We Meant Well (7 page)

In our air-conditioned isolation, it took years to realize we needed to think about things like garbage and potable water. What had happened all around Iraq since the chaos of 2003 was a process of devolution, where populated areas lost their ability to sustain the facilities that had constituted civilization since the Romans—water, sewage, trash removal—things that made it possible for large numbers of people to live in close proximity to one another. Shock and awe had disrupted the networked infrastructure that allowed cities to function. What had been slow degradation through neglect under Saddam became irreversible decline by force under the United States.

The collapse of civil society left a void that the bad guys had rushed to fill. Stories circulated of neighborhood militiamen commandeering shuttered power plants and private generators for the public's use, turning the militants into local heroes. In some poor areas, especially in the south, Iranian charities were a primary source of propane, food, and other services that people expected the government to provide, as Saddam had more or less done. It had finally dawned on us that providing reliable basic utilities was critical to a successful counterinsurgency. The PRTs were put on the case after earlier efforts by megacontractors like Bechtel and then the Army Corps of Engineers had failed.

Almost daily my team and I would go out into the field. We'd strap on body armor and helmets and load into armored vehicles for the soldiers to drive us out of the FOB. We rode in either armored Humvees or large monster trucks called MRAPs, mine-resistant, ambush-protected carriers. These sat high off the ground and were covered in antennas and crazy electronics designed to thwart the battery-powered triggers that set off IEDs and mines along our route. The best thing about the MRAPs was that they were hermetically sealed against nonexistent chemical weapons and thus possessed near-nuclear-powered air-conditioning. You could crank that stuff and form frost. The MRAPs were so high off the ground that the turret often tore down the spaghetti web of pirated electric lines strung over most streets, lessening our popularity every time we drove in. Our parade of four or five vehicles, armed with nasty-looking machine guns and tough-looking soldiers, would nonetheless roll through small towns and slums to arrive at whatever dilapidated building served as the center of US-appointed local government. (By common consent no one was allowed to comment on the paradox of creating a democracy by appointing local leaders. It just wasn't done.) As we drove, trash was a fact anywhere we looked, like the sun and the dust. The MRAPs specifically equipped to look for roadside bombs even had giant blowers welded to their front bumpers to whip garbage aside and expose the IEDs. For a poor country, everybody seemed to have a lot of things to throw away. Even though the trash was rarely collected, there were huge dumps filled with acres of it. You couldn't help but be reminded that for all the counterinsurgency ideals about living among the people, we still lived near Iraq but not in it; on the FOB you couldn't drop a Snickers wrapper without two people telling you to pick that shit up.

My team and I met with Yasmine, the local municipal services director, to ask about the status of trash collection in the area. The central market posed the most difficult challenge because of the volume of daily trash, the limited equipment to haul it away, and security. Concrete T-wall barriers located on either end of the market served as security checkpoints, making access for collection vehicles difficult and thus unpredictable. Without daily removal, there was both a danger to public health and increased risk, because garbage was a prime location for hidden explosives. The accumulated trash everywhere also signaled the utter lack of concern by the US-supported Iraqi government for the welfare of the people it ruled since the departure of the evil dictator who, officially, was better off gone. Freedom for sure, but unfortunately it was the freedom to not care.

Yasmine described the lack of experience among officials and corruption as further impediments. What the country needed, she said, “was educated, honest technocrats.” She mentioned officials who underspecified and then overpriced equipment so they could skim money. She lamented the lack of budget preparation. Without local input, the Baghdad-based Ministry of Municipalities developed the budgets for all the regional areas. This was especially galling for a long-term resident like Yasmine, who sincerely cared about the place she had grown up in. While she noted the frequency (and unproductiveness) of her meetings with US-appointed politicians, it disappointed her that fellow municipal directors never even bothered to show up for the coordination sessions she tried to schedule. This was all in spite of a multiyear, $250 million contract let out by the United States to hold good-government classes for these same Iraqi officials to teach them to be better bureaucrats. The contract was held by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which, while a part of the US government, did not report to the State Department. So, although I knew from talking to Yasmine that such a program was running in my area, I had no way to influence it or learn more about it except if Yasmine told me things or I happened to find some information on the Web, management by Google. The USAID representative would not tell me what he was working on. He would report to his boss, who would write a summary for my boss, who often remembered to forward it to me. We did not play well together.

Like USAID and State, the Army and State also had a hard time getting their vision for what we were doing in Iraq synchronized. The Army can be hard to understand. They often did things their own way for their own reasons, a bad idea when you were talking about the coordinated conduct of foreign policy and reconstruction of Iraq in support of our national security goals. While the State Department saw its mission as trending toward bigger picture stuff, the Army often focused on more immediate things. The argument was not a simple one—was it right to focus on a five-year water plant rebuilding project while local children suffered from dysentery that could be relieved by bringing in truckloads of bottled water daily? In an ideal world one could do both, satisfy the short-term need while working in the background on the long-term solution. We, however, worked in rural Iraq one year at a time, not an ideal world, and so couldn't agree on what was best to do.

Everyone did agree garbage was a problem, and it was obvious the solution was for someone to pick it up. But trash pickup was the archetypal example of everything that wasn't working with reconstruction. “If the trash isn't picked up soon,” said the Brigade Commander, “somebody will plant an IED in it and one of my boys will die. I'm going to pay people to pick up the trash now rather than wait for the Iraqi government.” It was a pragmatic approach to security but one that provided a disincentive for municipalities to discharge their responsibilities. As long as the United States would pay for trash pickup, why should the municipality? Using Coalition cash rather than Iraqi institutions set back efforts to foster self-reliance. Many small towns gave up lobbying the central government for money, knowing the Americans would pay for everything. Instead of encouraging growth and capacity of civic functions, our massive hemorrhaging of cash discouraged them. When we grew weary of paying or were diverted by some other shiny object, there was no one around to pick up the problem, and the trash piled up.

Complicating matters further, the contractors we employed often distorted local labor markets. The USAID inspector general found wages paid for trash pickup by its Community Stabilization Program were higher than the average for even skilled laborers. It was more lucrative to be overpaid by the United States to pick up trash than it was to run a shop or fix cars. Possibly people went out and found more trash to throw around so that they could be paid by us to pick it up. We overpaid for everything, creating and then fueling a vast market for corruption. It wasn't so much that we were conned, it was as if we demanded to be cheated and would not take no for an answer.

When Secretary of State Colin Powell warned President George W. Bush that after invading Iraq he would assume responsibility for thirty million people, it is doubtful anyone thought that years later the US government would be worrying about trash pickup in the central market of a rural town outside Baghdad. The maps consulted in dark, air-conditioned bunkers with blue arrows indicating an armored thrust had no strategy to offer for getting the garbage picked up. Had anyone known that nearby Baghdad produced eight thousand tons of trash a day, most of it now left uncollected just like in Yasmine's town, would we still have invaded? It was unlikely that anyone in the United States knew trash collection was now a major front in the Global War on Terror. To be honest, who cared about garbage in Iraq, except maybe the Iraqis who lived around the central market? They, after all, stayed in our war while we only visited.

There was no AC in Yasmine's office. One window had only busted-out glass, there was no electricity most of the time, and any AC unit would be stolen within the day. Near the end of our visit, Yasmine looked out the broken window at the garbage being picked over by goats in the heat and let out a sigh. Though Iraqis will shout their opinions at you in the street and wave their hands like a crack-crazed aerobics teacher to make a point, it was hard to sort out what they said from what they meant from what they thought you wanted to hear. Add in a bad translator who reduced three minutes of rapid speech to “He disagrees but loves all Americans and Obama president” and you often had no idea what was going on.

Yasmine spoke carefully, making sure the translator got it right. She was of an age, she said, where all she could remember were the wars with Iran in the 1980s, the long years of sanctions in the 1990s, and the US occupation from 2003. She asked when her daughter would lead a peaceful life. I thought she was talking to me, so I told her I didn't know and it was time for us to leave, as our security team said we had been in one place too long. Good-byes in these situations were always hasty and awkward, as the traditional final greetings and handshakes were hard to negotiate when everyone was pulling on their helmets and body armor, with the scratch of Velcro cutting through the exchange of formalities. Wearing that gear outside made a hot day even hotter, so it was nice to get back to the air-conditioning. Nothing was resolved with the trash pickup, but in the AC it seemed far away, for us at least, though maybe less so for Yasmine. She's still out there, we're still in here.

Water and Sewage

In a desert country like Iraq, nothing mattered more than water and its evil twin, sewage. Water was what allowed humans to live in the desert, and providing water and sewage facilities on a large scale had been the responsibility of the rulers of Mesopotamia since nearly prehistoric times. The United States eventually came to understand that providing such services was also part of our own responsibility and that configuring the nascent Iraqi government to take on these tasks was key to our counterinsurgency strategy.

With water on the brain, we once again mounted our armored convoy and drove off the FOB and into Iraq proper. The ride out to the vast nonworking sewage treatment plant took us through the usual postapocalyptic landscape, with ditches on each side of the road filled with greenish muck (neither water nor mud, and why was it green?).

The plant was built in 1963, and it had not been improved on since then. It processed no sewage; shit literally flowed right through it. Raw goop, possibly related to the green muck we saw in the ditches, poured untreated into the ancient Tigris. Back in 2004, when the war was still trendy and the Coalition of the Willing was still in play, the Belgians and the Japanese promised to rebuild the sewage plant and even committed a bunch of money. Belgian and Japanese engineering firms drew up plans, produced blueprints, and created a giant three-ring binder of bad English to describe what was to be done. A big problem in Iraq with water, sewage, and power delivery was measuring capacity (for example, how much water you had) and use (how much water you used). Under Saddam and continuing to this day, water and power were free (not socialism when we endorse it), so most facilities had no measuring devices. The capacity of the new plant was set to account for the projected population growth in Baghdad in the future, originally defined as 2027, later revised to 2005 to cut costs. It was far too expensive to have that much future. Then, the plant's future was put on hold altogether. The Belgians got out early, the Japanese engineers never visited the plant, and all sectarian hell broke loose.

Our sewage plant wasn't the only one that needed tending, as a large and growing proportion of Iraqis had no access to potable water. The early occupation authorities initially seemed to recognize the problem, and a $680 million cost-plus water reconstruction contract granted to Bechtel called for the water supply to be repaired within one year. The United States also selected Bechtel as the prime contractor for the bulk of the $4.6 billion in sewage projects funded by the occupation.
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Only nothing was ever done.

Early notice that reconstruction was not reviving Iraqi infrastructure came in December 2004 in a report issued by the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The report enumerated the ways the impact of US efforts in Iraq had been stunted. Only 27 percent of funding committed was actually spent on reconstruction per se. The rest was siphoned off, with 30 percent spent on security, 12 percent on insurance and international salaries, 10 percent on overhead, and 6 percent on profits. An additional 15 percent was lost to a standing line item in Iraq work—fraud, corruption, and mismanagement.
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The year 2004 was bad in general for water and sewage in Iraq. In a typical head-spinning strategy shift, the focus moved to security and oil production as State took over from the Coalition Provisional Authority. Work on water, sewage, and electricity was considered “too slow to have an immediate impact,” and so spending on those areas was deliberately cut by half.
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