Humanitarian Assistance

Being embedded with the Army was more than a way to live. I worked alongside the soldiers and was expected to carry the State Department’s vision of reconstruction with me. The Army excelled at a lot of things, but planning remains its strongest skill set. Nothing is done by chance, nothing that can be planned ahead of time is ever left to last-minute improvisation. Planning occurred in stages and it was only after I stumbled into this knowledge that I got the chance to get a word in edgewise.

The military planning cycle began with an order, wish, vision, hallucination, or good idea from the Colonel. Sometimes this was specific, as in “Find a way to make Route Tampa safer by interdicting the insurgents’ supply routes.” Other times it was general, such as “How can we get the Iraqis to rat out al Qaeda sympathizers to us?” Occasionally the ideas fell from on high, such as “Improve conditions for women in your area.” The officers tasked would get together and brainstorm, produce a document for a predecision brief with the Deputy Commander, and then refine that for a decision brief for the Colonel. Targets were designated as lethal (the supply cache they’d blow up) or nonlethal (the people they’d hope to befriend). To avoid any trouble, “challenges and issues” were sorted out at the early stages so that by the time you got to the decision brief the main thrust was pretty much set in concrete.

Without this knowledge, I’d often show up alongside the Colonel for the final decision brief, ready to add my points to the discussion. Everyone would take careful notes, nod attentively, and sometimes even ask me a question or two. They’d then go on with the brief, receive the Colonel’s go-ahead, and ignore everything I had said. The first time I was bewildered, the second a little pissed, and by the seventh or eighth time I finally figured out how the system worked.

Over the course of my year I was able to intercede early to make a few helpful points, deliver the Embassy’s messages, and otherwise participate in the planning and decision making. As the new guy, I couldn’t be too forceful in my opinions. Still, I had learned a lot through the projects that had been dumped on me when the Army moved on. I became familiar with the larger State-DOD issues played out in miniature, the clashes between easier feel-good projects and harder long-term development. In these clashes, the Colonel and I often had to agree to disagree. I remembered the abandoned promises scattered across the landscape while the Colonel forced himself to look only forward. To him, easy projects still held the allure of a quick victory and happy PR. Every Colonel wanted to make General, and you did not do that sitting on your hands listening to the State Department tell you what you should be doing.

One of the Army’s favorite feel-good projects on which we differed was a “humanitarian assistance” (HA) drive. This had very little to do with reconstruction and was always a sore point between State and the military and between me and my Colonels. Here’s how it worked: The Army contracted an Iraqi vendor to assemble ten thousand bags, all made of cheap plastic and mysteriously decorated with badly rendered images of Barbie, Disney princesses, and Japanese cartoon characters, as if the bags had been left over from something else. Inside was a package of dry beans, a bottle of water, a tin of halal beef, canned vegetables, and some macaroni. The food might make one or two meals for a family of four. Soldiers would drive around looking for places to conduct a “drop,” pulling up to the chosen villages and handing out HA bags to whoever showed up to take them. Everybody liked free stuff, and so a crowd usually developed. At one drop, the crowd got a bit out of hand, and the Iraqi police beat them with sticks until a US Sergeant Major waded in and broke up the melee. Sometimes the Army handed out blankets, wheelchairs, or toys bought with US government money, sometimes school supplies or other things sent by a now dwindling group of churches and schools located near US military bases in Georgia and Texas. These boxes, along with cartons of Girl Scout cookies and toiletries, used to arrive in massive quantities in the early days of the war. By 2010 they dribbled in once a week at best, usually through the chaplain’s office.

The soldiers smiled at the HA drops, which were always well attended by US Army media and PR people. The events made for terrific photos—a soldier holding a kid in his arms, a soldier smiling at a hijab-clad woman. The handouts would then commence. PR would fire off hundreds of frames of the same shot, of a smiling Joe handing a Transformer toy to a beaming Iraqi kid. If the photographers had zoomed out a bit they’d have seen the Iraqi faces grow more sullen the older the recipient. For every three-year-old smiling over a Snickers bar, there was a gray-haired mother accepting a blanket without making eye contact. You rarely saw older Iraqi men accepting giveaways. If they showed up at all, they usually stood toward the back of the crowd, smoking, their faces hard and blank.

The soldiers knew what to say around their officers and the Army media: best thing about being in Iraq, great to see these kids happy, just doing our job, glad we could help. What they said afterward, spitting Skoal into an empty Gatorade bottle, was fuck these people, we give ’em all this shit and they just fucking try to blow us up.

Resorting to gifts to seem popular was quick and easy but, like most quick solutions, really didn’t help. Once you started down the path of easy answers, your methods tended to sabotage later efforts to try the harder way. In a counterinsurgency campaign, there were several ways to make friends, most of them slow and difficult, like building relationships within the local community based on trust earned and respect freely given. Each iteration of handouts caused you to lose respect from a proud group of people forced into an uneven relationship. Iraq was not the Sudan or Haiti, and while pockets of people were malnourished, overall few were starving. Even if they were, a bag with one or two meals in it was not going to make any difference. The Colonel who ordered these HA drops thought that they made him friends among the locals. He waited in vain for the groundswell of happiness set in motion to cause local people to start turning over to us info about the insurgents in their midst.

This time, the Colonel was wrong. This was not Dances with Wolves; we were not going to be adopted into anybody’s tribe. I remember when we tried to give away fruit tree seedlings a farmer spat on the ground and said, “You killed my son and now you are giving me a tree?” How many HA bags was a dead son worth? If a goal of the US effort was to help the government of Iraq achieve legitimacy in the eyes of its people, what sense did it make for America to hand out food bags? Violence did not taper off. No jobs were created. The rich sheiks who controlled the territory stayed rich and in control. Giving away free stuff reminded folks of Saddam’s own clumsy attempts to buy love. But you just couldn’t stop the Army when it was on a roll. One of the more useful things someone said to me was that sitting still is not an Army thing. The Army sees the world through the eyes of a technocrat: for every problem (the Iraqis don’t like us) there was a solution (give them food bags) that involved money (an incredible $1 million in this case). The Army was like that—they got something into their heads about making friends and before you knew it you’ve got $1 million worth of Chinese intellectual-property-rights-violating food bags on your hands.