IRAQ - From One Who Was There

This is from someone who was THERE, trying to do the job, her best. She is not a "back-seat quarterback" with uninformed or politically-slanted opinion.

"The Blame Game" by CATHERINE ROSS, New York Times 9/1/2010

With the declared end of combat operations in Iraq arrives a period of reflection and review, of praise and blame. The manufactured nature of this turning point notwithstanding, we can’t help trying to sum the seven years up into nice, neat summaries. A few of these list signs of hope and progress, but many highlight points of failure.

In the deluge of review and reflection, an Associated Press headline grabbed my attention yesterday: “U.S. Wasted Billions in Rebuilding Iraq.” When I read it, my heart sank. The article was a litany of infrastructure projects that fell short of expectations, or that sit incomplete and unusable at this very moment. Despite the passage in President Obama’s speech last night praising the country’s troops, the article left me feeling disappointed and personally affronted, because executing those types of projects comprised my primary mission during my 12-month deployment to Iraq. It hurt to read the headline, even as I knew there was truth to it.

It’s no fun to play the blame game, but facing such depressing conclusions, I can’t help myself. Yes, many projects fell short for a myriad of reasons, but it wasn’t for lack of trying or for a lack of good intentions. I was part of a four-soldier civil affairs team attached to an infantry battalion, with most of our deployment spent in Mosul. My team and I were responsible for infrastructure assessments and reconstruction, as well as repairing and equipping Iraqi police stations in the eastern half of the city and outlying towns.

We regularly met with local leaders, school principals and teachers, medical facility personnel, police, and residents. We strove to make their priorities for reconstruction and ours one and the same. We were constantly limited by our budget, on which we were expected to complete as many projects as possible. In turn, those projects had to fall within the areas that our commanders deemed would have the most bang for the buck.

With such a large area of responsibility, my team would split up on most days — two of us staying at the FOB to meet with locals who showed up at our gate, and two of us outside the wire with a security element, conducting assessments. There were times we were so stretched, I would perform as a one-soldier-assessment-team with a platoon-sized security element, “hitting” up to six different facilities in a day, while at least one or two of my teammates was also out with another security element, conducting even more assessments. When we were outside the wire assessing or checking up on ongoing projects, we were writing reports about what we saw, tracking everything on endless spreadsheets and Power Point presentations, meeting with local government officials to coordinate our priorities, and submitting project proposals for funding.

Throughout all of this, my team was incredibly fortunate to have two excellent Iraqi engineers working with us. Through them, we were able to solicit and screen bids from Iraqi contractors to repair and rebuild the facilities that were deemed priorities for CERP (Commander’s Emergency Response Program) and other funds that we were permitted to use. After a contract was awarded, we had our engineers help us check on the progress of all our projects, to make sure the contractors were using proper construction techniques and quality materials. As locals, they were able to catch when a contractor had sub-contracted out a project to someone with poor skills or standards. No one on my team was an expert in construction, so having our Iraqi engineers help maintain accountability was instrumental in getting things done properly.

Our engineers were extremely hard-working men who worked in the office we set up for them inside our base nearly every day. I don’t mention our Iraqi engineers by name perhaps out of habit. They both took huge risks in working with us — many became targets for insurgents.

Towards the end of our time in Iraq, one of our Iraqi engineers was kidnapped somewhere between the F.O.B. and his home. He was missing for several days, but was thankfully released and able to go home. I don’t know all of the circumstances because we were not able to talk to him directly about what happened — he never returned to the FOB after that. His kidnappers had warned him not to work with us Americans anymore, threatening his family should he fail to comply. Our other engineer made a valiant effort to help us wrap up some projects, but he had been spooked and we couldn’t ask him to keep coming to work, so he quit.

It was a heartbreaking end to what had been a wonderful working relationship. We had shared meals with these men, traded stories about our families, found things to laugh about even moments after a barrage of mortars.

For me, there’s no simple explanation as to why there are failures on the reconstruction balance sheet. There is only frustration. When you are trained to do civil affairs, you are taught that it is a job to be executed after combat operations have ended, not while they are going on. To be tasked with rebuilding a country and winning hearts and minds — even as more damage to infrastructure was taking place and more lives were being lost — was challenging, but we did our best.