We Meant Well (16 page)

2. Prohibitive electricity costs;

3. Lack of data on consumer demand and preference for fresh chicken;

4. Lack of competitiveness vis-à-vis frozen imports from Brazil and USA;

5. Lack of critical mass to achieve a break-even cost in slaughterhouse operations;

6. Lack of Integrated Poultry Farming to lower working capital requirements.

Working capital is a very high roadblock in poultry. Even though the growing cycle is only 7–8 weeks, farmers have to finance almost 5kg of feed for each bird. Electricity cost is probably $.12–$.15 per bird per cycle, and chicks cost $.70 each.

In the light of current circumstances Inma does not recommend the revitalization of the fresh poultry industry in Iraq as a priority until a proper cold chain is restored and affordable grid electricity available.

Despite the report's worrying conclusion that “there are no data on the size of the market for fresh chicken,” the Army and the State Department went ahead and built the poultry-processing plant on the advice of Major Janice. The Major acknowledged that we could not compete on price but insisted that “we will win by offering a fresh, locally grown product … which our research shows has a select, ready market.” Major Janice had got it wrong about having done market research suggesting a role for fresh halal chicken and had in fact ignored advice that said no data were available on such a market.

A now defunct blog set up to publicize the project dubbed it “Operation Chicken Run” and included one farmer's sincere statement, “I fought al Qaeda with bullets before you Americans were here. Now I fight them with chickens.” An online commentator named Jenn of the Jungle added to the blog, proudly declaring:

This right here is what separates America from the swill that is everyone else. We are the only ones who don't just go, fight a war, then say hasta la vista. We give fuzzy cute little baby chicks. I love my country.

So, to sum up: USAID/Inma recommended against the plant in 2008, no marketing survey was done, Major Janice claimed marketing identified a niche, a business plan was crafted around the wish, not the data, $2.58 million was spent, no chickens were being processed, and, for the record, al Qaeda was still in business. With this in mind, and the plant devoid of dead chickens, we probably want to wish Major Janice the best with her new ventures. Telemarketing? Refi sales? Nope, Major Janice left the Army, and the US Department of Agriculture in Baghdad hired her. Her new passion was cattle insemination, and we learned from her blog, “You don't just want semen from bulls whose parents had good dairy production. You may want good feet, good back conformation or a broad chest.” Just what you'd expect from a pile of bull.

Soon after my first chicken plant visit we played host to three Embassy war tourists. Unlike the minority who traveled out on real business, most people at the Embassy rarely, if ever, left the Green Zone during their one-year assignments to Iraq. They were quite content with that, happy to collect their war zone pay and hardship pay and hazardous duty pay while relaxing at the bar. Some did get curious and wanted to have a peek at this “Iraq” place they'd worked on for months, and so they ginned up an excuse to visit an ePRT.

A successful visit meant allowing them to take the pictures that showed they were out in the field but making them miserable enough that they wouldn't come back and annoy us again without a real reason. One gang of fun lovers from the Embassy who wrote about water issues in Iraq decided to come out to Indian Country. At the ePRT we needed to check on some of the wells we were paying for (i.e., to see if there was a hole in the ground where we'd paid for one; we faced a constant struggle to determine if what we paid for even existed), and so the opportunity was heaven sent. The bunch arrived fresh from the Green Zone, two women and a man. The women still wore earrings (we knew the metal got hot and caught on the headsets) and had their hair pulled back with scrunchies (anyone who had to live in the field cut it short). The guy was dressed for a safari, with more belts and zippers than Michael Jackson and enough pockets and pouches to carry supplies for a weekend. Everyone's shoes were clean. Some of the soldiers quietly called our guests gear queers.

Everywhere we stopped, we attracted a crowd of unemployed men and kids who thought we'd give them candy, so the war tourists got multiple photos of themselves in their chic getups standing next to Iraqis. They were happy. But because it was 110 degrees and the wells were located in distant dusty fields an hour away, after the first photo op or two the war tourists were quickly exhausted and filthy, meaning they were happy to not do it all again.

We took two more tourists back to the chicken plant: the Embassy's Deputy Chief of Mission (who proclaimed the visit the best day he'd ever had in Iraq, suggesting he needed to get out more often) and a journalist friend of General Odierno, who was thus entitled to VIP treatment. VIPs fly, not drive, and so tended to see even less than regular war tourists. Their visits were more highly managed so that they would stay on message in their blogs and tweets. It turns out most journalists are not as inquisitive as TV and movies would have you believe. Most are interested only in
a
story, not
the
story. Therefore, it was easy not to tell the journalist about the chicken plant problems. Instead, we had some chickens killed so the place looked busy. We had lunch at the slaughter plant—fresh roasted chicken bought at the market. The Iraqis slow roast it like the El Salvadorans do and it was juicy, with crisp skin. Served lightly salted, it simply fell apart in your mouth. We dined well and, as a bonus, consumed the evidence of our fraud.

Midcourse Correction

A thousand years ago, on day one at my ePRT, I had been outraged by Sheep for Widows, fuming over the obvious waste of $25,000 for something so unlikely to enhance the reconstruction of Iraq. In the intervening months, I'd had a fast tour through any number of projects that achieved the same level of uselessness, albeit at frighteningly higher costs in money, effort, and time. The PRTs had been working in Iraq for three years before I arrived, but you'd sooner be able to lick the back of your own neck, as the Iraqis would say when something was impossible, than see any real results or progress. I had expected a rational system in Iraq. Instead, what I found was a Wonderland-like game where the goal seemed to be to throw a stone into the water and make no ripples. I was beginning to understand the rules: Someone at the Embassy would create a Line of Effort that fit a political need in Washington. A PRT or an Army unit would think up a corresponding project at dinner, secure funding over the weekend, and hire a contractor by Tuesday. Iraqis would watch a million dollars fall from the sky and a milk collection center would pop up. Then we'd hold a ribbon-cutting ceremony and move on. Reconstruction was a lot like the war itself, almost existential. We fought the war because we were in Iraq to fight the war. We ran projects because we had money for projects.

In spite of myself, I had overcome my initial shock and awe at the titanic wastes of money I had become responsible for managing. Things that were surprising the first time around became business as usual by the third or the fifteenth repeat. Take the Ready-Made Clothing factory. We spent money to train local women to work there, hiring sewing teachers, paying rent on a building, buying sewing machines, and acquiring some other bits and bobs. We gave the big money to the factory owner, who pocketed $200,000 to turn all this into the Mahmudiyah Women's Sewing Training Center. We justified the expense by again claiming the project would “accelerate economic development by providing much needed skilled labor.” Someone reviewing the proposal wrote in the margin, “What will happen if these women are trained and the factory can't hire them?” That proved to be the key question, because as the $200,000 was spent, Chinese imports began arriving in Iraq, such that a shirt from our facility cost 10,000 dinars, while a shirt from China cost 3,000 dinars. The factory staff dwindled from a thousand to forty even as our training program ran its course. We turned unskilled, unemployed women into semiskilled, unemployed women. This outcome was better than our carpet-weaving training classes in the same neighborhood, which local gangsters co-opted, one even using children as “trainee” bonded workers until we shut them down.

Or take the Kuba beef-processing plant. There we spent $170,000 to build the plant before giving it to the man who owned the land. He did some beef processing for three months, then moved to Dubai and rented the plant to someone else. That person processed beef for three more months, then abandoned the plant entirely when his delivery truck broke down. Four extended families had moved into the abandoned plant and now lived there as squatters. Someone (it might have been us, we're checking) was still paying for a guard, whom we asked to meet. One of the squatters said the guard had a second job and so did not have time to spend at the plant. The soldiers pulling security for us gave candy to the kids who lived in our abandoned facility, all out of practiced habit.

There were also veterinary clinics, crucial to improving local agriculture, since healthier animals produced more meat and milk and bred better. At our clinic, medicinal solutions were stored in empty liter soda bottles because of a lack of clean glassware. Most medicines had run out; Saddam had ordered the last shipment under the UN Oil for Food program. Amazingly, the UN had just delivered some medicines ordered years earlier, though they had expired in 2008. The doctor said, “Under Saddam we at least got medicines once in a while. Now we are free, but we don't have medicine.” Nor did they have clean water. Our conversation:

ME:
How do you get water?

VET:
We dig a well.

ME:
How is the water?

VET:
It is too salty to use, so we throw it away after pumping it.

The staff instead bought water from a vendor and carried it in bottles to work. The head vet was an older woman who had majored in English. With an eye toward some future ePRT project, I asked her what the clinic needed most and she said, “For me to leave here and live in America. Give me a scholarship.”

Fed on this daily diet of absurdity, I became inured to doing little and expecting less, and it was gallows humor fun to mock art shows and make jokes about widows trying to eke out a living. I was agreeing to coast along, possessing sight but no vision.

The problem was that coasting wasn't good enough. I was going to have to fail more or at least spend more, spitting out black and white to swallow whole the overripe range of grays my position called for. The message was delivered Lima Charlie (loud and clear) when the Empire struck back, calling me into the Embassy for a come-to-Jesus session over my canceling the Sheep for Widows project. People had complained. Buccaneer sheiks were our friends. Widows were trending up. The staff whined to my boss that none of the previous team leaders had ever asked for costs and metrics. The staff reminded him that they had spent millions without a question being asked. Of course, these statements were true. Everybody did it. The State contractors did it, USAID did it, the Colonels did it. Our job was not to think in or out of the box but to retrace endlessly the outline of the box itself.

My boss laid out my many faults, speaking slowly, a common State Department habit left over from a lifetime of d e a l i n g w i t h f o r e i g n e r s. His boss had political ambitions, and so most of his sentences were guarded passive-aggressive barbs consisting of the words
mandate
,
robust
,
empower
, and
team building
. The two men spent an hour reviewing my performance as failing to meet their unillustrated standards, concluding that I should not bite the hand that fed us. My six team leader predecessors had found plenty of ways to spend money, after all, while the number of new projects I had initiated was lamentably low. My sector did not have a failing vocational school, as was then in vogue, our rug-making sweatshop had closed down, unemploying several indentured slave widows, and we had stopped putting money into the beef plant. The Army was keen on building a factory to make medical alcohol from dates after a hospital gases project imploded and I had failed to show enough false enthusiasm. The two bosses together were like the anti-Diogenes, shining a light into the moral darkness, looking for someone else to embrace their hallucinations of what State was to do in this place.

The words were officially correct and carefully chosen (“Leverage the power of our money to enhance the economy,” “Reach out with new projects, evaluating their success instead of criticizing their potential”), but what was unspoken was clear enough: “Stop making a fuss. No one cares about the money, we have lots of money, and
not
spending it angers people. We all know we are not going to really change much in Iraq, so just do your year in the desert. Don't bring us down with you. We all have careers to consider.”

My boss closed the meeting by mentioning that he would soon retire from State into a consultant job with the Army, advising on future Iraq reconstruction projects at, I imagined, about double his current salary. His boss was due back in Washington for Senate confirmation hearings that would see him appointed Ambassador to a strategically important country. Me, having been reeducated, I was dismissed back to the field to try to do better.

The Embassy Lawn, Where the Grass Is Always Greener

The World's Biggest Embassy (104 acres, twenty-two buildings, thousands of staff members, a $116 million vehicle inventory), physically larger than the Vatican, was a sign of our commitment, at least our commitment to excess. “Along with the Great Wall of China,” said the Ambassador, “it's one of those things you can see with the naked eye from outer space.”
31
The newly opened Embassy was made up of large office buildings, the main one built around a four-story atrium, with overhead lights that resembled sails. If someone had told us there was a Bath and Body Works in there, we would not have thought it odd.