To Be a Friend Is Fatal (8 page)

I countered my cynicism with a little deferential sobriety: the amount of knowledge and expertise required to run a country was massive—far beyond what anyone in the Bush administration had prepared for—and beyond the capacity of Iraq's civil society, most of which had fled, or was being de-Ba'athified into prisons or exile.

And so one could look at the USAID-ARDI (Agriculture Reconstruction and Development for Iraq) program—budgeted at $100 million—with derision or respect, depending on one's mood. In its September 1, 2005, update, a half page was devoted to the training of fourteen officials from the Iraqi Ministry of Agriculture in the installation and operation of sprinkler systems. “This training is the first in a series to train 48 MOA officials to operate and maintain a variety of irrigation systems, including drip irrigation.” The improvement of Iraq's irrigation infrastructure seemed both hugely important and wildly inconsequential.

“USAID trained 183 Iraqis in beekeeping basics in an effort to help vulnerable groups gain a sustainable income. Participants included 44 widows, 79 poor farmers, and 41 people with disabilities.” I wondered whose job it was to tally off the characteristics of the grantees. Mine? Could someone from the disability column also have been a widow
or a poor farmer? The need to quantify the outputs and to tally up the deliverables seemed desperate: 183 beekeepers, 44 widows, 14 officials. Did these mean anything in a country of 25 million?

No matter. A couple years later, another release about USAID's help buying jars and natural wax for another beekeeper ran under the title “Bee Venture Brings Sweet Success.”

Sometimes the language was so punctured with USGspeak that it was drained of meaning: “ARDI is providing NGOs with training in facilitation, or guiding participatory decision making, in order to improve their capacity to solve problems and reach agreement through building consensus.”

It didn't take long for the distaste of the work to settle in; to realize that I was the person in charge of churning out little scraps of propaganda with tenuous ties to reality. It was enough, though, for the believers in the mission. Appreciative emails from recipients, mostly neoconservatives back in the United States, flooded in shortly after I sent out each day's
IDU
. “Why doesn't the liberal media ever cover
this
?! Not bloody enough for them?” they exclaimed, not recognizing that they were reading a “success story” about training on sprinkler systems that had been repackaged from a year earlier.

A week into my new job, I knocked on the door of the Education Sector trailer in search of a good news story for the
IDU
. A bespectacled young Iraqi with a soft smile stood up and extended his hand and said, “Hi, my name is Yaghdan.”

Chaos was the law of nature; order was the dream of man . . .

—Henry Adams

T
he Americans cared for the Green Zone like a prisoner tidies his cell. As the insurgency gathered force throughout 2005, the true enemy was not some inchoate militia but unpredictability. And so we did our best to make things predictable. We hired fleets of Iraqis to banish the dust each morning from our tiles, sheets, windows, and toilets, and then once again in the afternoon. Pizza Express and Burger King served up grease and cheese to absorb the hangover from the previous night. We hired a French chef who emailed the cafeteria menu each morning: potage Saint-Germain, grilled steak with herbs, batter-fried sole fillet, gratin potato dauphinoise. Iraqi chauffeurs drove us to and from the Bunker Bar, where the bartender was required to ask if you were packing before he poured. The embassy ran three-on-three basketball tournaments in the parking lot behind the palace and announced theme days to boost morale. This Friday: Talk Like a Pirate Day!

But every now and then, the war on the other side of the concrete would open its maw and spew forth some aged mortars or indirect AK-47 rounds and ruin a perfectly good party. So the blast walls grew taller, the parties moved indoors, and the checkpoints multiplied. We paid exorbitant sums to a security firm to produce a daily
Safe Report
, which lassoed the horrors outside—severed limbs, demolished convoys, exploded
marketplaces—into neat charts analyzing thirty-day trend lines and forty-eight-hour “activity levels.” We learned that “the number of incidents in Baghdad yesterday fell slightly (from 15 to 14). There were only three VBIEDs, vehicle-borne IEDs, compared to four the day before. Yesterday's activity accounted for 18% of the Iraq total (from 17% the day before).” We nodded knowingly, but we secretly knew nothing.

My friends and I found ways to make the Green Zone our own. Late at night on March 15, the eve of the first session of Iraq's Transitional National Assembly—the precursor to its first parliament—several friends and I piled into a USAID van and headed over to the convention center on the edge of the Green Zone. I had heard rumors of a Steinway concert grand piano in the assembly hall where the TNA would meet, but my previous attempts to get in had been stymied by overzealous Gurkhas guarding the entrance. This time, though, I slipped a twenty into the guard's palm, and he ushered us in. Inside, Iraqis were at work hanging a massive banner over the stage emblazoned with an excerpt from the Quran that extolled the virtues of consultation and cooperation. They shrugged when I asked nervously if I could play the piano, which was hiding behind the main stage curtain. My friends piled into the front-row seats designated for the prime minister and the president while I worked through blues and boogie standards by Fats Waller and Albert Ammons. On the way back to the compound, a friend likened the night to a group of Brits goofing around in Independence Hall in 1787, and I laughed guiltily. When CNN and Al-Jazeera gushed out reports on the opening session the following morning, the legs of the Steinway peeked from below the backdrop like a partly exposed secret.

Our world was gray and etiolating, domed with blast roofs and walled with concrete, made frigid by industrial air-conditioning, and in the alleys of our pale blue cubicles we pecked out reports for headquarters and called contractors who were sealed away in another compound a block over. On our computer desktops we kept our copy of the ubiquitous BaghdadDonut.xls file, in which a doughnut-shaped progress bar reflected how many months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds you'd been in Iraq and how many months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds before you could board the Rhino Runner, a steel-reinforced armored bus, back to the airport.

Yaghdan and I became friends, a friendship limited by his departure from the compound each day at five. We weren't able to socialize after work; I didn't know where he lived, and only knew Haifa's name. But in the kiln of the summer heat, he often showed up an hour early to rest his eyes in USAID's air-conditioned building. He had been working with the Americans for nearly a year, and his job brought him into the nerve center of the reconstruction efforts. In the chilled air of the cafeteria, he told me his work in the agency's education office was fulfilling but that it felt peripheral to Iraq's primary need, which was electricity.

Back in August 2003, when Yaghdan was recuperating from the gunshot wound, the Coalition Provisional Authority's viceroy, Paul Bremer, broadcast a message to the people of Iraq: “About one year from now, for the first time in history, every Iraqi in every city, town, and village will have as much electricity as he or she can use; and he will have it twenty-four hours a day, every single day.” This was meant as a rebuke of the electricity policy of Saddam Hussein, in which power produced in the Kurdish north and the Shi'a south was routed to benefit the Sunni center of Baghdad; now everyone would be expected to share. But as soon as USAID engineers repaired the 400-kilovolt transmission line connecting the grid in the southern provinces to the Sunni heartland, Shi'a plant managers in the south dispatched employees to blow it up. So long as the line was inoperable, Basrah and other Shi'a cities couldn't be asked to share and would enjoy the benefits of full power.

And so when the brutal summer of 2005 baked in, with temperatures consistently approaching 120 degrees, only a few hours of electricity flickered through Baghdad's grid each day. No water flowed from the faucets, forcing many to dig crude wells in their backyards to drink and bathe in the fetid groundwater. Water-borne illness spread, along with infant mortality due to conditions such as diarrhea.

Our well-fueled arsenal of Green Zone generators kept our power steady and water pure, insulating us from the only metric that counted: the number of hours of electricity each day, the truest barometer of violence and insurgency. Without power, businesses couldn't stay open past sundown, newborn babies couldn't be incubated at hospitals,
schoolchildren couldn't find relief from the heat during class, and, most important, other essential services, such as water treatment plants, couldn't operate. Throughout the country, local entrepreneurs purchased medium-sized generators and sold access to a meager current of electricity: enough for a small fan but not a refrigerator. Before long, messily bundled arteries of makeshift power lines were everywhere. I backbenched a meeting at the palace in which military officers pleaded for speedier progress on electrical projects: they were tired of sweeping up bodies each morning of Iraqis who had electrocuted themselves trying to tap into the informal grid of generators.

As the war trundled along, many Iraqis began to see the American failure to restore power as something deliberate, part of a plan. How else could one explain why the superpower's helicopters never ferried in generators? The Iraqis' disbelief turned to anger and a rapidly winnowing trust in the motives of the occupying American troops.

Soon after I arrived, I was invited to an ornate conference room in the palace for a weekly meeting with a council of public affairs “professionals” representing the State Department, the military, IRMO, PCO, USACE, and other acronyms I hadn't yet deciphered. On the wall was a large indentation that once held a portrait of Saddam Hussein. In its place hung a satellite map of Fallujah.

The chair of the meeting, a State Department official, started with an exclamation: “Goddamit, we need to show the world that we are making progress on the power and water!”

The public affairs working group in the embassy wanted to deliver some good news about America's progress in the power sector, and since USAID was in charge of nearly $3 billion dedicated to electrical generation under a contract with Bechtel, I needed to find a project to showcase. Back at the compound, I wandered into the Infrastructure Office in search of the tough but jovial Texan named Dick Dumford. He cleared some papers from a chair by his desk and swung it around for me. “Whaddya wanna know, kiddo?” he barked. Above his desk was a massive poster of a Siemens V94 turbine generator. I pointed to it and asked, “What's that?”

“That's MOAG!” he cried. “The Mother of All Generators!”

The V94 was purchased for around $50 million in 2003. With a
weight of seven hundred tons, it could not be flown in by helicopter: the generator was so fragile that it could be transported only on a special 120-tire truck at a maximum rate of five miles per hour. When USAID purchased it, the V94 was at the Syrian port of Tartous, and plans were made to construct a $178 million power plant in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk. A base camp was created, and a housing structure for MOAG and its transformers were installed. All that remained was the generator.

The generator truck reached the Tishrin Dam on a bend in the Euphrates east of Aleppo. When the US government imposed sanctions on the Syrian government, Damascus responded by refusing to let the generator cross the dam. USAID made the decision to reroute the V94 through Jordan and then through Iraq's volatile Anbar Province, adding months of delays.

For most of 2004 and early 2005, the generator sat near the Jordan-Iraq border, costing USAID $20,000 each day to hire a security firm to protect it. In order to bring it to the base camp (which also cost USAID dearly to protect), the agency needed to transport the generator through the most violent geography of Iraq, but before that could happen, roads needed to be repaved and low-hanging power lines had to be cleared away. The steel girders sent out by the agency to reinforce a bridge were stolen before they could be affixed. A single Kalashnikov round could ruin the entire generator.

When the convoy finally moved, it was heralded as the single largest troop movement in Iraq since the invasion. Three hundred marines and private security contractors accompanied it, supported by Cobra attack helicopters. Weeks after it crossed into Iraq, two years behind schedule, and tens of millions of dollars over budget, the Mother of All Generators arrived in Kirkuk.

By one count, the amount of money spent on the security firm to protect it nearly equaled the cost of the generator itself. For the same amount, USAID could have purchased scores of smaller generators and had them inside Iraq within weeks, but these don't provide as dramatic a ribbon-cutting ceremony. In the end, MOAG would theoretically add only 6 percent to Iraq's battered and besieged electrical grid.

I flew up to Kirkuk with a handful of Iraqi and American journalists as part of the public affairs campaign to “create a new narrative” about
the progress of the reconstruction. We swept low in our Blackhawk, slinking beneath telephone lines and scattering camels and sheep. There was no designated landing zone when we arrived, so the chopper hovered indecisively for a minute before setting down on the middle of a road a mile away. Gunners hopped out and raised their rifles at the cars now backed up in either direction.

Two armored SUVs hurtled out of the plant, churning up a wake of dust as they jostled across the field toward us. A short man in wraparound Oakley shades with a machine gun emerged from the passenger door of the lead car and shouted, “Which one of you is USAID?!” I raised my hand and was swiftly deposited into the back of the SUV with a protection security detail (PSD) team, which sped off, leaving the journalists behind on the baking road.