Milking the US Government

Counterinsurgency theory said that it was desperation and poverty that drove people into the arms of al Qaeda. Young men, faced with no economic prospects, no way to marry and raise a family, would be easy to recruit as suicide bombers. What else did they have to live for, the theory went. Leaving aside the possibility that some people became insurgents not because they lacked fast-food jobs and iPads but because they hated the presence of a foreign invader in their country, the Army and the State Department forged ahead with ideas for job creation. I, for example, inherited an Army effort to build a distribution network (“value chain,” in propaganda-speak) for milk in our area. The previous Army unit had dropped a couple of million dollars into the project, taken some pictures, and then rotated back to the States, heroes, no doubt. The current Army unit had little taste for dairy, and so the whole project fell by default onto the ePRT and me.

We were going to change the way farmers sold milk. From year zero, Iraqi farmers in our area had raised a cow or two each. The farmers kept some of the milk for themselves, selling the excess to their neighbors. Lacking refrigeration, transportation, and an organized distribution system, each area instead sought a delicate balance between the number of cows, the number of people, and the need for milk. It worked well enough for everyone but us. Without checking with the farmers, we decided to modernize the whole milk chain to create jobs. Farmers would sell their milk to our newly built centralized collection centers equipped with refrigerated tanks, and the centers would then sell the bulk milk to dairy-processing plants, also built by us. The processing plants were expected to sell to the farmers’ neighbors, who would surely be waiting around wondering what happened to the friendly farmer who used to bring fresh milk around daily.

Once the Army determined the war needed milk collection centers, they went around looking at locations, like a couple with a new baby house hunting. Putting the equipment into an existing building would obviously be quicker and easier than raising a new structure. The Army was told of a building that had supposedly been a Saddam-era dairy plant and went out to take a look. The neighborhood guy who met them explained they did not want the place. He said the plant had been a chemical weapons factory. No one had cleaned inside or removed anything, so maybe it was better the troops didn’t knock around, stir up the dust, and check inside the closets. The good news, the man said, was that nothing deadly had been manufactured at the plant since 1998. The Army wisely decided to build the milk collection center elsewhere.

As I took over the project, the collection center in Mahmudiyah was 90 percent complete and a ribbon-cutting ceremony was scheduled in a week. The center had been 90 percent complete for months, with the ribbon-cutting ceremony calendared several times. A 5,000-liter tank stood ready to hold milk collected from local farmers. But when we asked our Iraqi partner Sheik Sal about his plans for the business, such as the number of employees he’d hire, the price he’d pay farmers for their milk, and how the milk would be transported to the processing plant, he was unable to answer any of the questions.

The second Army-funded milk collection center, near Yusufiyah, was also ready to open. Our partner there, Sheik Naj, was also unable to answer any questions about operating the business, except for the one about the number of employees he intended to hire: zero. Neither man had the capital to purchase trucks for hauling the milk, to buy supplies, or to pay for the milk purchased from the farmers. This was troubling. That the Army had addressed none of these issues prior to committing millions to these centers was doubly troubling. It was relatively quick and easy to build a collection center, but slow and difficult to talk farmers into changing their way of selling milk (input) or to line up buyers for the finished product (output). Starting to think about the input and output that bookended our projects only after we had spent millions of dollars on the easy parts was like crying over spilled milk. Capital was the big issue, as without money to buy the farmers’ milk at a higher price than the farmers could get directly from their neighbors, no centralized collection center could succeed. Our reconstruction planning had not considered this, so we had centers that would likely remain dry until the sheiks sold them off piece by piece after we had gone.

Still committed to the project, we visited our two milk collection centers every six weeks to see if any progress had occurred, perhaps spontaneously. On one visit, the Yusufiyah plant was padlocked shut. The kids hanging around said the owner wasn’t there. (Kids were always hanging around everywhere; few attended school in rural areas, and those who did went only half days because boys and girls were not allowed to go to class together as they had been under the mostly secular Saddam regime. The new Islamic Iraq we midwifed in 2003 couldn’t afford to double the number of schools, so it was girls in the mornings and boys in the afternoons.) The kids told us they hadn’t seen the owner in weeks.

The second center was still not operating, but it was open and I was able to look inside the place for the first time. A few weeks earlier, after the contractor notified us that the work was done, we had sent out one of our inspectors, in this case a bilingual bicultural adviser (BBA), an Iraqi American who supposedly had a degree in engineering. I say “supposedly” because I later learned that in the rush to staff up for the Surge, the State Department had hired him and others like him sight unseen, having engaged a third-party company to conduct brief phone interviews with the candidates. No credentials were checked, which perhaps accounted for the vast numbers of not bilingual Iraqi Americans claiming to have PhDs (they were paid more for advanced degrees and so said they had them). Our BBA had signed off on this project as complete and in good order.

I do not have a PhD in engineering and so noticed immediately that there was a hole in one of the milk tanks large enough to fit my index finger. The milk-weighing station (milk is sold by weight, not liquid volume, to account for the butterfat) was rusty, another bad sign since the $500,000 we spent on this center was to have included stainless steel. The owner had not even put up the English “Milk Collection Center” placard we bought him, with an eye toward a nice photo op. When I confronted the sheik on the overall state of the facility, he simply smiled and asked for more money to build a fence.

Outside, another group of kids were entertaining themselves by throwing rocks at a three-legged stray dog. You can tell the strays’ age by their missing limbs, ears, and hunks of fur, like rings on tree stumps. The dog was trying to sleep, and every time the kids got close with the rocks, the dog would get up, move a little farther away, and flop down again. The kids never moved closer and never hit the dog. The dog never moved any farther than necessary. Each side accomplished nothing but the time did pass.

We went out another time to inspect one of the milk collection centers and ended up in the living room of the sheik who’d been given the facility to run. His house, modest by any international standard, was quite nice for rural Iraq. The house was concrete, two stories, squat, with the kind of thick walls you put up if you didn’t have a PhD in engineering but wanted to make sure the thing lasted. As with every other building in Iraq, wind, weather, and time had beaten the stucco to a grayish tan. The floors were cool tile. The carpets were outside on the clothesline soaking up the day’s sun. The building was old, and past lives clearly lingered.

The sheik casually wore his Glock in a Bond-like shoulder holster. I had read online that under long-established tradition, an Iraqi would not typically shoot you in his own home; in many years of traveling this was the first time I’d staked my life on a cultural convention from Wikipedia. An AK-47 (the law allowed every family to own one) with a full clip leaned against the wall in an adjacent room. I was weaponless but accompanied by seven heavily armed soldiers, who took up defensive positions inside, outside, and around the living room, after searching the house, of course.

The search had brought out the sheik’s mother, who said she typically didn’t leave the back room when male guests arrived. Since the soldiers had wandered in on her anyway and we were foreigners, she must have thought “Why not?” and sat on a chair at the edge of the room. The sheik’s father, also armed, soon joined us and took a chair facing me. With the house searched and the group assembled, tea was served, scalding hot, 70 percent sugar, in tiny glasses with a metal spoon in each. I knew then that long after I left Iraq the sound of metal tinkling against glass would rip me out of wherever I found myself and return me to this country. The sound was as tied to a place as any image in my mind.

The father was animated, happy to have guests to whom he could relate the last hundred years or so of Iraqi history. From the others’ reactions, I could tell that this was not the first time he had run through this overview, and I remembered my own grandfather’s wandering stories around the Sunday dinner table. The father was a practiced storyteller who explained how the family had controlled the land we and our milk collection center sat on since the Ottoman Empire, having seized it from the previous owners in a bloody struggle. One nice thing the Ottomans did was to create the first codified land ownership system for the area since Hammurabi, and most property deeds today in Iraq date from Ottoman times. So thanks to them, the father said, for titling the land to his family.

He moved on to the British, who took control of Iraq from the Ottomans. His own father had not had much good to say about the British, but they had dug the large irrigation canals in the neighborhood, and so perhaps something positive came out of all that. This was interesting because the example always held out for us in the PRTs to emulate was the colonial British, who conquered the world with good administrators. Their officers were highly educated, committed, conscientious, hardworking, and conversant in the local language—regular Flashman in the Great Game characters. More tea was served. We skipped quickly through about forty years to Saddam. Two relatives had been killed in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. The less said about Saddam, the old man muttered, the better, and we proceeded to the latest set of invaders—me, for all intents and purposes. He had good words to say (I was a guest), but he playfully added that his impression of America might be improved even more if we gave him a new generator for the house. Eyeing the weapons and fearful of having to drink more tea, I pretended to jot a note: next invasion, bring more generators.

At that point, the sheik himself started to explain how he had originally helped the “struggle” against the Americans, meaning planting roadside bombs and the like. Then, in 2007, he decided to participate in the so-called Awakening, a program through which we paid money to Sunni insurgents to stop killing us. The program worked and in many minds was the real key to the drop in violence that accompanied the Surge. The United States recharacterized the Sunni insurgents first as Orwellian “Concerned Local Citizens” and later, more poetically, as “Sons of Iraq” (SOI, sahwa in Arabic) and paid them monthly salaries to stand passively at checkpoints in the areas where they used to commit violence. This also worked, and the sheik pointed out that the skinny teenagers with rifles standing around roadside shacks on our way in were some of the 142 SOI fighters he still was responsible for. Our side never explored the similarity between what we were doing with the SOI and paying protection money to the Mob.

Iraq’s Shiite government inherited the sahwa program because we got tired of funding it and because “transition” was a theme that month. The thought in Washington was that the faster we could transition our programs to the government of Iraq, the sooner we could go home. The sheik sadly reported that no one had paid his men for their forbearance since March, nor had the government provided them with full-time jobs as promised. He hoped I might pass a note to the Embassy to goose the Iraqi government into starting to pay his guys again, as they were getting solid offers from al Qaeda (nationwide, 50 percent of the SOI had not been paid in April and May 2010, while fewer than half had ever been offered government jobs).22 Nothing personal, he assured me by way of offering a blessing on my family, but a job was a job. These issues seemed much more on his mind than the milk collection center I had come to discuss. The center might employ half a dozen men, maybe a few more to drive trucks if trucks were ever bought. With 142 fighters to look after, these few jobs created at the cost of millions of dollars seemed sadly irrelevant.

After a lot of tea and with a bit of business now wrapped up, we all stood to exchange scratchy kisses, followed by warm, lingering handshakes, before making our way outside to continue our respective days. We forgot the problems of milk collection, or at least set them aside for now, as it was obvious that we had a long way to go before declaring victory.