We Meant Well

by Peter Van Buren

  There was a program, done up on a word processor, with the official Army photo of the deceased, wearing a clean uniform, posed in front of an American flag—young, so young, you could see a few red pockmarks on the side of his face, a chicken pox scar on his forehead. All these photos showed a vacant stare, same as every high school graduation photo. The program was standard fare—some speeches, the chaplain reading the 23rd Psalm, and a final good-bye.

  The speeches were strained because the senior officers who feel it important to speak at these events rarely knew, or could know among the many troops under them, the deceased. As with every other briefing they gave, albeit without the PowerPoint, the officers read words someone else wrote for them to give the impression of authority and familiarity. The dead man’s job had something minor to do with radios and most present couldn’t say much beyond that. The eulogy thus rang a bit hollow, but you reminded yourself that the words were not necessarily intended for you and that the Colonel may not have been the best man for the job. He was a responsible man, trying hard to do something impossible, and he probably felt bad for his lack of conviction. He did understand why we were all here, and that a task had to be done, and that he need not be Pericles or Lincoln to do a decent job of it.

  The last speaker was by tradition someone acquainted personally with the deceased, a friend if one could be found, a junior leader or coworker if not. In today’s ceremony, things were especially awkward. The dead man had taken his life and had done so after only a few months in the Army and even less time at this FOB. Nobody really had befriended him, and this being the third suicide on the FOB made the whole thing especially grim. The ceremony felt rushed, like an overrehearsed school play where the best performance had taken place the night before.

  But sometimes things surprised you, maybe because of low expectations, maybe because every once in a while somebody stood up and said just what needed to be said. A young Captain rose without notes. “I was his team leader but I never really knew him. Brian was new here. He didn’t have no nickname and he didn’t spend much time with us. He played Xbox a lot. We don’t know why he committed suicide. We miss him anyway because he was one of us. That’s all I have to say.”

  This was how the Army healed itself. It was a simple organization, a vast group of disparate people who came together for their own reasons, lived in austere conditions, and existed to commit violence under bewildering circumstances. Simply, we will miss him anyway because he was one of us. The word that raised the sentence beyond simple declaration was “anyway.” It was important to believe we all meant something to one another because we were part of this. When it rained, we all got wet. We could hate the war, hate the President, hate the Iraqis, but we could not hate one another.

  The ceremony ended with the senior enlisted person calling the roll for the dead man’s unit. Each member answered, “Here, Sergeant Major” after his name was called. That was until the name called was the dead man’s. “Brian Hutson?” Silence. “Brian E. Hutson?” Silence. “Private First Class Brian Edward Hutson?” Silence. Brian was not there and almost none of us had known him but yes, today, at this place, we all missed him anyway.

  What Victory Looks Like

  On a rare cloudy day, we drove Aida, an ePRT Iraqi employee, through a twisty maze of S-curves, barricades, and checkpoints toward the edge of the base. It was her last day with the team and an American supervisor needed to follow her to the exit to take possession of her ID card so she could never reenter Falcon.

  Aida was one of the better people we had hired. Before the invasion, she was a professor of English at a major Baghdad university. She had a PhD and around the office people jokingly called her “doctor,” though she never laughed along. Because she had had to join Saddam’s Baath party at age twenty-seven to get her teaching job, she had been thrown out of work by the Americans in 2003 as part of the crude de-Baathification process that swept up everyone from Chemical Ali to preschool teachers. Several years later things changed, and such nonsubstantive party membership as our employee once held was understood to be nonsubstantive. By then, however, the insurgency had started, the universities were closed, and there were no jobs for professors. With what I wanted to hope was some sense of irony, Aida started working for the Army, as a ’terp, what the Army insists on calling interpreters. Her English was near fluent and she even understood the soldiers’ dark humor, but the work did not challenge her and she was bored. For her own protection we paid her in cash, forty dollars a day, so there was no paper trail to show she worked for us. Aida, of course, was not her real name, as she hid her actual identity even from a bunch of Americans unlikely to ever be able to pronounce it correctly.

  The little anteroom we used for out-processing at the gate was separated from Earth. A bit bigger than my parents’ downstairs closet, it had no air-conditioning and no ventilation. The air did not move. Time did not move. Every surface was covered in the gray tan dust of Iraq. A Ugandan guard stood with a machine gun in one corner, watching us. Another Ugandan stood behind a dusty counter window and stuck his hand out wordlessly for Aida’s base pass. He returned her cell phone from the rack; the rules prohibited local employees from having cell phones on the FOB so they could not call to confederates or trigger bombs remotely. The Ugandan guard then called a female Ugandan, presumably not to offend Muslim sensibilities, to search the three plastic shopping bags our employee had with her. The female guard pulled items of clothing out of the bags, looking at each piece as if weighing it as a purchase. The search took a long time, and the Ugandan kept making eye contact with me, as if hoping I would object so she would have an excuse to slow down even further. But I knew the game and I ignored her, and she had no reason to give me any guff.

  The inspection complete, Aida was told to walk out the door, which led to a narrow dog run about fifty yards long, fenced on both sides with razor wire. This was the regular way on and off the FOB. She had explained to us that because working for the Americans endangered her and her family, and because she was sure the gate was almost certainly watched, she always took a taxi into central Baghdad, got out at some random crowded place, and then, after walking around a bit, hopped into a second cab to go home. The idea was to obscure any direct line between us and the life she led outside the FOB. As she walked away between the razor wire, I thanked Aida for her work and called good-bye. She did not answer and did not look back. Maybe she did not hear me, though I spoke plain and loud enough.

  It was then very quiet, one of those odd punctuation moments when the traffic noise stops suddenly and you have a chance to snatch at the thoughts in your head. Following what we intended to be the liberation of her country, Aida had lost her profession and her livelihood, had found her life endangered by the only work she could come up with, and had received a meager, short-term handout from us that improved her prospects not at all. When our needs changed, we took even that away and walked her to the exit.

  So how did we end up accomplishing so little when we meant well? On the ground, at my ePRT level, ego played a role, as team leaders liked saying yes to their bosses, liked being “befriended” by locals, liked to brag about how connected they were to their assigned area communities by virtue of building and bankrolling stuff. This was the game we were required to play. Visitors from the Embassy demanded to meet “real” Iraqis, but only under safe conditions, and preferably ones who spoke English and would pose for photos in robes and who could be summoned on short notice, even on holidays and Friday prayer days, to accommodate the visitors’ inflexible schedules. We were all required to have a few such Iraqi friends to keep our bosses happy, and friends didn’t come for free.

  The physical reality, that we lived imprisoned on military bases, meant that we had the most cursory relationships with Iraqis and were always seen as fat-walleted aliens descending from armored spaceships. The professionals and the technocrats, the doctors and engineers who might have been partners in reconstruction, had fled to other countries (20,000
of Iraq’s 34,000 registered physicians had chosen exile).49 We were left to spend our money among thugs, thieves, tribal leaders with self-serving agendas, and corrupt government officials placed in their jobs by the United States.

  Our attention spans were short and our desire to examine the results was limited. The terms Iraqi good or good enough for Iraq stood in for any substantive quality checks. Soldiers would joke about “drive-by QA/QC,” where a quick run past some project would replace serious quality assurance or quality check inspection. The same sloppiness applied to staffing. If a guy had been assistant night manager at a KFC back home, he was made a small business adviser in Iraq. A Sergeant who fixed cars ended up overseeing a vocational school. We made desperate use of hobbies and tangential skills in lieu of real project management. The contractors took advantage of our sloppiness, and the Iraqis we were supposed to help got junk from us.

  Many good intentions floundered as personnel departed Iraq. Most people stayed no longer than twelve months, and they usually believed history began when they first stepped onto Iraqi soil. Our memory barely extended back beyond a few months. The child rape-murder atrocity committed by American soldiers and chronicled in Jim Frederick’s book Black Hearts: One Platoon’s Descent into Madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death took place in our area of responsibility a little before my time, yet no one in all my preparatory briefings ever mentioned it. They might not have known about it themselves but I’m pretty sure the Iraqis I worked with remembered. The Iraqis were here for the last group and here for this one. We have the watch, but they have the time, says an old joke.

  Our short-term memory should come as no surprise, sent to war as we were by people who failed to understand that history started a long time ago. As Andrew Bacevich observes in Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, when an event like Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 or the terrorist attacks of 9/11 “disrupts the American pursuit of peace,… those exercising power in Washington invariably depict the problem as appearing out of the blue, utterly devoid of historical context. The United States is either the victim or an innocent bystander, Washington’s own past actions possessing no relevance to the matter at hand.”50

  We lacked not only history but guidance. At all levels there was little direction to relate what we did at the ePRT to the broader goals we heard at the Embassy, such as the creation of a democratic Iraq or defeating the terrorists. We had to make it up on our own. Every ePRT went through fads and fashions in its year, holding women’s empowerment conferences, paying for trash pickup, or giving away books and school supplies. The local community often served as the only record of what had previously been proposed, promised, or done. Most ePRT and military leaders walked into first meetings with local power brokers to learn of projects we were supposedly committed to undertake. Though often suspecting we were being swindled, we actually welcomed their claims as a way of providing us with some direction.

  A variety of systems were created to track things, and every ePRT produced a “maturity model” matrix, layers of work plans, progress modeling reports, mission statements, strategic goals, charts of lines of effort, and the like. Owing to their length, complexity, and untethered-to-reality focus, these reporting tools were useless for planning and quickly devolved into a list of chores to be done, like cleaning the garage. Within my own year in Iraq, we switched progress models repeatedly, the changes making it impossible to compare progress from year to year, possibly the unspoken point of it all. Reporting obsessively on our “greatest accomplishments and greatest challenges” forced us to exaggerate or create something new to say every few days. If we didn’t do it, our bosses editing our reports would. No Embassy leader ever got (or wanted) an accurate report.

  Under a system where we proceeded without much direction or assessment, we could not win, but we could lose if something we tried offended someone in the Embassy. Given the long-term scale for progress in development and counterinsurgency, the best thing for people on a one-year tour was to take no chances, do as asked, and stay below the radar. This was what led to the preponderance of widow projects, for example, because they were safe. Reports to the head office often brought a rebuke for some initiative that crossed a line you never knew existed in the ever-skittish Embassy political section. Working with one eye on Iraq and one on the Embassy was difficult. I never once had a project I approved substantively questioned at any level, but all hell broke loose when I canceled two. The safest bet was to give in to the kindergarten system, which judged performance by effort rather than results. Activity was valued over insight.

  A military colleague working with another ePRT summed it all up, saying, “State is less concerned about what actually gets done. They don’t establish metrics for themselves, or measure accomplishments. More interested in process, policy, effective communication and establishing connections that allow them to generate good reports. The frustration with the State Department is that they are very happy just to be. And whether or not anything actually gets done is not important to them.”51

  Robert Kaplan, in the Atlantic, saw the PRTs as “smoke and mirrors operations.… As a concept, they have been successfully sold to the outside world, but they have yet to be sufficiently staffed and bureaucratically developed. They provide useful fodder for pep talks to the media, but on the ground, they run the risk of irrelevance.”52

  The deputy head of the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction offered a more charitable assessment of PRTs: “There’s a difference between ‘could we have done better?’ and ‘did we do nothing at all?’ I think it’s somewhere in between.”53

  The thing most folks said about the PRTs’ work was that it was ignorant (yes) and wasteful (yes, but by small amounts when the overall war cost $1 billion a week) but that really, at the end of the day, what was the harm? If a woman learned to drive, someone enjoyed a play, or a widow baked some wonderful date tarts, what was the harm?

  The harm was this: We wanted to leave Iraq stable and independent, with the strength to resist insurgency. But how did we advance that goal when we spent our time and money on obviously pointless things, while most people lacked access to clean water, or regular electricity, or schools and hospitals. How did we help stabilize Iraq when we acted like buffoons? Spending money on plays and beekeeping kits must have seemed like insanity, or stupidity, or corruption, or all three. As one Iraqi said, “It is like I am standing naked in a room with a big hat on my head. Everyone comes in and helps put flowers and ribbons on my hat, but no one seems to notice that I am naked.” An ePRT team leader wrote in his weekly summary, “At our project ribbon-cuttings we are typically greeted now with a cursory ‘thank you,’ followed by a long list of crushing needs for essential services such as water and power.”

  We grasped that military action could take us only so far, but we failed to understand the next stage. Historian Bernard Fall, writing in 1965 about our efforts in Vietnam, said that counterinsurgency wars are won “not through military action … but through an extremely well-conceived civic action program and, of course, a good leader.… Civic action is not the construction of privies or the distribution of antimalaria sprays. One can’t fight an ideology; one can’t fight a militant doctrine with better privies.”54 Another writer, blogging haiku-style in 2010 about Afghanistan, expressed the idea even more succinctly:

  Effective Leaders

  Control the Population

  Allow us to leave55

  As both writers noted, a key element in counterinsurgency is establishing a local government that can stand on its own because the people believe in their leaders. Field Manual 3-24, General Petraeus’s best-selling doctrine for counterinsurgency operations, argued, “The primary objective of any counterinsurgency operation is to foster development of effective governance by a legitimate government.”56 In Iraq, we never held local elections and never pressured the Iraqis to hold them. At a national level, Iraq went most of a year after the March 2010 elections with
no one in charge.

  Corruption was endemic. In 2010, a Baghdad newspaper reported the salaries of key government people. The highest paid was Jalal Talabani, who the paper claimed made close to $700,000 a year. The Prime Minister, his boss, pulled in $360,000, and two underlings made $170,000 each. The salaries were a small part of overall compensation, with allowances of $15,000 a month for transportation and $30,000 for entertainment.57 Members of Parliament made $129,000 a year, with similar allowances and a hefty 80 percent pension for life waiting for them after only four years of service.58 Meanwhile, 25 percent of Iraqis lived below the poverty line, set at $60 a month.59 The United Nations in 2009 estimated 57 percent of all Iraqis lived in slums. In the worst areas, such as Maysan and Diyala, over 80 percent lived in slums. Pre-2003, the average number of slum dwellers was 20 percent.60

  We controlled the moment the war started, but we couldn’t control when it ended except by walking away. After years of seeking a military solution, followed by years of building ineffective privies through our ePRTs, we simply declared victory and started to pack up. As one sheik told me, “You dug a deep hole in 2003 and now are walking away leaving it empty.” America sneezed and Iraq caught the cold.

  We meant well, most of us really did. Hubris stalked us; we suffered from arrogance and we embraced ignorance. Hew Francis Anthony Strachan, in volume 1 of his First World War, wrote, “Courage takes two forms in war. Courage in the face of personal danger, a requirement for tactical success … and courage to take responsibility, a requirement for strategic success.” In our reconstruction efforts there was no question about our courage in the face of personal danger, but we lacked the courage to be responsible. It was almost as if a new word were needed, disresponsible, a step beyond irresponsible, meaning you should have been the one to take responsibility but shucked it off.