Site Visit

A group of us went out into the Red Zone the other day to visit one of our "problem" construction sites. This was the first time I've been outside the International Zone on the ground. It's quite a bit different from flying over it in a helo.

Since we're Embassy staff, we go out in an Embassy convoy. These are run by Blackwater. Yes, it's that Blackwater, the one the press has pilloried so much in the past. Frankly, I love these guys. I have found them to be very smart, experienced, and professional individuals. Many of them are ex-soldiers who saw some of the worst of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, as civilian security forces, their mission isn't to go smash down doors, it's to make sure that people like me get into and out of places we need to go, safely and with a minimum of fuss and bother. The press likes to portray them as loose cannons. I've found them to be, without exception, very level-headed and unflappable. Exactly the kind of guys you want on your side if it ever gets ugly.

We went out in a convoy of several armored SUV's. There were lots of security measures in effect that I won't talk about, but suffice to say, I felt very safe. Still, as we got to the checkpoint that marks the boundary between the International Zone and the Red Zone, the tension in our truck suddenly went up. All of us put on our helmets - we were already wearing our vests - and our heads started swiveling. Security convoys do not flow with traffic because that's dangerous: that's how somebody with a bomb can get right up next to you. So we dominate traffic. That's the only way to describe it. We own the road and everybody else will wait. Maybe it seems arrogant if you're looking at it from the outside, but if you're on the inside, you realize that you have, in effect, a great big TARGET painted on your vehicle, and you have to take aggressive action to make that target hard to hit.

The press doesn't move this way. They take the other option: going low-profile and trying to be as invisible as possible. They use old beat-up Toyotas with the Bondo flaking off the sides, or taxicabs with local Iraqi drivers. So when they get caught in the traffic backups that convoys like mine cause, they gripe about it in print.

The project we went out to visit is a multi-million-dollar construction of a building in downtown Baghdad. Your tax dollars are paying for it, courtesy of Congressional largesse circa 2004 called the Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund, or IRRF. IRRF allocated about $20B (that's billion with a big B) for projects intended to rebuild some critical parts of Iraq's infrastructure and kick-start the economy. This particular construction is an important part of that. Unfortunately, it's been plagued with all kinds of delays and is one of our biggest headaches.

Building anything in Iraq is infinitely more difficult than it is in the States. For one thing, there are always people around who'd like nothing better than to blow it up and kill everybody associated with it. Sometimes they try. Then there's the difference between the American way of doing business and the Iraqi way. That's the subject of another post. Hell, it's the subject of a book. Or a whole series of books, plus a few hands-on immersion seminars. The phrase "Americans are from Mars, Iraqis are from Zarkon IV" might give you an idea. Bottom line: we do business and project management in very different ways.

We do the actual construction in very different ways, too. While I'm not an architect or construction expert by any stretch of the imagination, even I can see things that wouldn't pass muster in the States. Or most anywhere else, for that matter. At this particular site, I was ecstatic to see rows of cinderblock laid in reasonably straight lines - it was quite different from the last site I visited!

I took my camera and sketch pad with me on the trip. I'll try to get a few images up on the blog in the next day or so. But I didn't do much sightseeing. There are too many people out there risking their lives to protect dorky little me, and I'm not about to put them to a moment's more risk than I have to. So when we move, we move quickly, and about all I can do is snap pictures out the window and hope to get something interesting. We'll soon see if I did.