EDITOR'S NOTE: In the last few years, I've read a lot of stuff on our situation in Iraq, both pro and con. Most remarkable are the following observations of Iraq outside Baghdad as experienced by a U.S. Marine Corps officer who preferred to remain anonymous for obvious reasons. I am grateful to friends in San Francisco for sending me his notes.
The following notes are, and should be understood to be, my own personal opinions and observations, and do not represent the opinions of my command or the Marine Corps in any way. Moreover, they are based on my own personal experiences over one month, a very small amount of time, in a very small part of Iraq that may or may not be representative of other parts of the country or the country as a whole.
It's easy to understand now why the Iraqi Problem seemed so schizophrenic and baffling from back home. Republicans trumpet the success of the surge, the reductions in violence, the advances in security, the high-tech wizardry available to our troops. Democrats bemoan the abysmal political quagmire, the incompetence of the Iraqi Security Forces, and the difficulties faced by service members in their everyday life.
Well, it's all true. Like a John Edwards campaign speech gone Koranic - there are two Iraqs, and we're stuck right in the middle of them.
The first Iraq is a pretty nice place to spend a few months of my life. I go on early morning patrols and watch the day break over idyllic hand-plowed fields, well-kempt orchards, a picture-postcard palm grove framed against the sanguine Euphrates. Jefferson would be proud. Throughout the day I wander through little villages, making nice with cute little kids who pester me for chocolate and pencils and try valiantly to pronounce my name. Their parents offer me chai. Sometimes they feed my men, but never ever accept payment in return.
In this Iraq, the City Council meets every Wednesday, the electricity and water works, the market is open six days a week, and there are 400 Iraqi Police on the rolls.
But the devil is in the details my friends, and there are a whole lot of missing details in the second Iraq.
The second Iraq is blanketed in garbage. Pervasive, omnipresent, unchecked filth. There are no garbage cans anywhere, because when something is no longer needed, it is simply dropped on the ground, anytime, any place. The landscape is littered with car hulks, boat hulks, abandoned houses, rusted motors. Outside of the four corners of the inside of their homes, Iraqis could care less about their physical surroundings. Broken windows are a status symbol - they mean you're wealthy enough to buy glass. Rudy Giuliani would lose his mind here.
Those cute little villages are filled with children who have never seen a toothbrush a single day in their lives, men who won't work, women who can't read. What little work does get done, almost entirely subsistence agriculture, is done by the women, who carry bales of hay on their backs while their little ones play in the dirt around their feet. There are no gynecologists because women hardly go to school and God forbid a Muslim man see a Muslim woman naked. Health care is next to nonexistent.
The roads are abysmal, and it takes twice as long to get anywhere because every mile there's another serpentine barrier in front of another Iraqi Police checkpoint. The checkpoints get shot at almost every night.
The city council? It was simply invented by the unit that came before us, so they could have somebody, anybody to work with. As such, it's a collection of the richest, most morally malleable charlatans, sycophants and rogues the town has to offer. It is common knowledge that the most powerful man in the town got that way by murdering his competition. But since he's such a go-getter, now he's one of our go-to guys. The normal agenda of the weekly meeting is to squabble over who's nephew will get which contract that the Marine Corps has to offer this week. Without American contracts, I do not see what economy would exist in this place.
Those 400 Iraqi Police? They're mostly former Al Qaeda, a fact that everyone politely ignores. You might wonder how a town of 20,000 subsistence farmers can afford a police force of 400. The easy answer is that they simply don't get paid. You might ask why a man would work for a year with no pay. The easy answer is that there simply are no other jobs to be found.
And you can hardly call it work, anyway. At night they sleep on their post. They have one rifle for every 10 men. They have no gas to run their generators and light up their checkpoints, unless we give them gas, and unless I send my mechanic to their station to fix their generator. Even then, they siphon most of the gas off and sell it onthe black market. And how does a former-insurgent-turned-policeman live for a year with no salary? Extortion. Kidnapping. Bribes. The usual.
The police chief tells me that they can't get paid because they can't afford the $300 a head bribe it requires to get on the Ministry of the Interior's roster.
And the electricity is wonderful, at least when it's turned on. With a little luck, on a good day, that can be as many as four hours. No electricity means no water. No water means... well, I already mentioned the whole toothbrush thing.
Every single Iraqi I've talked to wants me to pay them to let someone else solve their problem. The police want us to give them a "bonus." The people want us to fix their irrigation, fix their schools, pave their roads, build them soccer fields. There's always an angle.Everyone wants something for nothing.
I would talk about the challenges we face as Marines, but I don't want to go into opsec territory. Suffice it to say, that few things are as good as they're cracked up to be - and that things left sitting inIraq for years at a time tend to crack up, a lot.
It is incontrovertibly true that the security situation here in Iraq has dramatically improved over the last year. Credit the sheikhs. Credit the surge. Credit dumb luck. Who cares. The point is that the security situation here is better than manageable - it's good. That sounds like a good thing, but it may not be. The pressure is off of the government to clean up this mess. Everyone knows that if the police actually quit on Friday, like they keep on telling me they're going to, the Marines will just pick up their slack. We prop up their security, we prop up their economy, we prop up their government.
As long as we prop it all up, there is no incentive to do anything other than take the system for a ride for all it's worth. And that's exactly what every politician in this country in their right mind is doing, from the city council member on up.
But if we left them right now, this whole house of cards would come crashing down just as fast as Al Qaida came crashing back in.
So the devil's in the dilemma - should we prop up this fragile,welfare-state status quo, indefinitely, in the name of security and peace - or should we give the Iraqis some tough medicine, knowing that their failure would be seen as our failure too?
Hey, you tell me. I just work here. At least I get paid.
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