Baghdad’s Bureaucracy

Stacy A. Bare served with the United States Army as a Civil Affairs staff officer and team leader in Western Baghdad in 2006. His work outside the Green Zone gave him a first-hand look at the U.S.’ reconstruction methods and brought him into contact with many Iraqi civilians. The most rewarding part of his experience, he says, was working in direct support of combat units from the 1st Infantry Division and 82nd Airborne Division at Forward Operating Base (FOB) in Kadamiyah, Baghdad. A 2000 graduate in philosophy from the University of Mississippi, Bare received his commission as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Army Intelligence Corps and has served in Sarajevo and Bosnia-Herzegovina. He also served in Angola, Abkhazia and Uganda with an organization called HALO Trust. He says he is alive today because of the sacrifices of the amazing men and women he has been fortunate enough to work with. Bare is 29 and currently studying city planning at the University of Pennsylvania. Next American City caught up with him via e-mail to discuss his role in the reconstruction of Baghdad and what he sees as the failures and successes of the United States’ occupation there.

Next American City: Is there an overarching plan for Baghdad?

Stacy A. Bare: Someone in the Department of Defense would tell you yes. I would tell you no. I saw several different Baghdad plans, but what you need to understand is how Iraq is divided up militarily. Different divisions are given different geographic regions of Iraq. Baghdad has its own Division called the Multi-National Division Baghdad (MND-B).

Every 12 to 15 months a new U.S. Army Division would become MND-B. Each new MND-B created its own plan for Baghdad. At the Division level, the staff level is all referred to as G, as opposed to S, so the Civil Affairs bubba became the G9. Each G9 created a new plan that outlined guidance in different levels of vagueness and specificity. Different operations, such as Operation Baghdad Together Forward (OTF) and Baghdad Together Forward 2 (OTF2) each have different civil affairs guidance. These have to be in some way tied into the next higher level’s command plan for Baghdad, but this changes often as well. It is a very frustrating situation to work in.

As an example, during one phase of OTF, we emplaced all sorts of barriers throughout Baghdad neighborhoods; during OTF2 we took all those barriers down. A lot of OTF2 was done to remove a lot of the stuff that OTF did because it proved so counter-effective.

Furthermore, you have four different organizations working on reconstruction in Baghdad — the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), the United States State Department (State), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the various Department of Defense actors, which we were.

There is very little coordination among these organizations. The Iraqi government was also a player, but our interaction with them was limited by a number of different factors. Some of the higher American officers and State Department people did not want us talking to different levels of Iraqi ministries and would get quite upset about it if they found out a young captain was working directly with a deputy health minister, for example. Where I worked, there was a situation where hospitals were not getting supplies. The official line was that it was because of a hard-line Shiite health minister who would only support clinics loyal to him.

When I started working the district I was in, there was no complete database of what was in our area. We received a few different spreadsheets with some Global Positioning System (GPS) grid coordinates on it. You can ask the guys that were our security team about the number of times we would go out hunting for a school, a sewage plant, a hospital, with only a grid coordinate and a poorly translated name for a guide. The only thing to do was to stop and ask directions. In much the same way, we found the main administration building for all the health clinics and hospitals in Western Baghdad. Within weeks we had worked out a plan to help deliver medicine to local clinics and hospitals using the Iraqi Army. Why couldn’t this get done at a higher level? I don’t know, but I can tell you the coordination and information lines shared between different levels of the U.S. Army, let alone trying to work with the other agencies, were broken.

I was frustrated and angry a lot in Baghdad, but one of the most frustrating things was an agriculture cooperative project I had started working on with CPT Brad Gustafson and Frank (one of our Arabic-speaking Bilingual Bicultural Advisers (BBAs)). Brad and Frank were the leads on the project and over nine months had jumped through a thousand hoops to get this agricultural co-op up and off the ground. The Iraqi Minister of Agriculture had to sign off on its creation, not to mention a considerable amount of local leaders.

This was a great example of American forces guiding Iraqis through a project they needed assistance with, which they wanted from start to finish. Lives were risked daily to meet with farmers, and five men were killed while conducting Civil Affairs action to work with agriculture producers and farmers in Western Baghdad. Sites were found, local organizations were created by Iraqis for Iraqis and near the end of our 12-month tour a new unit moved into the area and decided they did not think the co-op was necessary to spend time on, so right near the finish line and the creation of this co-op, again, Iraqi-driven, it was stopped. We were, or at least I was, heartbroken; so I were many of the Iraqis. In that area, because of a hasty decision made by a unit that just arrived on the ground, American credibility took a significant hit. Why trust the Americans? We simply don’t have follow-through.

I’d like to add a caveat here on the lack of coordination. USAID especially, was hesitant to share any information with us. Let me say that I have worked in the past, and in Baghdad, with some very courageous USAID contractors and employers, but I have also worked with some people who treated people in uniform as substandard and uneducated. There is a huge cultural difference between the Department of Defense and USAID. USAID primarily works out of the Green Zone and when I was in Baghdad, I was not normally in the Green Zone; USAID was not very good at coordinating their actions with units on the ground and would come to local meetings sporadically for varied periods of time. Some of their contractors or employees did not always know how to wear their protective equipment properly. In short, they were a liability for soldiers at times. Again, there are exceptions to this rule, but by and large USAID was beyond a thorn in our side.

USAID often flat-out refused to share information with us other than what they had “accomplished.” I have no idea how they measured their accomplishments, but I would dispute their statistics as inflated, if not flat- out made up. Their concern was that if they told us what they were doing, we would spend too much time checking in on their Iraqi partners and that would make their Iraqi partners a target for acts of terrorism. The reality of this is that the units we supported often found the Iraqi partners anyway. My favorite visit had to be when we visited the aptly named Iraqi Institute for Peace and found a room full of body armor, AK-47s, pistols and a machine gun.

NAC: What’s going right in Baghdad?

SAB: In spite of ourselves, there are a lot of things going right, and that boils down to the extremely hard work of the guys on the streets, their teams and their support. In one particular area in Baghdad where one of my colleagues was working, they helped broker the deal that brought former insurgents over to work against foreign fighters. This was a Civil Affairs officer who had been out of the army since the ’90s, is a banker in New York City, and simply wouldn’t accept
the bullshit. There are a lot of soldiers who work very hard to mend the gashes American forces have ripped into the fabric of Iraqi society. There are a lot of soldiers doing small things everyday that contribute to the success of a goal we’re not really sure of. A lot of commanders take the approach that the most important thing is to get all of their soldiers home from Iraq and the best way to do that is to get to know the local community. When soldiers find out the Iraqis are regular people and the Iraqi people figure out soldiers are regular people, some real sparks of understanding fly. However, we’re in and out too often and simply do not understand the culture.

Is our time in Iraq a failure? When I was there, George W. Bush said we weren’t wining and we weren’t losing. I don’t know what that means — were we in a tie? With who? What’s going right now is that fewer Iraqis and fewer soldiers are dying.

NAC: What’s going wrong?

SAB: This one is easy: Too many people are dying. On my worst days, I feel like the Army called me back to service, introduced me to some of the greatest Americans I ever knew, only so that I could write letters home to their mothers, fathers, wives and children, to let them know how much I loved their husband, son, brother, how much I would miss them, how thankful I was for their service.

When an Iraqi died I sometimes felt like we weren’t expected to mourn, but how can you not? You work with some of these guys every week for six months and one day you go to meet them and they’re gone. Just gone. You don’t get to go to their funeral, you don’t get to write a letter home to them, and no matter
what, US or not, when someone dies you have to move on. This is a part of war, but it never gets easy.

L. Paul Bremmer brings about unity in understanding between Iraqis and U.S. soldiers: Nobody likes him.” -Stacy A. Bare, former U.S. Army Civil Affairs officer

L. Paul Bremmer [Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) leader, who exercised authority over Iraq’s civil administration between May 11, 2003, and June 28, 2004 — Ed.] contributed to this. He brings about a sort of unity in understanding between Iraqis and U.S. soldiers: Nobody likes him. The bottom line is that the CPA had seemingly little to do with any previous understanding of Iraqi law.

When Bremmer and the CPA left — heck, even when they got there — there was not much of a transition process that the average Iraqi understood. The Iraqis cobbled together Saddam-era law with what they liked from the CPA, and what they liked from the post-CPA government. Hodgepodge! Many of the local councils I worked with used this [garbage] to pull the wool over my eyes and keep me off balance as to what they wanted to do. When I asked my higher headquarters for a copy of the Iraqi municipal law, I got a poorly-photocopied version of the law in Arabic. None of my translators were capable of translating the legal document. One could write a book, and I think many have, of how the CPA failed, or to justify its actions, but in a few succinct points, what I saw is this:

1. We (the CPA and by extension the United States, which means the United States Army to most Iraqis, which ends up being me and PVT Snuffy from Trailer Park, South Dakota, who deals with angry Iraqis every day, oh … and you) created divisions along ethnic lines that we would not allow in our nation and that went further to create a split and divided society.

2. We did not base the CPA on understandings of already existing Iraqi law, nor do I think we even tried to understand Iraqi municipal law.

3. We fired everyone in the Baath party.

Many of these people were the technocrats and bureaucrats that are needed in any country to run things. Many of them were Baathists simply because they needed a job. How many people do you know that hate their boss, hate their job, but go to work anyway? If you took over their company, would you fire them simply because they worked there? No, you wouldn’t, and you know a lot of people who, if they don’t hate it, at least don’t like their job or their boss, but they have families to feed. Most people just aren’t revolutionaries. This created further divide, as well as bankrupting the government of many qualified people, and opened up an environment ripe for cronyism and corruption.

4. We set up a system of municipal government that had never been done before, did not receive any functional level of funding, did not have any legislative
or executive authorities, didn’t make any link between these councils and ministry or municipal functions and told them this was democracy.

NAC: Does the military have a blank check to spend as they see fit?

SAB: Kind of, and what happens is that not just the military but also the U.S. presence often does not conduct a reality check about the price of things. USAID paid $200,000 for a two-room schoolhouse. It was a travesty. The Iraqis don’t see the difference between USAID and me — we all represent the same government. It might not have even been USAID, but it was definitely U.S. funds. What happens then is contractors, I believe, commit violence on the basis of contracts. A new school in Iraq could probably be built for $20,000. Greg Mortenson discusses how we fail in development projects in his book Three Cups of Tea. Basically, our regulations are supposed to prohibit us from bargaining with contractors, so we have to accept the lowest bid. It’s a bullshit system that leads to exorbitant overspending.

The worst part is that a lot of times people, the U.S. Army, USAID, USACE, the State, spend thousands of dollars on projects without ever knowing what is really going on. The unit we replaced was rumored to have been paying out contracts to Iraqis without ever actually going to check on them. Evidently they were just taking pictures of construction projects on base.