This week marks 20 years since the start of Iraq War 2.0. This date deserves some reflection.
In 2009-2010, I was part the war and headed two embedded civilian provincial reconstruction (ePRT) teams. I also wrote a book about the program, . For this, I was forced to retire involuntarily by my employer, U.S. State Department. The original title of the book was “Lessons for Afghanistan From the Failed Reconstruction of Iraq”. It was intended to show how our nation-building efforts failed except to set ablaze rampant corruption and how we could repeat them almost dollar-for-dollar here in Afghanistan. Isn’t it madness to do the same thing over and again expecting different results?
Between 2003 and 2014 more than 220 billion was spent on rebuilding Iraq. The sum of all we did was worse than none. Before our invasion, Iraq was more or less stable. It was good enough that Saddam Hussein was an ally during the Iraq-Iran War. Iraq became a corrupt client country of Iran by the time we were done. The name of the Iraqi prime Minister was once a familiar name for most Americans. But, nobody seems to care anymore, even though he changed his name from Zelensky.
Today, however, I am reflecting on the sixth anniversary of the war in Iraq. It was hot, dusty and there was a chance that someone might be killed. There were no official celebrations.
The four State Department employees had never been able to get along. We argued over what to do and how to get through the year. We moved to a small patio next to our office. It was surrounded by a CONEX shipping box on one side and a brick wall on the other because it was too lazy not to fall on the second. We usually returned with the hidden beer we had received from the Embassy. Although we were civilians, this did not mean that we fell under General Order No. We divided the cans into twos and one, to keep the stash from going bad. One can tonight, two Friday. This way, a few cases could last for several weeks.
We were greedy tonight, perhaps in celebration of the anniversary. We drank cans of beer, popped the tops and sipped the foam like Vikings in New World. Your body will dry out so that even a small amount of alcohol can’t be poured down your dry hole. We were greeted by a stupendous amount of drunkenness. It was like a summer at high school.
The darkness was nearly complete when we finished our last glass of water, with a lot dust in the air and only one toenail-clipping lunar out. We would have been embarrassed by light. We could have been anywhere if we were seen in a photograph. There weren’t any clues that an outsider could decode. We felt more connected to this place and one another than ever before.
We had spent long days at the Embassy for meetings, where we were laughed at as unworthy Country Cousin Muggles. The warm beer and blanket of the darkness led to stories. These drunken tales were familiar to us all, with the exception of one that was a wandering tale about a tree, Germans and a lawsuit. Two divorces, a girl who didn’t write, and a woman whose name was forgotten as the teller spent ten minute describing her shoes next to his bed. These stories were all equally as much as what we had to spit out. Some were bitter (the total of our ages topped 200; nation-building wasn’t a young man’s game), but the majority of them were more factual. A life of experiences, a thousand fall, all wrapped up in those voices.
Perhaps for the first, we realized that we had more things in common than differences. As if seven human years equaled a dog year, the time you spent in Iraq influenced how you felt about those who shared it with you. No one cursed Iraq or the anniversary. In fact, even though neither of us could walk straight to save our lives, we all knew that only by being in Iraq could we share what we were sharing. It was not talked about the daily routines that governed our lives, such as mortgages, chores on Saturday mornings, and running errands. This happened at the beginning of your life, when you could smell home on your clothes, or at end of a tour, when it was hard to remember what you did so that you could fit back in.
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It was hard to believe that a group so involved in the implementation of a policy like ours could not talk about politics. Others saw themselves only as performing a job. It didn’t matter who was president at the time. There were no comments on “Mission Accomplished” or the torture allegations or any other aspects of what they were doing. There was no curiosity or interest in discussing the realities of our intellectualized exercises for stability and democracy with those on the ground.
Instead, the talk was about people, friends and lovers, husbands, wives, boyfriends and girlfriends. These were people we didn’t have, but for whom we all accepted each other as surrogates. Perhaps because we were drunk, it was easier to see that we care about one another, despite our differences.
The next morning, I woke up with a severe headache and realized that I would soon miss those men just as much as I missed the smell of pillows at home or the feeling of kissing my wife after she had enjoyed a cup of coffee. It was already 100 degrees, it was a Thursday, if my memory serves me correctly.
