Phil Klay - Redeployment

“Fantastic,” I said.

“It wasn’t my idea,” said Bob. “We remade the Ministry of Agriculture on free market principles, but the invisible hand of the market started planting IEDs.”

“Okay,” I said, “but this region”—I pointed to the Shi’a areas—“needs water for irrigation.”

“West of Dover, too,” he said. “Irrigation systems need maintenance, and nobody’s been doing much of that.”

I tapped the dark spot he’d said was a water treatment plant. “Is this operational?”

Bob laughed. “We sunk about 1.5 million dollars’ worth of IRRF2 funds into it a couple years back.”

“What’d that buy us?”

“No idea,” Bob said. “But the chief engineer has been asking for a meeting.”

“Great,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

Bob shook his head and rolled his eyes.

“Look,” I said, “I know there’s a limit to what I can do. But if I can do one small thing—”

“Small?” said Bob. “A water treatment plant?”

“It’s probably the best thing we could—”

“I’ve been here longer than you,” said Bob.

“Okay.”

“If you want to succeed, don’t do big ambitious things. This is Iraq. Teach widows to raise bees.”

“Raise bees?” I said.

“Beekeep?” he said. “Whatever. Grow honey. Get five widows some beehives—”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ve got an Iraqi who can sell us the hives, and an Iraqi local council saying they’ll support the project—”

“Bob,” I said.

“Yes?” he said.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“The embassy likes completed projects supporting Lines of Engagement.”

“Which has what to do with getting five widows beekeeping?”

Bob folded his arms and looked me over. He pointed to the opposite wall, where we had a poster outlining the LOEs. “Give someone a job. That’s economic improvement. Give women a job. That’s women’s empowerment. Give a widow a job. That’s aiding disenfranchised populations. Three LOEs in one project. Widow projects are gold. With the council supporting it, we can say it’s an Iraqi-led project. And it’ll cost under twenty-five thousand dollars, so the funding will sail through.”

“Five widows with beehives.”

“I think it’s called an apiary,” he said.

“Beekeeping,” I said, “is not going to help.”

“Help what?” said Bob. “This country is fucked whatever you do.”

“I’m going to focus on water,” I said. “Let’s get that plant running.”

“Okay,” he said. He shook his head, then looked up and smiled amiably. He seemed to have decided I could go to hell my own way. “Then we should get you to one of the companies at Istalquaal.”

“Istalquaal,” I said, trying out the sound of the word, eager to get it right.

“I think that’s how you say it,” Bob said. “It means freedom. Or liberation. Something.”

“That’s nice,” I said.

“They didn’t name it,” he said. “We did.”

It took six weeksto get to the plant. Three weeks alone trying to get Kazemi, the chief engineer, on the phone. Another three trying to nail down the specifics. Kazemi had an annoying habit of answering questions about dates and times the way a Zen master answers questions about enlightenment. “Only the mountains do not meet,” he’d say, or, “The provisions for tomorrow belong to tomorrow.”

Meanwhile, Cindy’s women’s health clinic took off. She set it up on the Sunni side of the highway, and the number of patients increased steadily each week. I didn’t have much to do on the water front, and sitting around waiting for Kazemi to get back to me was enough to drive me insane, so I decided to get myself personally involved in the clinic. I didn’t really trust Cindy with it. I thought she was too earnest to handle something important, and the more she told me, the more I thought the project was genuinely worthwhile.

In Iraq, it’s hard for women to see a doctor. They need a man’s permission, and even then a lot of hospitals and small clinics won’t serve them. You’ll see signs reading, “Services for Men Only,” sort of like the old “Irish Need Not Apply” signs that my great-great-grandfather had to deal with.

Health services were the hook to draw people in, but key to the broader functioning of the clinic were Najdah, a dogged social worker, and her sister, the on-staff lawyer. Every woman who came in was interviewed first, ostensibly for the clinic to find out what health services they needed but actually to allow us to find out what broader services we could provide. The problems of women in our area went far beyond untreated urinary tract infections, though those were often quite severe—women’s problems were usually not sufficient pretext for a man to allow his wife or daughter or sister to go see the doctor, and health issues we think of as minor in the United States had a tendency to snowball. One woman’s UTI scarred her kidneys so badly, she was risking organ failure.

The clinic also helped women needing divorces, women suffering domestic violence, women not getting the public assistance they were entitled to, and women who wanted to file claims against Coalition Forces to get compensation for relatives they’d accidentally killed. One girl, a fourteen-year-old victim of gang rape, came in because her family planned to sell her to a local brothel. This wasn’t uncommon for girls whose rapes destroyed their marriage prospects. It was actually a kinder option than the honor killings that still sometimes happened.

Najdah and the staff lawyer would do their best to help these women out, occasionally raising their concerns with the local councils and power brokers. They didn’t try to “liberate” the Iraqi women—whatever that means—or turn them into entrepreneurs. Najdah and her staff listened to them and helped them with their actual problems. In the case of the fourteen-year-old, Najdah had a friend on the police force raid the girl’s home as well as the brothel. The girl went to prison. For her, it was the best alternative.

I made a few trips out to the clinic and had started thinking about expanding the idea to other communities when Kazemi finally got back to us with concrete ideas for a meeting. I arranged things with him and then tried to set up a convoy with one of the units at Istalquaal.

“Nobody’s been that way in a long time,” one company commander told me over the phone. “There’s probably IEDs there from ’04. We have no idea what we might hit.”

That’s not something you want to hear from a hardened soldier. I’d already done a couple convoys by the time I got to Istalquaal, but the memory of that assessment and the wary nervousness of the soldiers there gave me what, in the military, they refer to as a “high pucker factor.” The platoon that eventually took me out had clearly drawn the last straw. They all knew it. “Let’s go get blown up,” I overheard one soldier saying to another. When we got on the road, my only comfort was the obvious boredom of my translator, a somewhat short and pudgy Sunni Muslim everybody referred to as “the Professor.”

“Why do they call you the Professor?” I asked him.

“Because I was a professor,” he said, taking off his glasses and rubbing them as if to emphasize the point, “before you came and destroyed this country.”

We were getting off to an awkward start. “You know,” I said, “when this all started I opposed the war… .”

“You have baked Iraq like a cake,” he said, “and given it to Iran to eat.”

He sniffed and folded his arms over his belly and closed his eyes. I pretended something on the side of the road had caught my eye. Most translators would never say anything like that to an American. We sat in silence for a while.