Winds has featured many first-person accounts of post-invasion Iraq. While anecdotal, the picture they paint are useful in appreciating conditions on the ground. Besides Michael Totten's dispatches, Callimachus has presented "Kat's" two part account of operations at a Baghdad-based Western firm working on reconstruction projects. We've recommended this 2/06 IEEE Spectrum article on the Iraqi electrical grid.
Adventure writer Jon Evans has posted Blood, Bullets, Bombs, and Bandwidth on his website. Best I can tell, this is an expanded and updated account that he originally wrote for Wired. The linked version seems to date from mid-2005.
Opening 'graph:
Ryan Lackey wears body armor to business meetings. He flies armed helicopters to client sites. He has a cash flow problem: he is paid in hundred-dollar bills, sometimes shrink-wrapped bricks of them, and flowing this money into a bank is difficult. He even calls some of his company's transactions "drug deals" – but what Lackey sells is Internet access. From his trailer on Logistics Staging Area Anaconda, a colossal US Army base fifty miles north of Baghdad, Lackey runs Blue Iraq, surely the most surreal ISP on the planet. He is 26 years old.
And Evans' conclusion:
One of the few things Ryan and Tyler agree on is their scorn for America's attempt to secure and rebuild Iraq. Tyler rages that the US military "couldn't bother to protect" the road between Baghdad and Anaconda, or even the four-kilometre stretch between Baghdad International and the Green Zone. And he found that when most other Americans dealt with Iraqis, "they were very insulting, they were often very condescending, and in many cases I felt that they treated them like subhumans."I was struck by the picture Evans paints of the U.S. reacting to the successful initiatives of our enemies. In the run-up and the aftermath of the invasion, planners did not mind Gen. Franks' oft-used aphorism, the enemy gets a vote. Of course, most of the U.S. media never knew, and still don't care. Note, for example, the routine use of the passive voice ("a minibus rigged with explosives detonated on a busy street") in this typical AP account from April 17th. Bombs "go off" in Baghdad for inscrutable reasons--rather than as the organized centerpieces of mercilessly crafted political campaigns.Both of them lament the sorry state of the electrical system. "Not having power was probably the single biggest problem that created animosity among Iraqis," Ryan says. "The US tried to rebuild it in the Western industrialized-country model. The way Iraqis install a power system is, they put a bunch of small generators on neighbourhood blocks, with power cables running to everyone's house, and just sell them access directly. And it's easy to have a market-driven pricing mechanism. But the US solution was to give large US companies business here … If they'd had electricity working within a month or two of the invasion, there probably wouldn't have been near as much violence."
Iraqis desperately want to work. "You don't see people begging for money. You see people selling gas for money, selling cigarettes by the side of the road," Ryan says. Tyler agrees: "I interviewed a lot of people, and I never met one that wasn't so painfully eager it almost hurt to turn them away." But their economy remains paralyzed.
"The best way to deal with terrorism in the long run is to fix the underlying conditions that create terrorism," Ryan says. "It's difficult to fix their ideology, but it's easy to fix their infrastructure. But the US has done a bad job … It's like a feedback loop. They got on the wrong side of the feedback loop." Iraqi frustration breeds insurgents; insurgent violence cripples reconstruction efforts; and the resulting lack of power, communications, finances, and jobs breeds more frustration.
In the face of this feedback loop, American forces have withdrawn into heavily guarded enclaves. SSI's modern, globalized, best-of-both-worlds strategy, bringing Americans and Iraqis together to help rebuild the shattered country, has faltered. Blue Iraq's neo-colonial approach, living and working exclusively on military bases, continues to thrive. The seeds Tyler has helped to plant – a team of crack engineers still erecting dishes around the country – may someday help drag Iraq into the 21st century, one satellite link at a time. But not until the rain of insurgent bombs and bullets has ended. And neither Ryan nor Tyler expects that to happen for years.
Blog readers can, if they choose, read about the battle space as it appears to Westerners and Iraqis in Iraq. They can discern the not-very-hidden hands of Al Qaeda and elements of the Iranian government in shaping that space. I suspect that narratives of mystifying, terrible, and depressing carnage obscure this basic point to many newspaper readers.
Accounts like Evans' won't tell us what the least-bad policy options are for Iraq. But they do help to inform us about the realities of the situation there.
Keeping electricity flowing in a large war zone to which both parties have access, where one party is determined to sabotage and destroy transmission and generation infrastructure, has never been achieved, AFAIK. But the local generator is a non-starter as a general solution. For one thing, it merely pushes the bottleneck over to the fuel supply side; for another, it is a very limited resource which cannot scale up to handle commercial or industrial requirements except very briefly and locally. And generators are just as easy to take out as power lines.
So if the national grid can't be restored and protected, it's a no-win situation. In fact, it's of a piece with general civil security, which has ALWAYS been target #1 or #2 of the insurgents/militias, except insofar as they can provide it under their "protection" schemes and ultimatums to local populations. So they will have to be stopped and defeated both at the top and in detail. So the only operative question boils down to: "Who can and will achieve that?"
Good points, Brian H.
However, it seems to me that the CPA did not make a large effort to identify the likely problems and the stakeholders. They agreed to the metric, "we'll prove our success by providing a more reliable grid." An invitation to our enemies to cripple the grid (which they would have attacked anyway)--"look, fellow Iraqis, the Americans promise but don't deliver."
Seems to me (from this distance) as though most Iraqis viewed/view electric supply problems as a contest between Americans and Insurgents--no feeling of "those SOBs are attacking our grid!" Neighborhood-based generation has a lot of problems, but it does potentially have the advantage of drawing clearer cause-and-effect lines. "Advancing the cause of the Glorious Jihad" by making it impossible for your mother to use a room fan just doesn't have that sparkle.
As the IEEE article linked shows, there was never a clear plan for long-term reconstruction of the grid in the face of an active insurgency--only the hope that pouring lots of money into short-term fixes would help to dissapate resistance. It seems to me that, under these circumstances, it was extremely risky and unwise of the Administration to present grid performance as a main metric of success.
Electricity reconstruction has been nothing short of a disaster. Are the obstacles high? Definately. But sadly we dont get to pick and choose which vital projects we get to tackle. There is just no honest way to look at the situation and believe the US has given anything like our best effort to deal with this issue. The only counterargument i've really seen is that its such an intractible problem that we might as well half ass it. That to me is unacceptable. Maybe its an impossible situation (i refuse to believe that of the greatest industrial superpower to ever exist) but even so we have dont nothing to prove that one way or another. Our efforts have been halting, ill coordinated, underfunded, undersupervised, and never remotely prioritized. The nation that built a victory ship a day could certainly lay cable as fast as insurgents can blow it up if we had a mind- we could do it without breaking a sweat. We could build 100x more power stations and refineries than Iraq needs just to be redundant. We could do any number of things- but the honest answer is we havent really tried very hard. Its never been anything like a national priority.
Mark, you missed the point entirely. NO construction can withstand nightly bombing and mortaring, etc. So you eventually have to take out the bombers. More "effort" to do more or better construction is not gonna cut it, and never was.
AL,
"Blog readers can, if they choose, read about the battle space as it appears to Westerners and Iraqis in Iraq. They can discern the not-very-hidden hands of Al Qaeda and elements of the Iranian government in shaping that space. I suspect that narratives of mystifying, terrible, and depressing carnage obscure this basic point to many newspaper readers."
Rallying the troops to seek more "evildoers" to slay? Why not focus on those who are actually fighting us, rather than making new enemies. The Sunni insurgency constitutes 95% of the violence against us. AQI controls at most 10% of Sunni insurgency. What is our strategy against that remaing 90%.
The Iranians play (almost) no role in supplying the insurgency, nor is their role in supplying the Shia political parties and militias an important or critical component of the violence against us, despite all the manufactured hype about the smuggled Iranian EFPs. Of course Iran is an important political force in Iraq. That's just realpolitik. But implying that we should fight a war against them will not solve our problems in Iraq.
chew2,
1. That's "AMac," not "AL".
2. > Rallying the troops to seek more "evildoers" to slay?
. > But implying that we should fight a war against [Iran]...
3. > The Iranians play (almost) no role in supplying the insurgency.
Amac,
Sorry I confused you with AL.
My point stands. Our central military problem is with the Sunni insurgency, of which AQ is only a small part. The allegations of Iranian arms are hyped/cherrypicked/fabricated and not very important to the overall war even if true.
A few sniper rifles - no serial numbers, no proof they came from Austria/Iran rather than the black market. The patent had expired on these rifles and there are reportedly all sorts of copies. I went around with Roggio about this at the time of the story.
Streya missiles? - unsourced speculation from Roggio. You will note that later reporting says the US military did not think any missiles were used in those downings. While widely available on the world arms market the SA7 would be a high value weapon for the Iraqi insurgents. No way would the Shia Iranians risk supplying and training Sunnis with those weapons.
There is no secret that Iran has supplied SCIRI and possibly other Shia militias with equipment/advice/money/guns for a long time. SCIRI is supposedly one of our allies. The secret meeting you pointed to was welcomed and approved by the Iraqi government, and they forced the US to release those officials.
These are all normal small time potatoes in a civil war situation given the open borders of Iraq. Arms and money can be smuggled back and forth from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, and Iran. You can be sure that most of the aid to the Sunni insurgency is coming from parties in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria. We did the same thing in Afghanistan against the Russians.
Hyping Iran in this situation is similar to the WMD allegations against Iraq, just a pretext for possible military action.
> Hyping Iran in this situation is similar to the WMD allegations against Iraq, just a pretext for possible military action.
Chew2, I appreciate the detailed rebuttal. We will have to disagree--and it is an important one.
First off, I think you are starting with the assumption that I and others are stating X in order to accomplish objective Y.
No.
I am stating X because I think the preponderance of the evcidence is that X (rather than not-X) is the explanation that best fits the facts.
I think you may be making a conceptual mistake by starting off by assuming that battling against policy Y necessarily means that X must not be true, or must be pooh-poohed.
Your (or my) opinion that a military attack on Iran is an unwise policy move doesn't change the provenance of the Austrian sniper rifles (etc.). I'd invite readers to follow the links to Roggio's Fourth Rail and beyond, and see if chew2's rebuttal of these points is likely to be true.
The larger point, IMO, is that there are pillars of the conventional wisdom as regards Iraq that are likely to be untrue. In particular:
I think more convincing cases can be made for the converse of these three points.
As far as your point that the Sunni insurgency is mostly externally fuelled by other Sunni states and by jihadi individuals from those states crossing via Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan--agreed. That doesn't rebut anything I've written; it points out the foolishness of occupying a country without having a plan to secure its borders.
Amac,
Central point, whatever actual acts you can plausibly lay at Iran's door, they have only a very small effect in the overall fight that is going on in Iraq. So what if those sniper rifles came from Iran? Small potatoes and obtainable somewhere else. This is true of all of the accusations about Iranian interference.
(BTW be sure to read my comments and cites in the Roggio post about those rifles.)
From your comments I take it that you are not in favor of attacking Iran. But let me emphasize attacking Iran does not help us to defeat the Sunni insurgency or effect a political solution in Iraq. Think that one through. What happens after we bomb? Nothing good in Iraq. And we are not going to invade, so put that one back in your pocket.
This should not be about Iranian "evil intent" which we can exaggerate and feel righteous about until the cows come home, but what we can realistically achieve in Iraq.
chew2,
I can't see my comment #10 from last night, so apologies if this is a duplicate.
You raise a good point about the Steyr rifles matter. I couldn't find any resolution to the charges, one way or the other.
For the Baghdad discovery to implicate Iran:
I don't see that any of these three questions have been publically addressed. On the other hand, except for a statement by Steyr that they haven't been given #s to check, I don't see that the story has been rebutted, either. But the onus in a case like this is on the accusers.
I'll write again if I find out more.
More generally, I strongly disagree that evidence of Iranian meddling in Iraq is "small potatoes." It is in the interests of many or most of the Iranian Establishment factions to promote chaos and violence, and many seem to be doing so. I would have thought this would have been obvious in 2003, and a compelling reason to maintain tight border security along the Iran/Iraq frontier.
Unless one is a committed post-modernist, the Iranian government's intent in Iraq can indeed be called "evil." That recognition doesn't prescribe any given policy towards Iran. Let's not be "shocked!, shocked!"
Amac,
Re: the Steyrs. The Daily Mail article is unsourced. I don't doubt that we may have captured some sniper rifles. General Caldwell confirmed this in response to a Roggio question, but he didn't confirm how many, or their source or even ostensible manufacturer and type.
I assume that insurgents/militia could obtain these elsewhere even if the alleged Iranian source were shut off. That is why I claim these allegations are "small potatoes". Iraq was/is awash in weapons. So far supplementing this with outside weaponry seems to be limited. And at current force levels we have no hope at closing those borders. Despite that, Iran is not a powerful factor in the Iraqi battle space as you imply. 80% of our effort is against the Sunni insurgency, it is they we have to concentrate on.
You say: "the Iranian government's intent in Iraq can indeed be called "evil."
What's evil about it? They are just acting in their own national interest, just as we would do in their place. They want us to leave. They want a friendly Shia dominated Iraq as their neighbor. They want those guerillas/terrorists based in Iraq to stop attacking them. They continue support of their long time Shia political allies in Iraq. As Captain Renault said to Rick: "I'm shocked, Rick, shocked that there is arms smuggling going on here! I'm shocked that there are secret agents here."
You say: "It is in the interests of many or most of the Iranian Establishment factions to promote chaos and violence"
Why? Not to create a failed state. They want a stable friendly state on their borders. To help force us out? Perhaps. But this is a balancing act, they don't want those forces of chaos to lead to a Sunni victory or a failed state if they can help it. Indeed, we might be more likely to leave if there is stability in Iraq. So they may try to cause us a little pain, but they want to build up their Shia allies more. They want to protect the Shia population and its government and neuter the Sunnis. If they provide any aid to the Sunni insurgency, and I don't believe that they are, it will be very limited. It's more likely that they would aid some of the extremist Shia militias/criminals to attack us. But I have read very few reports of attacks by Shia's against the US forces.
Thanks chew2. As you no doubt recognize, we each made the same "shocked, shocked" allusion.
I can't bring up links that suggest, contra your stance, that Iranian elements are fomenting violence and chaos in Iraq. No time. But they are plentiful.
Thus, as far as "evil," I think Iranian elements are facilitating car bombings and death squads that target Iraqi civilians. That they are acting in their perceived national interest in doing so was precisely my point.
AMac,
Regarding Iranian evildoing.
"I think Iranian elements are facilitating car bombings."
There is zero evidence of this. 99.9% of the car and suicide bombings are by Sunni extremists. Better to point to the Saudi's and AQ..
As to death squads. While the Iranians supply aid to some of the Shia militias, I don't believe there is any evidence that they actively encourage death squad activity. The Iraqi Shia's have plenty of motivation to do this on their own. We supply equipment and training to the Iraqi police, some of whom have been accused of death squad activity and human rights abuses. I wouldn't call us "evil" because of that.