| I really enjoy one-on-one conversations, like my time in the Iraqi parliament member's room yesterday evening, after my Q & A on Colorado Confidential.
We talked for an hour or so well into the night and I think she grew more comfortable with me in a maternal way and really opened up. In fact, my live blog session wasn't as great as I would have liked because for part of the time I was trying to explain to her what the heck I was doing and the keyboard also had a weird layout that slowed me down (still QWERTY but also adapted for Arabic). But in the name of meeting more people, today was certainly efficient.
Here are some pictures of "the office". Using Photoshop, I distorted the faces of the Iraqi persons. I am no longer at this hotel so I don't mind putting these up (thank you to those who expressed concerns about my safety while I am posting from within Iraq).
The gentleman to my right is currently not in elected office because he is considered too close to the Americans and it is rumored he works for the Americans.
NGO leaders discuss the state of NGOs in Iraq and how to cooperate with American NGOs.
First of all, there is a very unusual power-dynamic between an occupier and the occupied. Especially among the Iraqi members of officialdom (whom I met with today), there is a strong deference accorded to their invader, as if they fear I might send someone to shoot them or at the least their career could suffer if they displease me as an American. Particularly during the parts of the day when we had members of the US military with us, the power dynamics of the situation unfortunately impeded our communications from being as effective as they could have been. Obviously it was extremely awkward and embarrassing for me to have this effect on people, and I did my best to reduce any influence that my privileged status as an American had upon what they shared with me.
Being relatively young helps, as does the fact that I am running for Congress and not currently in Congress. I fear that our members of Congress who come here get less of a real and varied experience, as their schedules are tightly managed by the Congressional Liaison Office of the Army (which operates out of Saddam's old palace). I walked by but didn't go in lest they call their higher-ups and try to corral me. Even if members of Congress visiting Iraq do have additional meetings, the power dynamic is such that they are even less likely to get a full story than an average American. This is actually a bigger problem for our military than they probably realize, because of the uniform, and because we are the occupiers, people tell us what they think we want to hear far too often and it's dangerous when we believe it because we are basically just echoing ourselves.
The Iraqis I met with at the Al-Rashid Hotel are a self-selected group and generally pro-American (or at least lukewarm). They are among those working with or "collaborating" with the Americans. As such their fate is tied to ours. The terrorists threatening the lives of our troops are also threatening them. Thus they are generally inclined towards the US staying in Iraq longer. The Iraqis who want us out now, some of whom would rather kill me than meet with me, are not at the café with us today and I don't have a firsthand viewpoint into their perspective yet.
Everyone I met with knows that I am an American, and to a certain extent they tell me what they want me (and all Americans) to believe and act on. They don't know whether I have any influence, or how I fit into the whole American hierarchy, but they can reasonably assume that any American's opinion is worth helping to shape towards their own ends. This was one of the classic intelligence failures that lead to this "mistaken" invasion. The US readily believed Chalabi's lies as he played us like a fiddle in goading us to invade Iraq. Of course there is the counterargument that the Neocons, who wanted to go to war in the first place, simply used Chalabi and others who advanced their preconceived notions. There is probably some truth in both of those statements, but at the very least it turned out that many anti-Saddam Iraqi exiles fabricated whatever they felt it would take to get us to invade, and it worked. Who knows what we're being told in an effort to influence us today.
With the above disclaimers, here is an account of some of the highlights from today's meetings. I will switch a few details and comments between individuals to reasonably protect everyone's identity, but all statements and quotes are entirely true. When I get back to the US, I'll post some of the pictures with the elected officials, as they are public figures anyway with assassins gunning for them already and were willing to take posed shots with me.
The meetings blurred together as people came and went, but our first meeting was with representatives of the national Ministry of Civil Affairs and the Ministry of Human Rights. Then we met with representatives of local municipal governments followed by representatives of NGOs (non-profits) operating in Iraq. Finally, we met with regional government (provincial) officials. We were joined for part of the day by another Colorado elected official serving here as Marine, State Senator Steve Ward. The best way to describe the content is to break it down by section.
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The Ministry of Civil Society and Ministry of Human Rights:
In my opinion, these national ministries are generally well-intended but impotent. Please see my summary of my meetings the prior day with the same ministry of Civil Affairs (different people). First of all, the charge of these ministries is murky and even their top people cannot adequately explain it. There is also a major disconnect between their responsibilities and their authority. The "Ministry of Civil Society" is presumably charged with regulating and assisting NGOs that operate in Iraq. The Ministry of Human Rights seems to have no teeth to their charge and no real funding.
Because they exist, the Ministry of Civil Society is deluged with requests from NGOs for funding. They don't really have any resources to provide or even a real process to evaluate grants (although they bragged twice about sending ill Iraqi children to Dubai for medical treatment), so I had an idea to open a web portal for them (a la www.kiva.org and www.donorschoose.org (both worthy of plugs here) that would allow donors to support the Iraqi relief project of their choice. Americans feel a lot of guilt (rightly so) about this whole "whoops, we invaded your country by mistake" thing, and I think that some Americans in the position to help would open up their own pockets to assist the Iraqi people if there were an easy and convenient way to do so. Even those of us who opposed this unjust war from the start and want more than anything else to bring our troops home cannot help but feel responsible for the situation over here and cannot help but be full of the best wishes and prayers for the Iraqi people in their quest towards stability and democracy.
If anyone wants to help with this web portal idea, please give me a shout out as a reply and I'll contact you when I get back. A few of us could put this together if we put our minds to it. Of course the vetting and oversight piece within Iraq is the most important. The ministry would certainly offer its help, but it is hard to say what success they would have and curbing corruption without another perspective on the matter.
Representatives of Municipal Government:
As the level of government closest to the people, those who serve on "district councils" (the neighborhood city councils of which there are many in Baghdad) have suffered a heavy toll. A sobering statistic that one of the municipal representatives offered up is that of the approximately 1300 local elected officials in Baghdad, 213 have been killed. Another argued that actually 226 have been killed. Before your eyes bug out, 1300 elected officials is a reasonable number for a city of over 4 million people.
Colorado, with a similar population of over 4 million, has well over 2000 elected officials (close to a thousand on school boards alone). The difference is that no Coloradoan officials (and few American officials) in recent history have been killed while in office. One in five Iraqi officials has been killed. It's amazing that these public servants labor on and it is one of those Thanksgiving Day reminders about how fortunate we are to live in a country where people of different ideologies battle it out on the blogs and the ballot-box rather than the streets (almost makes me want to kiss the nearest troll).
One municipal official, a gray mustachioed gentleman of fiftyish, observed that he was the only one alive from the seven people originally on his town council. He moves around to a new residence every month and he doesn't even tell his own children or wife (safely in Jordan) where he lives. He seems resigned to fate as he tries to make the best of it and rebuild his city and his country.
Unlike the members of Parliament, many of whom live in internal exile in the International Zone and cannot safely visit their constituencies, local government officials live and work in their towns. One of the representatives described another failed American operation in which the Americans did extensive leafleting in his town telling his constituents to contact his office for anything they needed. His constituents dutifully contacted him with lists drawn up of their needs, but his office had no support and no resources to help anyone and it turned out to be yet another exercise in reducing American credibility (with collateral damage to his credibility).
This particular municipal contingent was composed of independent secular representatives who felt that the biggest threat to municipal government is making municipal elections partisan. In the United States, most of our municipalities (particularly in the western US) have non-partisan elections and personally I think that system works best. A few years back, one of Colorado's right-wing legislators tried to make school boards partisan in CO with the thought that since most of our 186 school districts are rural, conservative, and solidly Republican it would tilt our boards to the right by having Republican primary voters rather than voters as a whole elect most of our school boards. Fortunately we stopped his proposal but it shows how partisanship can be used to advance a conservative agenda.
In this case, according to the municipal officials I met with, the major political parties really just operate as street gangs on the neighborhood level. According to one of them, the real conflict is not between Shiites and Sunnis but rather between rival partisan factions; since many areas are homogenous, different Shiite parties essentially battle on the streets for control and power.
I would characterize the feelings of the Municipal government towards the Americans as that of a clumsy giant that tends to crush what it tries to hug, and punches up the wall to kill a fly. They are slow to request American help in many matters because they usually think that the medicine is worse than the disease and while we might be well-intended we are grossly incompetent.
NGOs, the non-governmental relief agencies that operate within Iraq:
Non-profits are a critical part of civil society. In the United States, among other functions, they feed the poor, educate children, and provide a safety net beyond that provided by our government. I have learned a lot about the civic sector by founding and running several (public charter schools and computer recycling) non-profits. In Iraq, a strong non-profit civic sector is critical to actually accomplish the social progress that government ministers at best pay lip service to and at worst impede or corrupt.
Eight people representing several different non-profits (I will use the term NGO from here on out) met with us. It was actually hard to figure out how many non-profits were represented, because some of the people had three or four different NGOs they represented and/or were starting. One makeshift business card had five different titles with five organizations for the same individual.
It seems to be a trendy thing among the active educated set in Iraq to start NGOs, which is a good thing because some entrepreneurship in that arena is needed, although ultimately focus and execution is more important than conception. What they lack in know-how they make up in enthusiasm.
One of the things that the Ministry of Civil Society is cracking down on, according to both the NGOs and the Ministry, is bogus NGOs designed simply to raise money. The NGOs we talked to agreed that bogus-NGOs have given all of them a bad name lately and were glad that something was being done about it.
Because of the totalitarian nature of Saddam's dictatorship, civil society did not exist in any real sense. There was no real NGO sector under Saddam because he retained control of all elements of society and saw entities he didn't control as a threat to his authority. So now Iraqis are engaged in a learning process regarding NGOs. Some of the work done by the people we met with includes empowering and training women, offering early childhood daycare programs, and providing family counseling.
The topic briefly turned to American politics, and I asked a young woman who runs an NGO which of the US presidential candidates she likes, and she immediately responded Hillary Clinton. She cited the help that she had received from Bill Clinton's global initiative. I hadn't thought of this before, but one thing that could potentially make a Hillary presidency even more effective would be Bill Clinton's extensive post-presidential networking and meaningful assistance to NGOs across the world. Of course if you're not a Hillary fan that could mean that the Clintons will have even more influence globally than a president otherwise would.
Regional (state/provincial) government:
The province including Baghdad has its own government with an annual budget of $500mm this year hoping to double to one billion next year according to one of its representatives we met with. We met with two members from the elected legislature of the regional government, who were jealous when I told them that Colorado, with a similar population, has a budget of over $16 billion.
I was warned before this meeting that these particular state government officials were sectarian Shi'ites, as opposed to the more mixed and secular people from the other agencies. Thus we were advised to play our cards close to our vests and not inform them of all of our other meetings nor whom we met with. Clearly these regional representatives have decided to cast their lot with the Iraqi government, and thus they are threatened by the same terrorists that pursue members of parliament, but they still derive part of their own power base from elements close to Iran.
One important topic that I only discussed briefly (with these regional/provincial representatives, because one had an economics background) was the private sector and the economy. Save for the oil sector, the Iraqi economy is a complete basket-case. We didn't have time to do a thorough treatment of the subject, but obviously a robust private sector is important for Iraq if they are to have the resources they need in the civic and governmental sector as well as a happily employed population. The critical element for any kind of economic growth to occur is security. After they reach a reasonable level of security, then they can worry about a functioning legal system, building infrastructure, and ending corruption. Right now though business is still an afterthought until security is handled and people feel safe enough to engage in commerce again.
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During these meetings, my wheels were turning on what ideas I could launch when I got back to the US to do my small part to improve the situation. In addition to the giving portal website described above, I have a few other ideas I'll discuss in more detail when I return and would love your help.
After meeting with all these fine people, and I do think that most of them are honorable, well intended albeit in-above-their-heads, I had the sobering realization that when I return (and I will return!) to Iraq, some of them will likely have been killed. They take on enormous risks every day. While our troops are still deployed we think of Iraq in terms of the destructive powers of war and military occupation, but America does also have a constructive (non-military) role to play in helping to rebuild this country, and that work has just begun.
I really wish I could have interacted with more "real Iraqis" but as I suspected when I started, I will probably be able to have more frank and honest discussions with Iraqi refuges in Amman. Although they certainly have their biases as well, at least they won't see me as a member of a force that has the compound we're meeting in completely surrounded and who-knows-who listening to every word.
We finished with our meetings around 6 pm, and prepared to leave the green zone for a rather unique Thanksgiving evening outside of the IZ in the red-zone....
Best quotes from today:
"We have, still, some natural deaths in this country."
-- A town council member who had just described a late friend of his, who was an architect. I had asked if he too had been assassinated but apparently he had actually died of natural causes.
"Thank you for all the things you have done to Iraq."
-- This non-profit executive's words revealed both her poor English skills and her over-deference to me as an American. But this inadvertent mis-speak was more than that. It was at the same time a biting parody (a la Jon Stewart) and a cruel joke, a hilarious absurdity and a poignant or even tragic summation of the relationship between well-meaning Iraqis and their American occupiers.
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