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First-Person: Face-to-Face with the Realities of Iraq
by Matt McKnight
Al Asad Airbase, Iraq
The vestiges of Saddam Hussein's military -- bombed out fighter jets, old concrete bunkers that descend into massive underground complexes, drab office buildings that once housed the regime's infrastructure -- litter the landscape of Al Asad Airbase, a huge facility built in Anbar province in the 1980s as the war raged against Iran. These remnants are a stark reminder of what came before, and I find myself wondering what this place must have been like prior to the 2003 invasion. I write from Iraq, where I am deployed as a first lieutenant with the Marine Corps.
Al Asad sits a little over six miles from the Euphrates River and the city of Baghdadi, which, now peaceful, was once a bastion of the insurgency. We are bordered to the east by Ramadi and Fallujah and surrounded to the west by vast deserts stretching to the borders of Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Our area of operations, known as AO West, covers an area roughly the size of South Carolina. About 95% of the some 400,000 residents live along the Euphrates River Valley. The rest live a nomadic, Bedouin lifestyle in the deserts, as they have for the last 5,000 years.
As you might imagine, stabilizing and improving this area is no simple task.
I arrived in Iraq late in the fight for Al Anbar, which has changed dramatically since the convulsions of 2005 and 2006. The unit that preceded mine faced an all-time high level of incidents when they arrived in January 2007, but by the time they departed a year later, we were sitting on average of two incidents per day. The decline said much for our predecessors' successes, but it also told us we were measuring the wrong metrics. Though there is still always the danger of running into an IED or a sniper, as we looked deeper into the problems out here, we found that the complexity of fighting the active insurgency had migrated to a far more difficult problem: political development across the province.
Indications of rampant corruption have quickly surfaced as we've refocused our attention on the development of legitimate governance and begun to peel back the surface of the intricate web of Iraqi business and politics. We're now faced with a difficult decision about where to draw the line in our involvement with Iraqi issues that clearly don't affect Coalition forces. My view is that no one is capable of completely ridding Iraq of corruption, though we need to continue to sever the insurgency from the population while not attempting to fix problems that are outside our mandate or our control.
That said, I believe the fact that our concerns have migrated from fighting insurgents to improving governance is, unto itself, a sign of progress. Our biggest challenge now lies in convincing tribes that participating in a legitimate government is in their best interests. In the end, each time I see that some mayor bribed his way into an allotment of money for his city I start thinking that Iraq, with all its corruption, will never have a future, but then I find myself recalling the last article I read about congressional earmarks and think that maybe the Iraqis are not so far off-base after all.
Just as the counterinsurgency campaign in Al Anbar has changed the security situation in the towns and cities for which we are responsible, our roles as Marines have changed just as dramatically. In my currently position, I'm responsible for understanding the motivations and intentions of individuals and networks -- but I am no longer solely focused on hunting down insurgents. This means that I spend my days trying to understand and predict the actions of sheikhs, militia leaders, mayors, and police chiefs while still targeting the bad guys who are trying to disrupt Iraqi progress. I now find myself having far too many conversations about which sheikhs smoke Marlboro Light versus Pine cigarettes or what it meant when an influential tribal leader offered his sister to be my wife when he knew we were about to pressure him on a security issue.
Needless to say, this type of work without any other distractions (military rules prohibit drinking) makes for a never-ending series of 18-hour days typing, reading, and driving around dusty towns. In fact, the most relaxing time we have is when we are driving from town to town with no access to computers, and, despite what you might imagine, it's surprisingly hard to stay awake in the back seat of a Humvee. The first few months of our deployment have flown by, and we are actually coming up on the halfway marker of our year in Iraq.
As many of you surely know, there are negative aspects to every profession (this one certainly not withstanding), but when I look critically at my job and my day-to-day responsibilities, I couldn't have asked for a better position at this stage of my life. Because of the nature of the conflict and the drawdown in forces, I've had significant opportunity to be involved in many different aspects of our mission. At the regiment, I am at the lowest level (i.e., closest to the ground) that has access to the strategic picture while still being able do tactical things on a regular basis.
In the past few weeks, I drank chai with a sheikh in Hadithah, had lunch with a police chief in Baghdadi, and flew to a place near Mosul to take custody of a detainee from an Army unit. Everything out here is fluid, changing every day, which keeps things interesting -- and forces me to stay on my toes. There are numerous groups just waiting for a chance to take advantage of our presence, and they will jump as soon as we are distracted.
At Dartmouth we learned to search out the intricacies of a problem before crafting a response. In that type of academic environment there are limited consequences, but out here we're doing the same thing with complicated tribal and historical dynamics. With time so compressed, our purpose is to find a "70% solution" which will allow us to make a decision that directs events to the advantage of the Iraqi government and Coalition forces. In order to be successful in countering the enemy, we have to work harder, read more, be extremely humble in our analysis, and more effectively articulate our views to our command, the Iraqi Security Forces, and the Iraqi people.
The most amazing thing is to watch 19- to 23-year-old Marines doing the brunt of this labor effectively without the benefit of even a college degree. In the end, it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from; the people who are most effective here are the ones that can think outside the box, work long hours, and truly live by the principle, "if you don't care who gets the credit, you can do amazing things."
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