The Iraqi joke goes something like this:
A young Iraqi boy runs into his family's Baghdad home yelling "Mother, Mother! Father was in the garden watering plants and he got electrocuted!" and the mother says, "Praise be to God... We have electricity!"
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FOB Falcon, the base that I've called home for the past six months, is being closed down.
As most of you are probably aware, September 1st was the deadline for the last "combat troops" to leave Iraq. As of 1 September we have officially ended Operation Iraqi Freedom (the American joke goes something like this: They were going to call it Operation Iraqi Liberation until they thought about the acronym...) and are surging forward into Operation New Dawn, which does not form a catchy acronym of any kind. New Dawn is meant to be characterized by the end of combat operations, the presence of "Advisory and Assistance Brigades", and transfer of full responsibility to the Iraqi government, as the US takes a supporting role. Reconstruction is now meant to be civilian-led, though judging from the number of State Department-hired Xe (Blackwater's new monkier) goons who shared the C-130 ride into Baghdad with me, it looks security will be buttressed in other ways. It's also characterized by the closing of bases, and their transferral to the Iraqi Security Forces. Which is exactly what we were doing with Falcon, as I started writing this email.
As we were packing up the office, I walked outside to see two thick-biceped soldiers from Civil Affairs at the small gazebo outside our office. They were taking sandbags, piled two- or three-high around the outside of the structure, and emptying their contents onto the ground. I grinned.
"Have we determined that there is no longer a credible threat to the gazebo?" (Full disclosure: I'd never really understood why we hand sandbags there in the first place.)
The soldiers paused and looked at me, the sand still draining out of the sacks in their hands. " Well, since the Iraqi Army is moving into this base eventually, command asked us to knock this down. It's leaning."
I cock my head and squint at the gazebo. It is leaning. But just slightly, maybe 4 or 5 degrees, depending on how you looked at it. We'd spent long nights sitting in that gazebo smoking shisha, hammering out ideas, bantering about the day. I'd hidden lighters in it's rafters and clambered on it to retreive them.
"It's not going to fall over, and it's a waste to destroy it, isn't it? Anyway, are you convinced that the IA is going to build something more structurally sound?"
The soldiers continued their work. This what they were told to do, they said. And so, unquestioning, they were doing it.
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It takes an enormous amount of work to close a base. Up-armored convoys were going out every day, lugging giant metal boxes filled to their tops with equipment of all sorts. Much of what is there, the US cannot take home. There are fields of trailers being sold off by the US Army to Iraqi dealers at junkyard prices, who then in turn sell them to local Iraqi civilians. The same goes for bunkbeds, conference room furniture, rolls of wire, generators, air conditioners... anything the Army doesn't deem worth sending home. Even when we've packed up everything worth keeping, and sold everything worth selling, the detritus of the occupation will end up remaining in the rooms we abandoned. The shelves of our storeroom were vacant apart from a few empty shell casings, a busted neon yellow Nike running shoe, several Christmas-themed tins, and a year-old US Weekly magazine mouring the death of Brittany Murphy on the cover. I can't imagine what other artifacts will be found on base when it is re-occupied.
Our Iraqi partners are doing their absolute best to capitalize on our flight from the base. The good folks from Beekeeping for Widows (the almost Python-esquely named Provincial Reconstruction Team project) took most of our office furniture, loading up pickup trucks so high that they had to be tied down with string, and even then they looked precarious. A major from our local Iraqi Army division raided the Information Operations closet, taking stacks upon stacks of leaflets, handbills, tip cards, posters, as well as boxes of children's backpacks and soccer balls. The US Army major in charge of the room just looked blankly at the young IA minions carrying off the supplies. "You know," he said, "we've given out so many soccer balls in this country that every kid should have ten. They should be littering the streets and blocking drains. I have no idea where it all went."
The groups we work with, be it the Iraqi security forces or NGOs, are all accutely aware of our imminent withdrawal. When asked what he would do with the 20,000 posters he requested, the Iraqi major said, quite honestly, "We are stockpiling. We know that when you leave, we won't have these resources anymore. So we have to get as much as we can, and we have to get it now."
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There's frustration, there's disillusionment, and there's malaise.
It's spread thick across our brigade, and I'd imagine the other brigades in country. The frustration: The Iraqi Army is now in charge of security operations, and while that's the goal, there's no way of insuring that they'll do anything with the information, support, or equipment that the US provides them. Over 1,000 warrent support packages have been sent to the IA this year so far, but there's no record anywhere of how many of these packets have been used, or how many of these individuals have been convicted. Missions can be arranged, coordinated, locations scouted and planned, men mustered, and the IA can simply not show up. The disillusionment: The standard line you hear from soldiers and staff is "Well, we haven't accomplished it in the past seven years, I doubt we're going to accomplish it before we leave Iraq." You can apply this to the water/electricity crisis (see above joke, apologies for the black humor) or almost any other larger scale reconstruction project here. The malaise: The brigade leaves at the very beginning of December. Part of my job is assessing brigade needs and trying to assist them with their questions or the tasks they want to accomplish in Baghdad before they redeploy. The standard answer there? Just get through the next 62 days. Not that anyone's counting. They say that this is one war that has been fought seven times. In November a new brigade will arrive who have never worked in the Baghdad area before, and we will start the war all over again.
I spent the afternoon with a prominent Iraqi sheikh in the area I'm currently working in. He hosted us for an enormous meal of grilled lamb, chicken, spiced rice, okra, vegetables, soups, and fresh bread, all laid out on giant platters. As we sat down, stuffed, to drink tea and get to the meat of the meeting, the commander asked the sheikh about the increase in assassinations of leaders in the area - government officers, sheikhs, Sons of Iraq, soldiers and policemen have all been targeted throughout Iraq. The sheikh shook his head and said, "You know, with the government not formed yet, it's not just the terrorists trying to get ahead; the political parties are out there too. At times it's impossible to tell the difference. We don't know who is behind the killing anymore." He told us that he awaits the day that he's kidnapped or detained by the government on faulty intelligence. At a certain point it becomes clear that this hospitality is one part traditional Middle Eastern hospitality, one part insurance that if he does disappear, the US Army will come looking after him. With the drawdown and the US stepping back to leave the Iraqi Security Forces in control, there was no guarentee that we could even do that.
Agreed Ken but BC
Originally Posted by John T. Fishel
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