Most people back in the US can imagine (to an extent) some of the "challenges" in doing work in a war zone where explosions, gunfire, and kidnappings seem to be the order of the day.
Less easy to imagine are the day-to-day challenges that have less to do with getting killed, and more to do with loss of basic conveniences that those in the "real world" take completely for granted. It is hard to understand why things seem to move so slowly in Iraq, and why American ingenuity, industry, and technology seems to sometimes fall flat on the hard, hot pavement of the Arab Street.
For Americans, it is quite right to take certain things for granted - we live and work in a free, organized, rational, competent, peaceful, and just country.
(Dear Liberals: I apply these descriptions to the United States not in the absolute fantasy sense you seem to require, but as a relative description of America compared to, well, every other country in recorded human history. You, as liberals, should approve of moral relativism.)
But what if that wasn't the case? What would it be like to instead live and work in an oppressive, chaotic, irrational, incompetent, violent, and unjust society? Well, look no further than Iraq -- the Cradle of Civilization that we, as Westerners, apparently robbed long, long ago.
Some snapshots:
Can You Hear Me Now?
Communications will be the first thing that strikes at the heart of your productive life when first confined to the Cradle. No functional telephone landlines will be available. Mobile phone usage will be the telephone method of choice, and you can expect constant drops in service, no cooperative agreements between carriers from one city to the next (Erbil can call Baghdad if one dials internationally, but Baghdad can NEVER call Erbil and no one seems to know why), network shutdowns unserviceable over a holiday or the Muslim Sabbath, batches of SIM cards to lose, and huge stacks of phone cards to carry in your pocket.
Satellite phones must be used for any non-urban areas, but expect to have to stand in a statuesque ballerina pose in order to maintain a signal for longer than 5 minutes, at about $2.00 per minute.
The (almost) World Wide Web
If you prefer e-mail, internet service is available, of course. All you need to do is cough up about $6,000 in order to have a personal satellite system installed, including dish, receiver, cables, routers, etc. Make sure the installation company is legit, and not just the son and nephew of the local goat merchant who thinks he remembers reading something about applied satellite theory in the Holy Koran. Then all you need to do is pay about $500 per month to get frequent slowdowns and shutdowns due to cloudy weather, satellite overload, an unanchored dish that topples in a light breeze, frayed wires, and connectors crimped with a stone and a screwdriver.
Whenever I travel on R&R for a week or two to a "normal" country, I actually jump a bit when I first come online. The speed at which a webpage can load truly startles me.
Road Trips
So with phones that are dicey, and a fickle and frustrating internet, one might choose to simply communicate in person when conducting business. A road trip to meet with people or check on a project might seem like a good solution to the limitations of electronic communication in a technologically deprived society.
All that is needed to meet with someone in Iraq is to file a travel plan 48 hours in advance with military operational security command centers that cover the regions in which you will be traveling. Then assemble a personal security detail (PSD), usually comprised of several expat and local professional security "operatives" that will be driving a hardened lead/scout car, an armored car (for the "client" -- that's you), and a hardened chase car (often called a "gunship," and often a minivan or SUV big enough to carry the PKM belt-fed machine gun in the rear). Your team will take you to your destination of choice (latest intel reports permitting) at a bargain rate of only about $8,000 per day.
For a trip of about 30KM through Baghdad to an outlying suburb, plan for about an hour and a half trip, that way there's plenty of time to get through traffic jams, highway checkpoints manned by Iraqi police/insurgents (no telling which is which), crawling IED sweeps, US and Iraqi combat patrols (careful -- stay 200 meters back!), donkey carts, other PSD teams (rather erratic and aggressive they are!), uncontrolled intersections, kids playing in the highway (no kidding), and the like. You'll be quite comfortable in the back of your armored car in the 130-degree heat (in which the AC unit was last serviced by an Iraqi) sitting behind tinted windows about 3 inches thick and sporting your body armor and weapons of choice.
Fly the Friendly Skies
From certain key bases or cities, air travel is also an option. Military flights aboard Blackhawks or C-130s are common in Iraq. However there is generally no published schedule for security reasons, so the idea is usually to go to an airfield near you and basically talk your way aboard a mil-flight. Could take hours, could take days, and you better not be in a latrine for too long -- you might miss it.
Commercial aviation has been in operation in Iraq for almost a year now. If you get nervous flying United, let me tell you, there's nothing quite like flying the friendly skies aboard the pride of the Sunni Triangle, Iraqi Airways. (Note: Be very wary of any item tagged with Arabic script, but that contains moving parts. I consider flying aboard a duly-tagged 737, with the word "Iraqi" in the title, no less, to be the most dangerous part of my existence here.)
I've taken about 8 IA flights in the last few months between Erbil and Baghdad. Two have gone smoothly (meaning delays less than 3 hours). Four have been cancelled, causing me to have to return to our office and try again on a later date. Each one way, 5km trip to or from the airport in Baghdad to the "Green Zone" is about $3,500 in PSD costs. In comparison, the flight in question costs about $90.
The remaining two flights I experienced were the best of all. They were both delayed by several hours, plus they wound up landing in the wrong city -- a town called Sulimaniya that is about 3 hours drive from our assumed destination of Erbil. Unarmed and unaccompanied, I took a cab to a local hotel to wait for my $6,000 PSD to arrive the next day. Fortunately, Sulimaniya is a Kurdish town, so the danger of my head getting sawed off in the middle of the night was significantly diminished. Fallujah doesn't have an airstrip - hamdul-Allah!.
Home Sweet Home
For life around the house (or trailer, or tent, or whatever), things in Iraq only get better. Trailer and tent dwellers can expect no room, no privacy, common showers and latrines, and rain, wind, sand, and mud to find there way into everything. Those who are stupid enough to fend for themselves in "Indian Country," like yours truly, get the advantage of living in a real house, or "villa" as they are called here. High quality housing in Iraq is not too common, but any city or town has its high-rent district.
For a low monthly cost of only about $5000 to $10,000, you will have the opportunity to spend another $75,000 to renovate the place so that it's fit for (Westerner) habitation. Setting aside certain structural "concerns" will be necessary - the best villas are generally 2 or 3-story, un-reinforced block and mortar construction, and there's generally not a square corner or straight line in the house. Hard to imagine how a 6-point earthquake anywhere in the Middle East will tend to result in at least 20,000 people killed, right?
The Little Things
Local contractors love to get house renovation jobs for Westerners, and drool at the opportunity to cut every corner imaginable and rob their blue-eyed client blind. Common areas of concern after renovation are clogged sewer lines (often due to contractors disposing of excess concrete into the toilets during construction), bursting water hoses, little to no water pressure, blackouts at least 10 times per day, over-boiling water heaters with jammed pressure relief valves (stand up before you flush, lest ye jewels go the way of the lobster), high-amp electrical lines spliced with scotch tape, ungrounded everything, door hardware that seizes (we've had to kick down several doors in order to escape captivity in bedrooms and bathrooms), shower fixtures that provide involuntary electroshock therapy (careful with that fixture at groin level -- OUCH!), and the apparent inability to determine the difference between the colors red and blue.
This last point deserves extra attention. Water taps and faucets are generally color coded. For any people of Middle Eastern culture who may be reading this, red is the color for hot water, and blue is the color for cold water. If, as a symbol of protest or a revised sense of reasoning, a society was to reverse this arrangement, then that might be justifiable -- hey, it's your stupid country. But what no one can justify, and indeed what no one with an IQ over 55 can comprehend, is the total random application of red vs. blue against hot vs. cold. Yet this is the norm for any water fixtures installed by Iraqis anywhere in the country -- camps, houses, hotels, government offices, restaurants -- you name it.
The inability to consistently apply a color coding system comprised of only two colors, to a condition that has only two possible variables, never fails to astonish.
It Just Gets Better
This is just the tip of the iceberg -- a brief (well, not really) rant about daily dysfunctions in Iraq that are so fundamental they can often turn a 2-hour task into a 5-day adventure.
Yes, there are many other factors, besides the guns and bombs, which make accomplishing anything in Iraq a tremendous challenge (more on The Civilization of Deception, Jesus was Carpenter but Allah Is a Plumber, and Why Americans Love Security and Hate Progress, in later posts).
And let not these lessons be limited to just Iraq. Anywhere we find modern conveniences like communications, travel, and competence severely diminished, we will see how fine the hair is that suspends us just above the common miseries of centuries past.
When we find ourselves without the basics, another conspiracy film shown oh-so convincingly, or hip-hop song rendered oh-so crudely, or news story penned oh-so alarmingly, or lesson professed oh-so distortedly, or speech spat from a podium oh-so earnestly, won't get the trains running, or the water flowing, or the planes flying, or the phones chatting, or the lights glowing, or the sewage pumping.
Men and women who have far more talent and determination than any actor, singer, news anchor, professor, or politician, must virtually re-invent the wheel under brutal conditions in order to overcome the basic 18th-century obstacles of long distance, harsh weather, impassable terrain, and human lunacy.
Ask a girl named Katrina -- she'll tell you. Had any other country been met with the same disaster, under the same conditions, the losses would have increased many fold. The Americans who pulled off that mass rescue were flat-out brilliant, and only people who've never had to DO anything can look at the Katrina Rescue and see nothing but failures.
Question Of The Day: Given the fact that a typical Iraqi apparently cannot distinguish between red and blue, what will be required of America (at home and abroad) in order to succeed with the reconstruction of Iraq's infrastructure and the formation of a viable and stable constitutional democratic government?
Answer: Patience and Perseverance -- on an Evolutionary scale.
