We Meant Well (2 page)

But saying so couldn't make it true. The whole of reconstruction was plagued by problems from the start.

For the first years of the war, the military had run reconstruction on its own, albeit haphazardly. The Army conceptualized the work as doing a few favors for the locals, such as vaccinating farm animals or handing out candy, enough to tame the wilderness. State had a much bigger mandate, nothing less than raising up an economically sound, democratic Iraq. The differences in mission and approach would dog the PRT program for its entire sad life.

Complicating matters was that the reconstruction effort was fragmented and understaffed. By July 2007, sixty-two US government agencies were involved in the project. When General David Petraeus took over the war in Iraq, his advisers identified eight major coordination bodies at the Embassy in Baghdad. “We have an underdeveloped Iraqi bureaucracy and an overdeveloped US bureaucracy,” one Petraeus adviser observed. On the ground we were spread far too thin for so daunting a mission. The East Rasheed ePRT, for example, had to serve a population the size of Detroit with a staff of six. The ePRT in southern Baghdad had eight people from State embedded with 3,700 soldiers tending to one million Iraqis.

Raw number of personnel aside, properly staffing the PRTs and ePRTs with the right mix of people proved to be the greatest challenge of all. The Department of State struggled to field adequate numbers of qualified employees from among its own ranks, forcing the creation of an army of contractors, called 3161s after the name of the legislation in 5 USC 3161 that created their hiring program. They were supposed to be SMEs (pronounced smee, not s-m-e), subject matter experts, a term that became a part of the war's large lexicon of ironic phrases. “Iraq is not for amateurs,” said Ambassador Chris Hill in Baghdad, though it was mostly amateurs whom the State Department found.
4
The main criterion for hiring seemed to be an interest in living in Iraq for a year with a $250,000 salary and three paid vacations, and so that took a front seat to any actual skills. In the enthusiasm to staff up, most of these people were hired without interviews, directly off their often wobbly résumés. Though some of the 3161s turned out to be talented, it was more by luck, personal pluck, or accident than by design. State assigned people roles based on merit badges earned: a former local council member became a senior governance adviser, while a female gym teacher from the Midwest morphed into a women's empowerment programmer. Imagine the old Andy Hardy movies, where the kids' enthusiasm was supposed to make up for the lack of costumes and props.

The need for 3161s to live on a military base also skewed hiring toward former military, nearly self-defeating the idea of providing a civilian side to the reconstruction. The Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) in its review of the PRTs' first year of operation found an Army veterinarian developing agriculture programs, an aviation maintenance manager as a PRT coleader, and advisers to Iraqi provincial governors who included a former Navy submariner, an ultrasound technician, and a Drill Sergeant. PRTs were short of personnel who could best assist Iraqis in developing the capacity to administer the economy, establish the rule of law, and foster good governance, often because the 3161s didn't know how to do these things either. Language was also a problem, as almost none of the 3161s spoke any Arabic. As the State Department did not provide language training, the grand total of Arabic speakers among the 610 PRT personnel deployed in mid-2007 was 29.

Added to the mix were a few genuine State Department FSOs. The first wave was a rare bunch, folks interested in adventure, danger junkies, a few serious Arabists eager to try out their skills. However, with only several thousand FSOs worldwide (even today there are more military band members than FSOs) and embassies and consulates to staff all around the world, State quickly ran out of the relatively small pool of happy few volunteers. What to do?

The Vietnam CORDS program was the last time the Department of State “directed” Foreign Service Officers into positions abroad that they did not want to take. The program's name was invoked in whispered conversations all over Foggy Bottom as the Department tried to drum up the next wave of volunteers for Iraq. A small minority of FSOs objected politically to doing anything to support the Bush wars of choice, but really, most of us were just unsure of our role, untrained in how to survive in war, and unclear what the point was anyway. FSOs thus initially stayed away. For political reasons, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was loath to ask Congress for additional, new Foreign Service Officer positions. With the volunteer pool empty and no new FSOs forthcoming that could be tasked to Iraq, all that was left was option number three, to deploy a carrot and stick against existing personnel. This is where I came in.

My side of State was removed from the high-level WikiLeaky things ambassadors did and changed very little between administrations. We worked with Americans who were victims of crime abroad, helping them get home. We took care of folks who got arrested and evacuated people caught up in earthquakes and coups. This was the benign side of empire, the ability to care for our citizens pretty much anywhere in the world. Despite the enthusiasm for the new PRT idea at the higher levels, the rank and file of the State Department like me were unsure if this was right for us. We were ready to hop in after the shooting was over but would do what we could to avoid a fight. Yes, 9/11 had changed everything, we'd heard that, but the concept of inserting us into the middle of a war did not sit well.

Things got serious after State changed personnel rules to make it nearly impossible to get promoted without an Iraq (or Afghanistan, now also Pakistan) tour and added some financial incentives such as special danger pay. With these carrots and sticks, discord was tamped down, the conservative pundits were put back in their cages (Michelle Malkin in particular suggested someone should slap the “weenie and whiner FSOs” who refused to serve in Iraq), and the FSOs were lined up for the surging PRT program without anyone's having to be forced to go, sort of.
5

I had never served in the Middle East and knew nothing about rebuilding past the Home Depot guides, but people like me were what the Department had been dealt to play this game. The new rules boxed me into serving or seeing my career flatline. Less cynically, despite my reservations about the war, I still believed in the idea of service (love the warrior, hate the war) and wanted to test myself. I also needed the money, and so the nexus of duty, honor, terrorism, and my oldest daughter's college tuition (hopefully there'll be another war when my youngest is college age) led another FSO into semivoluntarily joining The Cause. Between war and peace lies reconstruction and I would try to do my part.

*   *   *

But first, training, or so I thought. Despite the enormity of our task and the stated importance to the interests of the United States, preparation for PRT duty was amazingly brief, all of three weeks. Week One was five days of what we called Islam for Dummies, a quick overview of the religion with some pointers on “Arab” culture (dudes kiss, no serving bacon, no joking about God). Some mention of Sunnis and Shias was made but the conflict came off more like a sports rivalry than open warfare. The instructor was former military and sounded a lot like Dr. Phil, which was very comforting. It felt like we would be holding an intervention for the war, forcing it to confront its shortcomings—“Tell him, tell him to his face, you are a bad war. You disappointed me, war.” Dr. Phil also gave us our only Arabic language training, ninety minutes of handy phrases and greetings.

Week Two was an overview of the simple spreadsheets and database we'd use to track millions of dollars of project grants, plus a negotiating session where a local Iraqi American was called in to pretend to be a town mayor. He asked for a bribe and then gave me permission to build a dam (in Iraq I never built any dams and there were no mayors in the small towns I visited). Since the class included both longtime State employees and our new contractor colleagues, we all sat politely through a dreary session on how an embassy works. Since there was nothing Middle Eastern in the neighborhood, the class went out as a group to lunch at a Chinese restaurant. Really good pork buns.

Week Three took place at an undisclosed location in West Virginia where we learned defensive driving skills (none of us ever drove on the streets of Iraq) and had a weapons familiarization course (all FSOs in Iraq were unarmed). The last time I punched someone was in junior high school. I was never in the military. I had at that moment never fired a weapon. A Real Man with a biker beard, angry tats, an NYPD baseball cap, and serious sunglasses loaded a weapon (I called them guns then) and carefully placed it in my hands. He kept his own veined, masculine paws on the cold steel, helped me aim it at a very nearby target, and then told me to pull the trigger. He did this for our group of about twenty-five State Department employees. After each shot, without looking at the target or the shooter, the Man said, “Hit, good shot,” and took the weapon back to prepare for the next person.

After only fifteen school days I was fully trained to lead an ePRT in the midst of a shooting war. Missing from the training was any history of the war and our policy, any review of past or current reconstruction projects, any information on military organization, acronyms, and rank structure, any lessons learned from the previous years' work, or any idea of what the hell a PRT was and what our job was going to be. They never told us anything about what we were supposed to do once we got there. What we did get was a firm handshake from Dr. Phil and a ride to the airport. I was off to Iraq.

Inhaling: Arriving in Iraq

I showed up at the airport with an absurd amount of luggage, not knowing what to take to a war. The clerk at the counter saw my new boots and one-way ticket to Kuwait and helpfully asked, “Are you a soldier?” She quickly explained that soldiers do not have to pay to check extra luggage. I stammered out a “yes” to save some money, leaving for later the philosophical questions of who exactly it was that was going to Iraq and whether I could truthfully claim to be fighting for my country.

We landed with a thump in the dusky Kuwaiti evening fourteen hours later. I was ass deep in this now, with a feeling of inevitability that was uncomfortable, unfamiliar, overwhelming. At the same time, the inevitability was cathartic, sort of the way fear dissipates just after you jump off the high board. I did not know them then, but all around me were the people I would live with for a year in Iraq: the carpetbaggers, the Iraqi American prospectors, the tired divorced contractors making $250K a year, the odd soldier coming back from emergency leave, the newbies trying to look old, the burned-out third timers, the Third World slavers, and the mad, mad young ones desperate to burn off their youth in an adventure that would likely not end well. This was not something you got into, it was something you ended up in. Some may have been on their first trip abroad, others held golden frequent-flier status such that they were practically allowed to pilot the plane if they wished. I wanted the air to feel electric and for people to ask me who I was and why I was there, but the air was dry and nobody cared who else was present—a crowd of the lost milling toward a sad guy whose job it was to hold a cardboard sign telling us where to go next. Unlike the military, who deployed by unit, we walked in, and later out, alone.

I was scooped up by people working for Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), the mega contracting firm connected to Dick Cheney's Halliburton. KBR's Kuwait staff were big-bellied crackers wearing sports team ball caps, blue jeans with belts and suspenders, all fat as Shetland ponies. The Clampetts had occupied Kuwait. They walked around the airport looking for fresh meat, me, like lumpy islands in a smooth sea of wealthy, perfumed Kuwaitis in their white man dresses and headgear. KBR had created a fiercely huge but inefficient organism to process us into Iraq. The task seemed simple: move us passengers from the commercial airport to the US Air Force base hidden in the Kuwaiti desert so we could get on a military flight to Baghdad. The base was a legacy from when the United States invaded Kuwait after chasing out the invading Iraqis in 1991. We followed the KBR guy like ducklings, dragging luggage as part of the parade. We gathered at the immigration counter, split up, reassembled on the other side, and gathered and split for processing a few more times until we were outside in the dark, waiting for a line of Econoline vans. The van ride was forty-five minutes in darkness, the only noise the squalling radio the KBR driver used to shout things like “Departing!” and “On Route Tampa!” at a volume that made me think he did not understand what the radio part did and was trying to make his voice carry.

If I had been able to sleep I would have jerked awake when the van stopped. It was seriously black dark, and while I generally knew what time the plane had landed, there was no way to tell what time it really was anymore. I stumbled off the van with everyone else, amazed to see ground under my feet. I scuffed sand on my boots so they looked less new (they still looked new). The KBR guys herded us into a huge hangar that might have been purgatory, if God drove a Greyhound. Hundreds of beaten-down recliner chairs lined up as if facing a distant screen, with the ambience of a bowling alley snack bar. Soldiers, civilians, and probably actual gypsies were sleeping or sitting upright, staring at nothing. The place smelled of sweat and sand. Cletus moved us from station to station, each pause accomplishing something small I did not understand—hand over ID card, get it back, walk over there and fill out a form, walk somewhere else and repeat 90 percent of the process, everything done by hand, on paper. I was thrown a helmet and body armor ripe with someone else's sweat, black and greasy at the collar, wrote my name on a piece of duct tape, and stuck it to my chest as told, and then, suddenly, it was time to wait.