that economic success hinged on producing the first-ever Baghdad Yellow Pages. After a lot of effort, we could come up with only 250 businesses to include out of a city of several million people. My ePRT was saddled with hundreds of copies of the finished product to distribute. We could not safely go door-to-door and so hired a local contractor at seven bucks a copy to give away the books for us. Cost: $7,000.

  The Baghdad Zoo

  The State Department, as part of a joint effort with the Army and the USDA to revitalize the zoo, paid for computers and Internet service, ostensibly so that zoo veterinarians could use the technology to establish online relationships with vets in the United States. The thought went, if people could be shown on TV going to the zoo, it would send a message that life was returning to normal in Iraq. General Petraeus sponsored a million-dollar water park (defunct after the water pumps broke down) in Baghdad for the same reason. The zoo people revealed their collection included a large carp tattooed with an old-style Iraqi flag, the one with a Koranic verse in Saddam’s own handwriting. Saddam’s white horse, familiar to everyone in Iraq from hundreds of TV broadcasts, was also alive and on display. A tamed cougar kept as a pet by son Uday was available for photos. One issue the Iraqi vets needed to discuss online was whether to keep providing alcohol to the bears so they were docile toward visitors. The daily throwing of live donkeys into the lion cage at feeding time was also worthy of a Web chat. Cost: unknown.

  English Language Academy for Iraqi Bureaucrats

  Since Americans have such a darn hard time learning foreign languages like Arabic, why not teach the foreigners to speak English? The Army thought it was a good idea, too, and so set aside $26 million for the Iraqi International Academy to do just that. Despite the use of an existing building that the Iraqi military kicked families out of just for us, the rehab of the place ran $13 million. The Army was pleased with the progress, and even got the British Council (the UK’s official cultural arm abroad) to agree via Facebook to send a few teachers.42 The Army forgot to involve the Iraqi government, which said it had no money to support the academy and refused to take over running the place. SIGIR intervened in early 2011 to suggest the Army not spend an additional $13 million to equip and furnish the school.43 Cost: $13–26 million.

  Road to Nowhere

  After deciding a paved road would increase commerce in a particular area, the Army hired a contractor. By the time anyone checked on progress neither a paved road nor the previous rutted dirt road was there. The contractor took the money and laid down only gravel. The gravel made the road more passable, and so insurgents started to use the road as a transit route at night. The local residents appealed to the police, who set up barricades, closing off the road entirely, ending what little commerce the original dirt road had sustained. Cost: unknown.

  Tarmiyah Hospital

  The hospital was a major construction project. The Army finished ten rooms but did not put a roof on the facility before abandoning it for security reasons. The hospital had no power from the grid. The Iraqi Ministry of Health refused to accept the building because it did not have the staff, budget, or supply systems to open the facility—which had no roof. Cost: no one will ever know, but in the millions.

  A Newspaper

  When you get tired of poor media coverage, you buy your own newspaper. The Army has paid for and distributed its own newspaper, Baghdad Now, for years despite its having a readership of near zero. Soldiers would be tasked with handing out copies while on patrol. Costs continue to accumulate and are now in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. My ePRT paid local lawyers to write articles for the area newspaper promoting a free press without disclosing that the writers were funded by the United States. Cost: $25,000, including two generators stolen from the lawyers’ offices.

  * * *

  There were almost too many failed projects to document, though SIGIR tried. What SIGIR called a “legacy of waste” in an August 2010 report included a $40 million prison that was never opened, a $104 million failed sewer system in Fallujah, a $171 million hospital in southern Iraq that Laura Bush “opened” in 2004 but that still has never seen a patient, and more, totaling $5 billion. Although some corruption was found, it did not account for a large amount of squandered money. Audits resulted in the restitution of only $70 million worth of embezzled funds, practically a rounding error given the $63 billion spent overall on reconstruction.44

  Back at the old Saddam-era sports facility where we had just watched our nascent NGO training project collapse in a heap of fraud in front of our eyes, I thought about this litany of projects I had known and the money that had been spent. My thoughts were interrupted when the head of the NGO who had taken our money swept into the room and scooped us up, leading the charge out into the hallway. She took us into a room stuffed with sewing machines. Dust covered the machines and several were in pieces. The head of the NGO explained that one of my predecessors had given her $25,000 the previous year to conduct sewing classes, but unfortunately she did not have enough money to pay a teacher, so the classes were on hold. There is an Arabic expression, “A rug is never fully sold,” suggesting negotiations never need end as long as one side sees
money to be made. Without missing a beat, she swept her arm over the industrial waste, announced her next venture would be to teach meat processing, and asked us for another $25,000. This time we passed on the opportunity.

  Promises to Keep

  We not only knew the formula by now, we excelled at it. Receive LOE, create project, spend money, move on. Had we wanted to learn, we would have seen that it wasn’t that hard to identify the elements of an effective project: work locally on an issue, spend money on demonstrated need, solve people’s problems in a visible way. This was stuff any community organizer or humanitarian aid worker could have told us, had we set aside our hubris long enough to just ask. It was possible that the women’s clinic we sponsored in Zafraniyah just might have shown us the way.

  Zafraniyah was a usually violent, mixed rural and urban zone on the outskirts of Baghdad, squeezed between the Diyala and Tigris rivers. The area was now mostly Shia, with a Sunni presence. Zafraniyah was something of a case study of postinvasion Iraq, having seen a significant amount of sectarian violence after 2003 and then renewed fighting during the 2007 Surge. Its largest mosque, with a huge green dome that overlooked the main highway into town, was once Sunni. It had allegedly been taken over by the Shia Jaish al-Mahdi militia and was rumored locally to be one of their largest bases outside Sadr City. It was no surprise that in the span of ninety days there had been more than forty significant violent acts nearby.