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10 September 2011 Black Humor for War Time Debt Profligacy and Panic Images by Cryptome.
We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Peter Van Buren, 2011. Peter Van Buren was a State Department officer in Iraq working with Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs). He was based primarily at Forward Operating Base Hammer Van Buren provides an informative, gorge-raising, black humorous, literal boots-on-the-ground, apology for "we have a war to fight, damn the cost, others will pay the bill" instigator of the current global panic about national debt ever bleaker humor. Rue with him being taken in by the natsec scam, laugh at each other and weep over your unpaid bills, service cutbacks, and tax duns for the cost of guiltless official malfeasance. DoJ-celebrated task force prosecutions for terrorism, financial crime, health care fraud and child pornography are easy, small-time stuff compared to the great crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan forgiven by war-time exemptions, with very few cases for US official financial profligacy, negligence and wastage. Excerpts:
Page 11: My side of State was removed from the high-level Wikileaky things ambassadors did and changed very little between administrations. [Van Buren was based primarily at FOB Hammer (as was Bradley Manning), a huge base 12 miles in circumference which was heavily compartmentalized to separate types of personnel: military, USG, OG (CIA), contractors, guards, servants.]
Pages 46-49: Money and Our Meth Habit We lacked a lot of things in Iraq: flush toilets, fresh vegetables, the comfort of family members nearby, and of course adult supervision, strategic guidance, and common sense. Like Guns N' Roses' budget for meth after a new hit, the one thing we did not lack was money. There was money everywhere. A soldier recalled unloading pallets of new US hundred-dollar bills, millions of dollars flushing out of the belly of a C-130 cargo aircraft to be picked up off the runway by forklifts (operated by soldiers who would make less in their lifetimes than what was on their skids at that moment). You couldn't walk around a corner without stumbling over bales of money; the place was lousy with it. In my twenty-three years working for the State Department, we never had enough money. We were always being told to "do more with less," as if slogans were cash. Now there was literally more money than we could spend. It was weird. We'd be watching the news from home about foreclosures, and I'd be reading e-mails from my sister about school cutbacks, while signing off on tens of thousands of dollars for stuff in Iraq. At one point we were tasked to give out microgrants, $5,000 in actual cash handed to an Iraqi to "open a business," no strings attached. If he took the money and in front of us spent it on dope and pinball, it was no matter. We wondered among ourselves whether we shouldn't be running a PRT in Detroit or New Orleans instead of Baghdad. In addition to the $63 billion Congress had handed us for Iraq's reconstruction, we also had some $91 billion of captured Iraqi funds (that were mostly misplaced by the Coalition Provisional Authority), plus another $18 billion donated by countries such as Japan and South Korea. In 2009, we had another $387 million for aid to internal refugees that paid for many reconstruction-like projects. If that was not enough, over a billion additional US dollars were spent on operating costs for the Provincial Reconstruction Teams. By comparison, the reconstruction of Germany and Japan cost, in 2010 dollars, only $32 billion and $17 billion, respectively. While a lot of the money was spent in big bites at high levels through the Embassy, or possibly just thrown into the river when no one could find a match to set it on fire, at the local level money was spent via two programs: CERP and QRF. CERP was Army money, the Commander's Emergency Response Program. Though originally provided to address emergency humanitarian needs and short-term counterinsurgency costs, this nearly unlimited pool of cash came to be spent on reconstruction. The local US Army Commander could himself approve projects up to $200,000, with almost no technical or policy oversight. Accounting was fast and loose; a 2009 audit, for example, found the Army could not account for $8.7 billion in funds. It might have been stolen or just lost; no one will ever know. The Army shared its money with us at the ePRTs, partly out of generosity, partly out of pity, and partly because individual military units were graded on how much cash they spent -- more money spent meant more reconstruction kudos in evaluation reports.
Pages 56-57: Garbage In our air-conditioned isolation, it took years to realize we needed to think about things like garbage and potable water. What had happened all around Iraq since the chaos of 2003 was a process of devolution, where populated areas lost their ability to sustain the facilities that had constituted civilization since the Romans -- water, sewage, trash removal -- things that made it possible for large numbers of people to live in close proximity to one another. Shock and awe had disrupted the networked infrastructure that allowed cities to function. What had been slow degradation through neglect under Saddam became irreversible decline by force under the United States. The collapse of civil society left a void that the bad guys had rushed to fill. Stories circulated of neighborhood militiamen commandeering shuttered power plants and private generators for the public's use, turning the militants into local heroes. In some poor areas, especially in the south, Iranian charities were a primary source of propane, food, and other services that people expected the government to provide, as Saddam had more or less done. It had finally dawned on us that providing reliable basic utilities was critical to a successful counterinsurgency. The Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) were put on the case after earlier efforts by megacontractors like Bechtel and then the Army Corps of Engineers had failed. Almost daily my team and I would go out into the field. We'd strap on body armor and helmets and load into armored vehicles for the soldiers to drive us out of the FOB. We rode in either armored Humvees or large monster trucks called MRAPs, mine-resistant, ambush-protected carriers. These sat high off the ground and were covered with antennas and crazy electronics designed to thwart the battery-powered triggers that set off IEDs and mines along our route. The best thing about the MRAPs was that they were hermetically sealed against nonexistent chemical weapons and thus possessed near-nuclear-powered air-conditioning. You could crank that stuff and form frost. The MRAPs were so high off the ground that the turret often tore down the spaghetti web of pirated electric lines strung over most streets, lessening our popularity every time we drove in. Our parade of four or five vehicles, armed with nasty-looking machine guns and tough-looking soldiers, would nonetheless roll through small towns and slums to arrive at whatever dilapidated building served as the center of US-appointed local government. (By common consent no one was allowed to comment on the paradox of creating a democracy by appointing local leaders. It just wasn't done.) As we drove, trash was a fact anywhere we looked, like the sun and the dust. The MRAPs specifically equipped to look for roadside bombs even had giant blowers welded to their front bumpers to whip garbage aside and expose the IEDs. For a poor country, everybody seemed to have a lot of things to throw away. Even though the trash was rarely collected, there were huge dumps filled with acres of it. You couldn't help but be reminded that for all the counterinsurgency ideals about living among the people, we still lived near Iraq but not in it; on the FOB you couldn't drop a Snickers wrapper without two people telling you to pick that shit up.
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