Armed Humanitarians (12 page)

Garner recalled that Powell asked to see his MOU, a formal memorandum of understanding between the different component commanders from different nations contributing to the force. “General Powell, there isn't one,” Garner responded. “We didn't sign an MOU.”

Powell flushed for a minute. “If I'd known that, I'd never have let you start this operation,” he said. Pausing for a moment, Powell added, “If I'd done that, you'd still be back in Turkey trying to get an MOU signed, so you did the right thing.”

Equally important, Garner also collaborated with civilian relief workers and nongovernmental organizations, a major departure from standard military practice. Military commanders were trained to guard access to information, and the idea of civilian relief agencies being allowed to participate in planning meetings or set foot inside an operations center was anathema. Likewise, relief groups had also been quite wary of cooperating with the uniformed military, but Garner held a “town hall” meeting to build rapport. “We have to demonstrate you can trust us,” he told them. “We're going to go full open kimono.” Garner gave NGOs and aid workers the opportunity to hitch rides on his helicopters and vehicles and granted access to the task force's civil-military operations center so they could coordinate relief efforts.

Initially the relief workers may not have been comfortable around the military, but they quickly discovered the phenomenal logistics capability the armed forces had. Security and mine clearance also helped lay the foundation for effective relief. What started as a military operation became a unique hybrid experiment in collaboration among the military, international organizations, civilian aid workers, and private relief groups.

But the lessons of Operation Provide Comfort were largely forgotten within the institutional military, in part because of the spectacular success of Operation Desert Storm, the conventional fight between U.S. and Iraqi forces. As Garner later told me, “It was kind of lost in the shuffle.” His operation was viewed as a minor epilogue to victory, and little effort was made to study it. And Garner would never have a real chance to apply his experience. ORHA's lines of authority in Iraq were less than clear, its staff was spread thin, and its planning guidance was almost nonexistent. Colonel Mike Fitzgerald, a deputy planner at U.S. Central Command, later recalled that the only ORHA-related planning document he ever saw was a “one to two page document that said these are your essential tasks. It didn't tell him [Garner] where he was lined up in the chain of command and who he responded to.”
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Less than a month after his arrival in Iraq in April 2003, Garner was replaced by Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, a career diplomat who became the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, a revamped occupational government that was funded through the Pentagon. As U.S. proconsul, Bremer reported directly to the president through the Defense Department. The military, through its new proconsul, retained the lead in rebuilding Iraq.

In civilian life, Lance Corporal John Guardiano was an editor; in Iraq, he would become entangled in municipal affairs. Guardiano had enlisted in the Marine Corps at the late age of thirty-four, in a put-up-or-shut-up fit of post-9/11 patriotism. After boot camp at Parris Island and training as a field radio operator, he joined a reserve Civil Affairs unit based in Washington, D.C. His actual Civil Affairs qualifications were minimal: The unit was supposed to provide him with training in the basic tasks during his weekend reserve duty, but he was called up for active duty before he ever got around to the training. Anyway, Marines were expected to be riflemen first.

Guardiano was activated in February 2003 in preparation for the invasion of Iraq. His unit, the Fourth Civil Affairs Group, was broken up into four- and five-man teams and parceled out to frontline Marine units preparing to cross the berm into Iraq.
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Guardiano was assigned to the First Battalion, Fourth Marines. They crossed into Iraq in late March. After a short mission to Nasiriyah, Guardiano's Civil Affairs team set up shop in Hillah, a mostly Shia town about sixty miles south of Baghdad. The Marines had been told to expect surrender en masse by Iraqi military units after the invasion. That never happened. The enemy dispersed, and Marines shifted into an uneasy constabulary role. Guardiano went out on routine patrols with the infantry, anxious to find the “bad guys.” They rarely found them: the
fedayeen
, former Ba'athist paramilitaries, had gone to ground. The unit's mission shifted—subtly, almost imperceptibly at first—to rebuilding.

The Marines Civil Affairs team began arranging meetings with sheikhs and tribal leaders. The First Battalion, Fourth Marines set up an office at the municipal hall, where a Marine commander played the role of local grandee: meeting petitioners, hearing complaints, weighing requests for assistance. The occupying Marines also created a city council to create some semblance of a local government. Many Ba'athists had fled or gone underground, and the unit's encounters with most Iraqis were positive. Guardiano felt that by and large, the residents of Hillah were genuinely grateful to the U.S. military for ousting Saddam.

Not everything was rosy. Hillah and the surrounding province was now home to fifteen thousand disgruntled ex-soldiers. On May 23, 2003, in the second decree he issued as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Bremer disbanded the Iraqi army. This act had far-reaching implications: It made it difficult to reconstitute the Iraqi military and security forces to assist in restoring law and order, and it created a pool of angry, unemployed men with military training who became willing recruits for the insurgency. When unemployed soldiers found out that the American military was providing stopgap salary payments to some local municipal employees, their discontent grew. One group of ex-soldiers even organized a small rally in protest outside the municipal hall. Guardiano wrote an opinion piece that touched on the protest in the
Wall Street Journal
. “The soldiers' complaint was not that the United States is too heavily involved in Iraqi affairs,” he wrote. “They were instead complaining that we are doing too little to help them. They want more help, not less; they seek greater engagement, not a withdrawal of American military forces. The difficulties here aren't the result of the U.S. being heavy-handed. Rather, they result from our inability to bring greater resources to bear.”
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The biggest frustration for the Marines, then, was the absence of outside help from the rest of the U.S. government. Political advisors from the State Department, it seemed to many in the military, were a no-show. Guardiano saw no nongovernmental organizations on the ground in Hillah, either. The only civilian representative of the U.S. reconstruction effort in the area was an elderly man working as a USAID contractor who had showed up to help advise the new city council. Recalling it later, Guardiano said, “We wanted the State Department. We wanted the UN to help. I mean, very badly.”

Guardiano and the Marines were puzzled. Although Hillah was seeing sporadic violence, it seemed secure enough to begin work on “Phase IV,” the military's shorthand for postconflict operations. “Honestly, that caused us to scratch our heads somewhat,” he said. “By our standards … well, you have to understand, it's a little unfair—because we were walking around with guns. You're there with a Marine infantry regiment … But the point is, we would have escorted the UN, we would have escorted the NGOs. We would have been their security guards, happily.”

In fact, the United Nations had established a mission in Iraq after the fall of Baghdad. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan had sent one of his most capable diplomats, Sergio Vieira de Mello, as his special envoy. But on August 19, 2003, a truck bomb laden with explosives detonated outside Baghdad's Canal Hotel, headquarters of the UN mission. Vieira de Mello and twenty-one others were killed; after the bombing the United Nations pulled out nearly all its staff. Nevertheless, Guardiano and the Marines began reaching their own conclusion: They had been left holding the bag. “I think part of it, candidly, was an antimilitary bias,” Guardiano said. “And I think a lot of us felt that way: They don't want to be seen with the Marines, they don't want to be seen with the military.”

For Guardiano, as for other troops on the ground, a shared perception was beginning to take shape: Although Marines and soldiers were at war, the rest of the government was not. They would have to go it alone. And to make matters worse, they would have to tackle postwar reconstruction missions while being shot at. The collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime created a power vacuum within Iraq, and U.S. troops would quickly find themselves in the middle of a vicious internal war.

A civilian reconstruction effort was taking shape, however slowly. By late March, as U.S. troops reached the outskirts of Baghdad, humanitarian assessment teams from USAID had progressed no farther than Umm Qasr, the Iraqi port just over the border from Kuwait. “We don't operate in a combat environment,” Donald Tighe, a spokesman for USAID's Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) in Kuwait, explained to the
Christian Science Monitor
. “We have begun the assessment process in areas declared secure by the military.”
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The reality was a bit more complex. As a USAID official who was on the ground in Kuwait at the time later explained to me, the DART teams were in a bind, because they had no security of their own, and traveling with the military was initially not considered an option, because nongovernmental organizations that worked with USAID to implement their programs insisted on strict separation from the military mission. No one had planned to deliver aid in an active combat zone. The official said, “The USAID DART was refusing to leave Kuwait, because they were told the only way they were going to have security inside was with the military. And they were like, ‘Nope! None of our NGO [non-governmental organization] partners will have anything to do with us, oh no, no, no!' ”

In essence, the war in Iraq was widening the military-civilian rift that had been exposed in Afghanistan. Part of the problem was political. Some charities, such as the U.K.-based Oxfam, refused government funds to finance operations in Iraq, partly because of their objections to the war.
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Many aid groups opposed efforts to place humanitarian projects under military supervision on principle: The International Rescue Committee, CARE, and WorldVision all refused to take part in a thirty-five-million-dollar USAID program to rebuild Iraqi schools and health clinics because, they argued, it undercut their independence and neutrality.
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But the problem was also bureaucratic. The organizational culture of USAID was not geared toward working in a combat zone, and despite the small experiment in armed social work that had begun in Afghanistan, the agency was waiting for a formal end to hostilities—a sort of punctuation mark—to begin their work.

USAID's work began to pick up momentum in April 2003. On April 2, the agency announced $200 million in food aid for Iraq, a contribution that would be funneled through the World Food Program, and also began parceling out the first major aid contracts. On April 11, the agency announced an initial $7.9 million award to the North Carolina–based Research Triangle Institute, or RTI, to promote Iraqi participation in local government. It also gave a twelve-month contract to Creative Associates International Inc., an international consulting firm, to revitalize Iraqi schools. Finally, it announced a major overhaul of Iraqi infrastructure projects, awarding an emergency infrastructure repair contract to Bechtel, a construction firm based in San Francisco. The contracts would go toward repairing airports, dredging and upgrading the port of Umm Qasr, and repairing and rebuilding hospitals, schools, irrigation systems, and some ministry buildings. That contract had an initial ceiling of up to $680 million payable over eighteen months.
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But it was clear that USAID was farming out work to the usual suspects: established, well-connected firms such as Creative Associates International, RTI, and Bechtel. Much like Afghanistan, Iraq was shaping up as a bonanza for Beltway bandits. In an opinion piece in
USA Today
, Andrew Natsios, the head of USAID, defended the contract awards as a wartime necessity:

Instead of the usual procurement process allowing all firms to compete for contracts—a process that takes six months—the U.S. Agency for International Development used expedited procedures under federal law, allowing it to limit the number of competing firms to shorten the decision time. Naturally, the USAID issued invitations for bids (known as Requests for Proposals or RFPs) to multinational firms with a proven track record of tackling major reconstruction projects in post-conflict countries such as Bosnia and Haiti. And since the war in Iraq had not yet begun or is still underway, RFPs went to firms with security clearances.
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As in Afghanistan, preference would go to large international firms and established consultancies. It was a continuation of business as usual for USAID: outsourcing their work to the development-industrial complex.

In parallel, the State Department was scurrying to find volunteers to fill the ranks of the newly created Coalition Provisional Authority. One internal notice in July 2003 sought volunteers for “TDY POLADS” (temporary duty political advisors) in Iraq. Volunteers would serve three-month rotations. Arabic language skills were preferred, but not required. The notice also outlined the incentives: Volunteers would receive 25 percent danger pay, plus a 25 percent differential (an extra salary allowance). In essence, volunteers would receive a 50 percent pay boost for service in Iraq. They would also be able to bank their pay, since housing, meals, travel, and laundry would all be provided in lieu of a per diem. Equally important, the State Department was not planning to break or curtail regular diplomatic assignments for temporary duty in Iraq. The bureaucratic routine of bidding for embassy assignments or jobs within the Washington bureaucracy would not be interrupted.