TIKRIT — The invasion of Iraq began as a gritty,
boots-on-the-ground affair. (Karl Zinsmeister’s Boots on the
Ground, which chronicled the event, has been read by almost
every other soldier I’ve met over here.)
“I remember our first six months after the invasion, we were
living in a schoolyard in Baghdad without running water,” recalls
Capt. Mark Galloway, now serving his second tour as head of supply
at Forward Base Summerall, near Bayji, 40 miles north of Tikrit.
“Now the facilities we have are amazing.”
FOB Summerall is indeed a remarkable projection of American
force and logistics. Air-conditioned trailers house 1,200 members
of the 82nd Airborne. The dining hall serves restaurant-quality
meals, while the kitchen bakes a new cake every night. (The one
Saturday honored St. Patrick’s Day.) There are several gyms, a
recreation hall with two 36-inch TVs, and a huge airplane hangar
left over from Saddam’s time that now houses the vehicle
maintenance and welding shops.
Meanwhile, high in the sky floats an observation blimp surveying
the base perimeter and beyond. Four months ago, in an amazing feat
of technology, the blimp’s infrared cameras caught a pair of
insurgents planting an improvised explosive device (IED) in the
midnight streets of nearby Siniyah, a rebellious town about five
miles away. The remarkable high-resolution photographs allowed the
Army to disable the bomb and persuaded the town council to impose a
nighttime curfew that all but eliminated further incidents. At that
point, two Iraqi Army soldiers, an Iraqi Police officer, and two
American GIs had died within the space of a month.
There is no question of America’s ability to project force into
the region. The real question is whether our armed forces will be
able to do much more than simply protect themselves — and whether
the American people have the stomach for such an open-ended
enterprise.
One of the 82nd Airborne’s latest responsibilities is trying to
untangle the mare’s nest of theft and corruption that pervades the
nearby Bayji Oil Refinery, one of the three largest in the country.
Capable of providing 75 percent of the country’s fuel needs, Bayji
is now being robbed blind by its managers, employees, security
guards, and just about everyone else in sight, with at least some
of the money going to terrorists. The head of distribution was just
arrested a few weeks ago after being caught permitting the
diversion of huge amounts of fuel. Baghdad is far away and
preoccupied with other things at the moment, however. And so the
Army has been asked to step in.
“We estimate that 30 percent of the production of the refinery
is being resold on the black market,” says Capt. Kwenton Kuhlman,
whose Bravo Company now spends almost every day at the refinery
checking Arabic purchase orders and billing records. “The real
problem is this fuel is being diverted from the Iraqi people.”
In fact, the day I accompanied Bravo Company to the refinery
last week the story appeared on the front page of the Wall
Street Journal. “[O]il smuggling…is helping to destabilize
the fragile Baghdad government and finance insurgents, adding
another facet to the Bush administration’s latest pacification plan
for Iraq,” said the article. “‘The fuel that is stolen comes back
as bombs, mortar shells and Katyusha rockets,’ said Hamad Hamoud
al-Shakti, governor of the Salahaddin province, home to the Bayji
refinery.”
ON CLOSER INSPECTION, HOWEVER, the real problem does not seem to be
theft but the archaic system of price controls and government fuel
allotments left over from the Saddam era.
Hardly anybody in Iraq buys and sells fuel through normal
commercial channels. Instead it is parceled out in “allotments,” to
be sold at a government-fixed price that is now one-third the black
market price.
The means of distribution are “gas stations,” one of the
strangest manifestations of contemporary Iraq. Permission to build
a gas station in large cities and along major highways is handed
out by the national and provincial governments. Naturally,
favoritism reigns. There are as many gas stations in the Tikrit and
Bayji areas — Saddam’s home territory — as in all of Baghdad.
Like everything in Iraq, these structures are surrounded by high
walls. Theoretically, they are spaced evenly along the highway at
least every five miles, although approaching Bayji along Route 1,
the main national highway, they appear every 1,000 yards. Often a
Bedouin tent surrounded by a herd of sheep sits right next
door.
All these gas stations sit completely unattended and almost
never open. When they do, the gas lines often extend for more than
a mile.
The reason for this anomaly is that owning a gas station has
nothing to do with selling gas. Their sole purpose is to be issued
a permit that allows the owner to go to the refinery and collect a
designated allotment. The owners then funnel these allotments into
the black market. “We went to a station with the Wall Street
Journal reporter and there was an owner who had drilled a hole
in his back wall siphoning gas to trucks outside,” say Capt.
Kuhlman. “We arrested him on the spot.”
After fuel leaves the refinery, it can pop up just about
anywhere — except at the gas stations. In Tikrit, we saw children
selling one-gallon jugs from the sidewalk. Much of the pirated
profits, however, undoubtedly end up in the hands of
terrorists.
SO THE OBVIOUS QUESTION emerges: Why have we sent thousands of
American soldiers 7,000 miles across the ocean in order to enforce
a Soviet-style system? If gas station owners were simply buying gas
at a market price, they wouldn’t have any opportunity to fence it
onto the black market. In fact, there would be no black market.
Competition might eliminate half the gas stations but those that
survived would thrive. The government would collect its proceeds
from the refinery and might have enough money to pay its soldiers
and police officers, who are often deserting for lack of pay. Of
course the oil industry would remain a state monopoly — but that
is the choice we have faced all along. (Last week, at the urging of
the World Bank, the government did raise the price of oil to about
60 percent of the market price.)
It is important to recognize how primitive conditions are in
Iraqi society and how much of a task we have before us. Edward
Banfield described an almost identical situation in the southern
Italy of the 1960s in his classic book, The Moral Basis for a
Backward Society. Banfield found there was no “public sector.”
People were loyal only to their immediate and extended families.
Neighbors were regarded with a great deal of suspicion and
strangers were beyond the pale. Consequently there was no
cooperative enterprise.
Iraqi society functions much the same way. In the smaller towns,
houses are often surprisingly comfortable and well built. Interior
spaces are clean with walls made of plaster and rugs covering stone
or dirt floors. The fieldstone-and-cement exteriors can be
surprisingly artistic. Yet each home is surrounded by a wall and
concern for the outside world ends there.
There is no municipal garbage collection, even in the more
prosperous towns. Instead, people dump their trash “over the wall.”
The result is that a handsome villa that looks like it could
inhabit a Florida suburb will be surrounded by a vacant lot filled
with broken bottles and discarded plastic containers a foot deep.
Households flush “gray water” from sinks and baths through a small
pipe and into the street. In the cities, toilet water is treated
the same way and the streets have become open sewers.
Although there are “city councils” — usually run by tribal
leaders — there is no effective municipal government. Local taxes
do not exist and whatever funds are collected go to Baghdad, where
they are distributed with enormous inequality and favoritism. By
the time these funds reach the municipal level there is literally
nothing left. In Tikrit we saw road crews spreading fresh tar on a
section of Highway 1 that was already adequately surfaced.
Meanwhile, whole neighborhoods and villages remain unpaved.
Even if the violence is quelled — and that remains a big enough
question mark — the task of making Iraq anything close to a
functioning society remains immense. Enthusiasts keep talking about
how “the Iraqi people must stand up,” but the Iraqi people are
essentially inert. The rudiments of self-government have yet to
appear.
“History shows that the successful suppression of an armed
insurgency takes at least a decade,” says Major General Benjamin
Mixon, commander of the Coalition effort in the northern provinces
as he sits in his offices at FOB Speicher in Tikrit. “The question
is whether the American people will have the patience to sustain
that kind of effort.”
Indeed, even if the violence is quelled, the task has only
begun.
