The smartest guy I know in the nation-building business sent me the note that follows. It addresses my earlier post about the $1.3 billion Agency for International Development request for proposals from “qualified sources to design and implement a social and economic stabilization program impacting ten Strategic Cities, identified by the United States Government as critical to the defeat of the Insurgency in Iraq.”
He writes:
The Iraq Strategy, the Strategic Stabilization plan for 10 cities and the DoD Stabilization Ops Directive signed this week are all part of a package.
I’ve attached a fresh copy of the Stabilization Ops directive for you. Reading it takes me back to my four years in the Indochina War where our strategy was similarly embedded within heroic assumptions about the nature of the conflict and the limitations of our enemy.
The Strategic Stabilization of the 10 Iraqi cities where the insurgency in strongest assumes an environment sufficiently permissive for extensive civilian expat operations in the urban core.
Yet the reasons for choosing these 10 cities is that the strength of the insurgency has made the environment relatively impermissive.
As in Fallujah, we may find ourselves saying that we “have to destroy the city in order to save it”!
I remember the days when the typical US Provincial Rep in Vietnam was an idealistic 22 year old with a freshly-minted BA in poli sci from XXXXX College (redacted by TWN) who had never been farther than Chicago before he hit Phuoc Long Province in III Corps.
Six weeks into the job and our young Prov Rep would be carrying his Swedish K with panache, squiring his new jungle-bunny girlfriend around the town, and being regularly deceived and defrauded by cynical and manipulative Vietnamese provincial officials who were feathering their nests prior to a stealthy departure for California with their mistresses.
I suspect that we may have some tough times ahead, Steve.
This seasoned foreign service officer makes a key point that must be repeated:
The Strategic Stabilization of the 10 Iraqi cities where the insurgency in strongest assumes an environment sufficiently permissive for extensive civilian expat operations in the urban core.
Yet the reasons for choosing these 10 cities is that the strength of the insurgency has made the environment relatively impermissive.
The entire package of requests and commitments contained in Department of Defense Directive, Number 3000.05, signed by Acting Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England and titled: “Military Support for Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction (SSTR) Operations” is available here.
Although the $1.02 billion for strategic city stabilization, in addition to another $300 million for performance, bringing the total to $1.3 billion is just a small line item in this overall directive, a little quick ‘back of the envelope’ math is interesting.
We can probably assume that Kurdistan cities are probably not part of the strategic stabilization objectives of the Department of Defense, so the population in that region can be dropped from calculations.
I have been scouting around to assess the size of Iraq’s largest non-Kurdish cities and have been unsuccessful, but I did see that Fallujah had a population of 300,000. So, for argument’s sake, let’s propose that 8 million people populate these ten largest cities.
Taking just the $1.3 billion from this stabilization line-item and dividing by 8 million people comes out to $162 a person. Most households in Iraq have 7-8 people, meaning that a household of 8 would receive $1,296. While the CIA lists that purchasing power parity per capita income in Iraq is $2,100, that figure is vastly inflated. The reality is that in pre-invasion Iraq, doctors — who are on the upper end of the economic food chain — were fortunate to bring up $100/month. Most of Iraqi society subsists on far less.
Being able to distribute “incentives” to Iraqi citizens via loans and grants, or subsidies for certain kinds of social capital-building endeavors could have profound impact. Some will call such distribution bribes. Others have suggested — like Charles Wolf in the Wall Street Journal the other day — that “shares” of Iraq Oil, Inc. be distributed to Iraq’s citizens.
To escape accusations of creating new “welfare dependency”, perhaps another route would be to hire Iraqi firms and personnel to carry out this stabilization initiative.
My basic point is that $1.3 billion, which turns out to be a small slice of what America is committing to Iraq, is a huge sum that could be directed towards Iraqi citizens to incentivize support and to keep American or other non-Iraqi civilians from increasing the footprint of the American flag inside Iraqi borders.
While I opposed the invasion of Iraq, once we crossed the line and became occupiers, it became hugely important to get the occupation “right”. The only way occupations go well, in my view, is if the occupier creates a class of political and economic “winners” that become the backbone of the society that emerges and which are thankful for the role the U.S. played — but also happy about the occupier’s departure and the resumption of genuine sovereignty.
We did nothing like this — and we continue to ignore the reality that the chief beneficiaries of our involvement were characters like former Prime Minister Allawi and current Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi and their minions. Those are the financial beneficiaries, but the real winners have been Shia theocrats who have moved quickly to consolidate power in the void left by the invasion and dismantled Coalition Provisional Authority.
I don’t think America can meet its objectives in Iraq any longer — and our “brand”, as a nation, has been tragically tarnished by our missteps and fumbling in Iraq.
That said, if we are still able to generate contracts on the order of $1.3 billion, perhaps we can begin improving the fiscal circumstances of a broad cross-section of Iraqis — broadly distributed — and not centralized in the clutches of thugs and city bosses.
I recognize that to many in the nation-building business, my thoughts may seem naive, but mutual interest and cohesiveness among people can be influenced by force or by greed.
Rather than satisfying the greed of our contractors and sending them into unstable and unsafe areas of Iraq — where there mere presence helps inspire anti-occupation insurgency, let’s consider strategies that appeal to a broader cross section of Iraqi citizens and “reward” them for owning up to the task of stabilizing their own cities.
— Steve Clemons
