I spent about six weeks in Iraq researching the Army’s Civil Affairs mission: its methods, goals, and effectiveness. Vietnam was my generation’s “war to win the hearts and minds of the people,” and Iraq is that kind of war for a new generation. Here are some impressions.
A War of Their Convenience
American casualties in Iraq are much worse than those we suffered on 9/11. That’s because in the vacuum our invasion caused, the White House has established the world’s busiest shooting gallery, where every nutcase in the Middle East rushes to pick off an easy target. Day after day Americans drive the same crater-pocked roads, praying against another detonation. The enemy buries bombs every night, in the same spots on the same roads; no neighbor turns them in; and the Iraqi Army never sees them do it. After a hearty breakfast, the enemy walks to work, presses a button, watches the boom and goes home again.
The shooting gallery is a heart-breaking, humiliating spectacle that the enemy hopes will never end. They can inflict on us maximum agony with minimum effort. With every trip outside the wire, no matter how peaceful our intent, Americans become ducks in a row, waiting for the odds to catch up with them.
The tragic news is that most of our war dead are being killed this way. The melancholy news is that we still manage to find thousands of young men and women willing to travel those roads, despite the odds. We send proud ducks to that shooting gallery. They are more magnificent than we deserve.
A Prudent Civil Affairs Mission Is Essential
Although Civil Affairs soldiers have conflicting opinions about the war, they are dedicated to their special mission within it. Their courage is extraordinary, their morale is high, and they are a pleasure to be with.
If we have to be at war in Iraq, Civil Affairs is essential. We can’t tamp down the insurgency and quell sectarian violence unless the people have something to strive for together. They need jobs, power and water; a functioning government at the local as well as the national level; and schools that will nurture rather than infect their children. Guns won’t bring them any of those things, but Civil Affairs and reconstruction might.
So if we have to be in Iraq, we must have Civil Affairs.
That doesn’t mean the mission ought to be wasteful or reckless. Folks at the top who are running this war seem to have little regard for the money poured into Iraq; yet they gripe about every dollar spent for worthwhile purposes back home. They unload cash by the ton in Iraq, with no assurance that our treasure won’t end up in private, disreputable hands.
Lost your job; no health insurance; daughter just got shot in Sadr City? Don’t be a Gloomy Gus. There’s good news from Iraq. America has promised small businessmen in Balad Ruz to put snazzy new awnings on their roadside-market shops. Really. It’s true. Soon the mortars can explode in prettier surroundings.
Civil Affairs is doing good here; but it’s not always doing smart. It’s managed by the same people who gave you Katrina and said it was a job well done; who proclaimed “mission accomplished” in Iraq before the real war got started. They are desperate now for signs of progress, and will spend whatever it takes to produce an appearance of progress. Watch them brag that the sheer volume of their spending is proof that progress is being achieved. It isn’t, any more than the volume of your gambling is proof of your fabulous winnings.
Progress is not measured by the money we spend, nor by the projects we fund. Those are the investments, not the results. If you don’t understand my argument, endorse a blank check to me and I will demonstrate the logic. Then you can explain it to the White House.
The Civil Affairs Mission Has Been Neglected
The Army says it has 4,600 Civil Affairs soldiers, more than 95% of them Reservists. That means there are about 230 full-time Civil Affairs soldiers to handle our world-wide needs, not just in Iraq.
Many of the Civil Affairs soldiers I met had no contact with the specialty until they received orders to deploy. People working in Civil Affairs are often rookies, having spent their whole careers training for another specialty – such as artillery – and now they are investing in factories and water systems, and teaching Iraqis about municipal government.
The goals are noble, and the courage of our troops is great. But bedrock arrogance subverts our Civil Affairs effort: the notion that you can you grab any American soldier, give him a few PowerPoint slides and lectures, and expect him to teach Iraqis everything they need to know about everything that matters.
You say any artillery officer can be quickly cross-trained to do Civil Affairs? Well, how would you like it if a random Civil Affairs officer were hustled in to fire your howitzers?
Maybe some day we will treat Civil Affairs as a specialty that requires the same commitment of time, training and resources as other critical specialties.
Maybe the specialty is important enough that more than 5% of its practitioners ought to be full-time career Army folks, able to pass their expertise from generation to generation.
Maybe the Army already knows that, but it’s too late to do anything about it, because as Don Rumsfeld famously admitted, we went to war with the Army we had, instead of the Army he should have wished for.
Our Predicament is Exactly This
One morning I noticed that the mess hall was suddenly flooded with Africans. They wore sharp khaki uniforms and looked like Denzel Washington might look if he were 21 years old and ran a marathon once a week. One of them checked my ID before letting me in. He was so handsome, polite, and personable that I considered giving him my daughter’s email address.
After seeing this new crop of contract allies, I realized how multinational my experience had been. Security guards in the Baghdad Green Zone came from Peru. South Americans and Filipinos and Europeans and various Asians fed me and washed my clothes. Some folks who cleaned my latrines looked like those cookie-cutter people from the Willie Wonka movie. Now here were these Africans checking my ID.
Among all the nationalities you are likely to see on an Army base in Iraq, one nationality is conspicuously absent, or nearly so: Iraqis.
Sure, there are Iraqi interpreters, a few Iraqi shop owners, and an occasional Iraqi contractor. But there are not many of those. Our service workers were imported from all around the world, excepting for the most part Iraq and its neighbors.
We are spending billions trying to jump-start their economy and generate jobs for them. Yet we won’t give them thousands of jobs we already have available to fill.
The prejudice against Iraqi nationals within our bases is obvious and undeniable. Some legitimate journalist should look into it, root out some facts, and develop a story. There might be a Pulitzer in it.
I’ll just tell you what I think about this rampant prejudice against Iraqis.
I feel great about it!
I have developed a habit of waking up in the morning and would like to continue.
KBR/Halliburton can hire whomever they want from every continent on earth so long as they keep the Iraqis and their local friends outside the wire. KBR knows how to turn a profit; and explosions that wreck buildings and kill me, their ultimate customer, are bad for business, bad for share value, and just plain stupid.
Some Iraqis can’t be trusted because they willingly support the insurgents. Honest, decent Iraqis can’t be trusted because their families might be threatened or taken hostage. Good Iraqis can be just as untrustworthy as bad Iraqis. That’s the way things are.
Back in the good old days, and by that I mean the Vietnam War, we hired a Vietnamese woman to keep our hootch clean and do our laundry. Vietnamese helped in the mess hall, and others cleaned the latrines, and others kept up the grounds. Vietnamese women staffed the “massage parlor” and others lined up at the gate each night. We had Vietnamese in our lives outside the base, where there was a war, and inside the base, where we tried to find some peace.
I look back with fondness to that aspect of the Vietnam War: we maintained intimate, trusting relations with some Vietnamese, even while shooting, burning and blowing up a lot of others.
In Iraq we don’t have Iraqis in our lives, and don’t want them, for reasons that staunch proponents of the war, speaking with obligatory political correctness, will not talk about. But silence will neither win this war nor get us out of it. So let’s be frank.
I could sleep well at night because my Army base was serviced by strangers from foreign lands whose customs and religion I didn’t care about so long as they were not Iraqi.
More than four years into the war, Americans in Iraq will trust practically anyone in the world except the one group of people we need to trust if we are ever going to get out of Iraq.
The mess that our country has tumbled into is exactly this:
We have put in Iraqi hands the future of the region, the lives of our soldiers in the field, and the harmony of our nation; but we still can’t trust these people to wash our laundry. When it comes to the security of our military bases, we would rather get help from Vietnam.
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This story is part of a series featuring the Army’s Civil Affairs mission in Iraq.
Richard Galli served as an interpreter in an Army Civil Affairs unit in Vietnam (1970-71). He spent six weeks in Iraq as an embedded freelance journalist.
3 Comments
As a Registered Nurse, Army Reservist (from Rhode Island) who was drafted into Civil Affairs I cannot agree with you more. I’ve been here 5 months, have done nothing medically, and I am totally unprepared to re-enter my career as a nurse. There is a fair amount of blame to be leveled here, but I can say the Army has done an injustice to the individual solider by thrusting them into areas they are unprepared for, the Civil Affairs community for giving them untrained/unprepared soldiers and the Iraqi people.
Richard,
I don’t have to tell you that this is deja vu all over again! More makeshift incompetence orchestrated by our over-zealous and arrogant political leadership. Despite what some might think of as your brutal honesty, I think you are too kind in your assessment. I disagree with you when you say that our country has “tumbled” into this mess. We didn’t tumble, stumble or bumble into this mess, we created this mess, all by ourselves.
Let’s not forget recent history, which includes two wars and over ten years of severe sanctions during which time we continually bombed Iraqi infrastructure destroying power grids, water and sewage treatment plants, communications systems and what had been one of the best health care systems in the region, to say nothing of the untold numbers of people (many of whom were children) who died in the process.
And now we give the impossible task of cleaning up the mess to our naive and unsuspecting youth. We do them a disservice. Trusting, courageous and dedicated as they may be, they can’t heal a sucking chest wound with a bandaid. As my aunt Martha Emma used to say, “if the shoe don’t fit, don’t force it”.
The use of ad hoc civil affairs soldiers is not unique to Iraq.
In Afghanistan the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) which had been commanded by Civil Affairs officers are now literally being led by submarine drivers and bomber pilots.
It is bad enough that mere lip service to the importance of civil affairs leads to shake and bake civil affairs soldiers, but taking persons who aren’t even affiliated with a ground force is insane.
Granted, some of these commanders are surely doing a great job, but on average will you get better commanders if you use civil affairs officers or if you use a sailor or airman in need of command time.
This is all part of a drug deal where an undermanned and resourced Army begs borrows and steals lawyers, accountant, engineers, mechanics etc…from the other services and offers up wartime command positions to these service without regard to the impact on the mission.
I served on two Afghanistan PRTs between 2002 and 2005 and would jump at the chance to command because I feel obligated to put my experience to use even though it would effectively destroy what is left of my civilian career. However, the Army is not too inetersted in my experience.
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