As the drone flies, the USAID compound was situated upon four scabby acres on the dorsum of the nose-shaped Green Zone, its eastern edge carved by the quiet waters of the Tigris. After the fall of Baghdad, when the embassy and the Pentagon split up the opulent Republican Palace, and the properties of the Green Zone were divvied up by various agencies and contractors, USAID laid claim to the former headquarters of the motorcycle division of the Republican Guard and built some of the finest living quarters around. Our bombproof homes lined the northern half of the compound; sardine-can trailers serving as offices clotted the southern half. A massive structure was emerging from the ground in the northeastern corner, built by Iraqi day laborers who were bussed in to pour concrete and stack bricks. AID workers called it the NOB, short for New Office Building, and we eagerly awaited its completion so that we could work in mortar-proof peace.
At nine o’clock on my first morning there, January 3, 2005, I wandered over to the Public Affairs Office and found my new boss in the middle of a tense phone conversation. Doug’s hair was disheveled, his clothes rumpled, his right shoe untied. He peered through thick lenses at me, nodded, and pointed at my cubicle, just beside his. I sat down and waited nervously.
“I don’t care how Washington went, you’re scheduled for Basrah tomorrow!”
Through the phone’s handset, I heard the voice of a young woman yelling back at him.
Doug took a sip from a white Styrofoam cup and sighed, and the odor of whiskey crept out into the morning air. The woman’s voice was still shouting through the phone as he hung up on her. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
“Are you Kirk?”
I shot to my feet and extended a hand. “Yes, happy to meet you.”
“You, too. Look, you gotta go to Basrah tomorrow to show a Times reporter our projects down there.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The girl who was supposed to do it is refusing to go, and I can’t do it.”
“But I don’t know anything about our projects down there. Don’t I need body armor and stuff?”
He thought for a moment, then reached for his cup.
“Yeah. Go down to the warehouse and get your armor.”
I raced out of the office in search of the warehouse, a barn-sized building in the far corner of the compound formerly used to repair the Republican Guard’s motorcycles. A team of Iraqis issued my body armor, a helmet, a cell phone, and a walkie-talkie. As soon as I turned it on, it squawked with the sound of an American requesting an Iraqi from the maintenance department to fix a problem with her air conditioner. A mess of sweat and fine dust, I slung the armor over my shoulder and hurried back to the office, wondering how to get to Basrah and what I was supposed to do there. I walked in just as my new boss was getting ready to leave, a scowl on his flushed face. “Forget it. I’m going now. Just get yourself set up here, and we’ll talk when I get back in a few days.”
“Oh, their names are so tricky and hard to remember! Just call them Ahmed or Mohammad, that’s what I do, and it sure seems to do the trick.”
Sandy, the USAID executive officer, a plump woman in her fifties with sausage fingers and turkey jowls, answered a question about Iraqis in her welcome briefing to orient the half-dozen Americans who had arrived in the previous week. Sandy was the third-highest-ranked American in the mission and supervised the ninety Iraqis who worked for the agency in its Green Zone compound. Of them, only three were named Mohammad or Ahmed.
By the end of the first week, I struggled against an impression taking root that life in the USAID compound and the Green Zone was more high school than front lines. The cliques were recognizable within days: jocks, overachievers, bad boys, the jaded and embittered, the excluded. The jocks were now armed mercenaries, ’roided up on drugs ordered from a Cyprus-based website and lumbering around in a first-person-shooter video game fantasyland. Young professionals were skipping rungs on the career ladder by volunteering for service in Baghdad; they wore crisp button-ups and ties and kept the dust from their shoes and the booze at a minimum. Down-on-their-luck types came for the danger pay, hoping to chip away at debt back home. Still others escaped midlife crises, running to Iraq from crumbling or ruined marriages.
It was clear who was at the bottom of the heap. As I walked into the dining facility, the scene summoned another unpleasant memory from my high school, where whites and Latinos sat in separate sections with little mixing. None of the Americans were sitting with the Iraqi employees. On the second day, I sat with some of them, and a few Americans at the next table over stared at me. Over American food prepared by Nepalese employees of a Halliburton-KBR subsidiary, I eagerly copied out Iraqi slang and vocabulary into a small black notebook.
The war was nearing its third year when I arrived in the first days of 2005, a few weeks before Iraq’s first parliamentary elections. The delusions and optimisms of a quick victory in 2003 were now distant memories, abraded by the rise of the insurgency and our torturous response in 2004. By 2005, the violence was fixed in a seemingly permanent state of escalation, each month rivaling its predecessor and challenging its successor. The threat of incoming rockets and small arms fire was high enough that the US Regional Security Office (RSO) issued a directive in January requiring Americans to wear their body armor and helmets at all times inside the Green Zone. Ordinarily, AID workers didn’t wear armor to walk the hundred yards from their homes to the cafeteria or the office within the security of the compound, but the security office anticipated a spike in mortar and indirect small arms fire.
During one of my first mornings there, a series of mortars landed in quick succession near the compound, followed by the Voice of God, a loudspeaker broadcasting a recording of a 1950s-sounding American newsreel telling us to “duck. And cover. Duck. And cover.” Across the walkway, a woman screamed. “And cover. Duck.” The sky was soon freckled with scrambling Blackhawk and Cobra helicopters. In the next office over, separated from ours by a thin piece of corrugated metal, a percussive marching melody erupted: “My eyes . . . have seen . . . the glory of . . . the coming . . . of the Lord.” The lieutenant colonel in the US Army Corps of Engineers kept the CD spinning in his computer’s drive for such occasions. If he was going to go, it’d be with his own soundtrack.
Then the mortars stopped and the Voice of God and “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah” disappeared, and the computer dinged with a new email from Washington.
The RSO emailed its directive about the body armor the following morning as I was getting ready to leave the house, so I suited up. As soon as I stepped outside, I came across an Iraqi maintenance worker, adjusting the sprinkler out front. Another Iraqi pushed a broom, sweeping the dust from the alleyways between the houses. Neither wore a vest or helmet. “Where’s your armor?” I asked in Arabic, and they just smiled and shrugged.
The armor and helmet suddenly felt like a clown costume. As I walked to the office, I saw protected Americans milling about among unprotected Iraqis. At lunch, I quietly asked an Iraqi across the table whether or not he had any armor, and he laughed. “No, of course not! USAID said they do not have any for us.”
I stopped wearing the armor after lunch, more out of shame than any principled stand. When the head of security for the compound saw me, he reprimanded me for ignoring the directive. I asked why the Iraqis didn’t have any, and he snapped, “Do you have any idea how expensive these vests are?”
Americans were king of the compound, but within the broader Green Zone, USAID staffers nursed badly wounded egos, damaged by their increasing marginalization in the efforts to rebuild Iraq.
In the first weeks of the war, USAID’s administrator, Andrew Natsios, had confidently told an astonished Ted Koppel on Nightline that the postwar reconstruction would cost America only $1.7 billion, at which point Iraq’s oil would pay for the rest.
Natsios: This doesn’t even compare remotely with the size of the Marshall Plan.
Koppel: The Marshall Plan was $97 billion.
Natsios: This is $1.7 billion.
Koppel: All right, this is the first. I mean, when you talk about 1.7, you’re not suggesting that the rebuilding of Iraq is gonna be done for $1.7 billion?
Natsios: Well, in terms of the American taxpayers’ contribution, I do. This is it for the US . . .
When it soon became clear that the true costs would run into the tens of billions, constituting the largest aid program since the Marshall Plan rebuilt postwar Europe, the public affairs team deleted the transcript of the interview from USAID’s website.
Despite this, I assumed that USAID would lead the efforts to rebuild Iraq. Created by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 as a way of consolidating America’s various aid programs into one federal agency, USAID had decades of experience, with missions in scores of countries throughout the world.
Of the initial $20 billion, though, only a quarter went to USAID, while the rest went to a newly created Projects and Contracting Office, or PCO, which operated out of the embassy. Another tranche of funds was managed directly by the Department of Defense, which had limited experience of its own in reconstruction work. Another entity was created at the State Department to “coordinate” these competing efforts, called the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office, or IRMO. Senior USAID officials sat castrated in embassy meetings with State Department contractors and soldiers who had little prior experience but now operated with greater funding and authority. Back at the compound, they spoke wistfully about an indeterminate point in the future when the military would withdraw, State would return its focus to matters of diplomacy, and USAID would have the true lead on reconstruction efforts. One mission director, upset with what she perceived as insufficient status, spent roughly $250,000 each on a small fleet of armored luxury Mercedes-Benz SUVs to shuttle her ostentatiously through the half mile of secured Green Zone to the State Department’s palace. Because of their top-heavy design, they were determined unsafe for use outside the Green Zone, which itself did not require up-armored vehicles.
But USAID’s identity crisis in Iraq was not entirely the result of losing a bureaucratic turf war. In the 1980s and 1990s, the agency had undergone seismic changes, riding the privatization wave that swept through the Pentagon and countless other federal agencies, leaving employees to focus more on the management of contracts and grants rather than on actual fieldwork. The fuel for career advancement was no longer mastery of a region or a country and its development needs but of the minutiae and paperwork required by a swamp of regulations and directives found in government binders with names such as the Code of Federal Regulations, Federal Acquisition Regulation, and USAID Acquisition Regulation.
USAID thus became more of an administrative agency than a development agency. Its energies turned to assessing which contractors were capable of delivering what type of deliverable, the time frame for said deliverables, the projected impacts of said deliverables, the mechanisms for contract close-out or early termination, the format and clearance process for issuing requests for proposals, the point systems for grading proposals, the format and clearance process for listing new positions, the point systems for grading candidates for new positions, the timeline for requesting, reviewing, and replying to reports generated by contractors and implementing partners, the schedule and guidelines for conducting performance evaluation reviews of subordinates, the guidelines for . . .
Nevertheless, when USAID received its $6.4 billion share of the funds set aside by Congress, it established the largest aid mission in the world.
One of my primary responsibilities as a public affairs officer, I discovered, was to facilitate the agency’s boasting of its reconstruction efforts by digging up any good news from the soil of ten thousand projects in every province and disseminating it in a two-page report called the Iraq Daily Update. With a distribution list numbering thousands of bureaucrats, Capitol Hill staffers, journalists, and contractors, the IDU had become a small gremlin that needed feeding each morning, and I was now its caretaker. The Public Affairs Office was small: only three people in total when my boss wasn’t sleeping off a hangover. While I poked away at the IDU, he and my other colleague spent their days fending off journalists investigating potentially embarrassing projects.
My work required me to be on good terms with everyone in the compound if I was to extract any good news from his or her office. “Christ, that goddamn IDU! Why don’t they make it weekly? Or monthly!” boomed one of the economic development officers. Nobody liked the IDU. When I walked into someone’s office during work hours, I’d usually find a pained but polite expression. “Sorry. Don’t have anything for you today.”
My outgoing predecessor noticed my bewilderment when I came back empty-handed the first day. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Just go back into the archives a few months and grab one of those; maybe refresh it a little. There are tons of them, and nobody remembers.”
And so I did, poring through reams of IDUs. “USAID Funds Beekeeper Initiative in Dohuk.” “Sewing Shop Provides Jobs and Hope in Kirkuk.” The photos accompanying the updates had an extortionate quality: the Iraqi recipients pictured never had more than the faintest of smiles.
To learn the language of the IDU was to learn the language of the US government—USGspeak—which as early as 2004 had already evolved to tamp down expectations. The $1.7 billion certainty of 2003 was long gone. No more absolutes in word choice. A single page of the update was spayed with verbs such as developed, improved, assisted, worked with, provided a framework for, all trailing off into nothing that could be held against them in the future. “Yes, we improved the statistical analysis procedures at the US central bank; there was a two-week training course at the Federal Reserve in New York. Here’s a picture of some of the attendees.”
USGspeak was not limited to its official reports. In meeting after meeting, we resolved to “look into” and “get a handle” on things. Sometimes we were directed to “begin ramping up” our efforts. This coded yes/no language offered an escape path in case something went wrong as well as a trail of bread crumbs in case something went right and we wanted to take credit. If things went right, we could say that we had started ramping up our efforts in anticipation of this long ago. If things went wrong, we could say that we had started ramping up our efforts but hadn’t received enough funding. Failing that, there were always contractors or the mess of competing acronyms over at the palace to blame. And failing that, there was always the laudanum of “the security situation,” which could numb even the harshest critics: our efforts would have been a smashing success if Iraq wasn’t such a violent place. But because of unreceptive Iraqis and their mortars, we needed the help of private security firms, which proliferated algae-like and soon claimed thirty cents of every reconstruction dollar.
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.”