http://www.afji.com/2008/03/3358800

Carried Away
Dead reckoning
The U.S. Navy’s new maritime strategy sets forth a vision of the role of naval forces in defending and protecting U.S. national interests against new threats.
Cmdr. Jerry Hendrix challenges the Navy to align its old-style, carrier-heavy pro¬curement strategy with the new maritime strategy.
Karl Hasslinger, a former submarine commander, points downward to a potential threat still overlooked: an attack on seabed infrastructure critical to the economy and to U.S. security.

Chris Cavas questions the wisdom of introducing three major new platforms at the same time — all based on untested designs. Is this bold new thinking or reckless risk?
And Capt. Bill Lescher compares good risk with bad risk. Successful implementa¬tion of the new strategy depends on the Navy leadership seizing the first while miti¬gating the latter.
CARRIED AWAY
BY CMDR. HENRY J. HENDRIX
The new maritime strategy is out, and for the first time in 20 years, the Navy finds itself with a new course and a new set of strategic priorities. The maritime services have formally recognized that preventing wars is at least as important as winning them and, hence, have made the decision to renew their commitment to humanitarian missions.
The problem with this initiative, however, is that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The Navy’s hammer, which dominates its procurement strategy, is the carrier strike group. In a strategic paradigm that includes insurgencies, piracy, disease, natural disasters, rising regional competitors, increasing economic competition for shrinking mineral resources, drug trafficking and weapons proliferation, the Navy owes the nation a procurement strategy that fills the toolbox with gear capable of responding across the spectrum of engagement and conflict. Instead, more than six years into the post-Sept. 11 era, our budgets continue to emphasize carrier strike groups dominated by high-end technologies designed to meet Soviet surface action groups steaming through the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom gap and regimental formations of Backfire bombers descending from the polar north.
The war on terrorism promises to occupy the thoughts and exertions of the American military for much of the generation to come. This has forced those within the military who are inclined to examine service and joint strategies with a critical eye and to question the utility of current force doctrine and structures. The Navy has not been exempt from this exercise. Adm. Michael Mullen, who ascended to the position of chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff from the post of chief of naval operations, took the aggressive step of anteing up Navy personnel for service as individual augmentees to support units in Iraq and Afghanistan and take pressure off stressed Army and Marine units, but he took other structural steps, as well.
Mullen made the controversial decision, despite opposition from reactionary Navy and Marine Corps leaders, to solidify the structure of the relatively new Expeditionary Strike Groups (ESGs), an innovation introduced by his predecessor, Adm. Vernon Clark, as well as acting as a strong supporter of the newly established Naval Expeditionary Combat Command (NECC). Both of these organizations were designed to address the low end of the engagement and conflict scale ranging from post-disaster humanitarian assistance to small-force engagements ashore, and from combat operations on inland waterways to civil-military affairs-style infrastructure creation. However, ESGs, with their shortage of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets and the now-standard practice of stripping away their surface combatants at the onset of deployments to cover other missions, lack the capabilities to operate at their full potential. The NECC, largely funded out of wartime supplemental budgets, remains unsure of its future in a post-cost-of-war supplemental budgetary environment. What is needed is a new maritime procurement plan that firmly locks these innovations into place and forges ahead on a course that places the Navy in a stronger position to leverage its strategic influence ashore.
Let me emphasize that I am not advocating the demise of the aircraft carrier. It has demonstrated its flexibility and utility for more than 70 years and I cannot envision the day when a crisis erupts and the president does not ask, “Where are the carriers?” There can be little doubt that in an era increasingly characterized by declining access to overseas shore bases that we will continue to require the services of our aircraft carriers. The question really becomes “how many do we need?” Twenty years ago, it was 15 carrier strike groups (we called them carrier battle groups then, and I miss the name), then we went to 12, and now we sit at 11. So what is the bottom-line requirement? It depends on whom you ask, but I believe the number will be somewhat lower, and we will return to this topic shortly.
First, we must examine why the number isn’t higher. We have gone from a nearly 600-ship Navy to 500, 400 and now we are crashing through the 300-ship barrier on our way to something close to 270. There is a promise that we will get back north of 300 again, but looking at the projected retirement dates for Aegis cruisers and the expeditious manner in which we decommissioned the Spruance-class destroyers when their maintenance costs began to climb, logic suggests that the number of days the Navy spends with an inventory in excess of 300 ships will be few. Why? Our leadership, despite its best efforts and ample historical precedent, has been unable to persuade the legislative branch to commit to a Defense Department core budget north of 4 percent of the national gross domestic product. This level of spending characterized previous periods of war and conflict. In the out years, beyond the wartime supplementals, the services face largely static budgets.
GOLD-PLATING
We have not been helped by the Navy’s recent propensity to buy Ferraris instead of Fords when it comes to our ships. It seems that every time we enunciate a requirement for a new ship, we specify a requirement for a very basic design, and as soon as we get done with the initial press conference, we begin gold-plating the prototype. Ten years later, when the first ships are being built, we find that the unit costs have grown and realize that the Navy is not going to be able to buy as many as it would like, so additional mission requirements are placed on the few ships that are procured, driving up the costs even more. It’s a death cycle. Look at the recent travails of the Littoral Combat Ship if you need any evidence. If that example isn’t strong enough, one need look no further than the stories surrounding the development of a 25,000-ton Ballistic Missile Defense cruiser or a legislative initiative that requires new Navy vessels to be nuclear-powered.
We must also take into account the fact that the ships presently in the fleet are expensive to operate. The amount “$1 million a day” is often thrown around when discussing carrier budgets. Yet the Navy writes its year-to-year engagement strategies with carriers in mind. When the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations talks about 1.0, 1.5 and 2.0 coverage in the Arabian Gulf, we all know it is talking about carrier strike groups, but do we need that capability continuously? At one point last summer, we had two carrier strike groups and one expeditionary strike group in the Arabian Gulf to demonstrate American resolve, presumably to the Iranians, who countered by sending their own carrier to meet us. Oh, wait a minute — they don’t have an aircraft carrier. In fact, no one who is not formally allied with the U.S has an operational aircraft carrier (yes, I count the French as being formally allied with us). Instead, the Iranians sortied their flotilla of small combatants and, yes, they have the advantage of having a lot of land-based aircraft to back up their small, littoral navy. Did our carriers send a signal? Yes. Do we have to send it all the time? No.
AN ALTERNATIVE CARRIER STRATEGY
In fact, we should consider moving away from regular carrier deployments and toward an alternative strategy of directed/focused surge deployments. In this alternative future strike, carriers on both coasts would be in a constant state of readiness to deploy in response to crises. The West Coast strike carriers and their air wings would be forward based at Guam to cut transit times. In this scenario, we might be able to get by with fewer strike carriers in the inventory than what we maintain now, and send a percentage of the remaining carriers into a maintenance reserve status.
The remaining carriers could be placed in semi-active status and reconfigured for other mission sets, namely to act as expeditionary sea-base platforms to embark Army and Marine Corps expeditionary brigades during crises. Ever since the introduction of the Sea Power 21 operational construct five years ago, the sea base has been getting the short end of the stick from long-term planners, even though it was touted initially as having the most potential to have a positive effect in the post-9/11 world. The sea base was envisioned not only to serve as the logistical base for combat operations ashore, but also to provide a credible engagement force for the type of conditions that tend to predominate the embryonic cultural conflicts that serve as the precursors to insurgency, terrorism and civil strife.
The Marine Corps, with its scalable Marine squad-platoon-company-level ground force embarked on current Expeditionary Strike Groups, acting in concert with host-nation governments, is the ideal force to head off embryonic terrorist groups. ESGs can defuse crises before they metastasize into full-blown insurgencies. Marines have long trumpeted their ability to execute a three-block war: fighting a conventional battle in an urban environment on one block while conducting peacekeeping operations on the next and humanitarian assistance on the third. This flexibility, when combined with their doctrinal and proven operational ability to rapidly constitute themselves into 2,000-man Marine Expeditionary Units, 5,000-plus-man Marine Expeditionary Brigades and 15,000-plus-man Marine Expeditionary Forces, singles out the Marines as the premier ground force at the lower end of the political-military engagement scale while maintaining an option for forcible entry.
ESGs and their antecedents, the Amphibious Ready Groups, were designed to support requests for tailored response forces. The ships of an ESG, with their multiple flight decks, robust medical facilities, and ample room for manpower, construction materials and other supplies, were also envisioned to be a force that could respond to natural disasters and render humanitarian assistance. Focusing the availability of these assets in those regions of the world where radical Islam has begun to make inroads toward altering the popular perception of the U.S. would go a long way toward fighting the other campaign of the war on terrorism.
The campaigns of the future will be fought on the east coast of Africa, in Southeast Asia and in other Pacific island nations where previously moderate Islamic populations and their governments are being challenged by radical movements bent on established pure Islamic rule under Shariah law. Strategically targeted Expeditionary Strike Groups could head off many of these radical groups by building well-equipped secular schools in place of madrassas, drilling wells to provide ample supplies of clean water and creating modern medical facilities, as well as initiating other local services. Terrorist organizations such as Hamas have taken advantage of local shortfalls in the past to step in, provide assistance and gain a reputation among the locals as being a group that could be counted on to provide help. The Navy, if we are taking the new maritime strategy at face value, can step in to fill this role and steal a step from the radical Islamists.
This was the vision for the sea base at the outset, but part of that plan envisioned a future sea base that would possess the capability to service brigade- to division-size forces and their aviation support aircraft. Assigning some large-deck carriers, with their increased carrying capacity, nuclear reactors, higher sustained speeds (meaning quicker response time) and increased flight operations windows meets that vision. Such a restructuring of a carrier force also would have the additional benefit of freeing up money to develop and build alternatives in the long term.
This type of force realignment would present an opportunity to redirect resources to the newly emergent NECC community that is not only demonstrating potential, but also is already creating real success in fighting terrorism. Riverine squadrons and Maritime Expeditionary Security Forces conduct patrols daily on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, where they provide the type of security and stability needed for local infrastructure to grow and thrive. Naval Construction Battalions (Seabees) help to create much of that infrastructure. If plans hold, we soon will be operating in the ports, rivers and littoral waters of Africa, Southeast Asia and in and around western Pacific islands where al-Qaida is beginning to gain a foothold. Other units of the NECC, such as the Maritime Civil Affairs Squadrons, have been formed quickly to fill gaps in our joint strategy and will see their first detachments deploy this year. These two squadrons are ideally shaped to interact with the nongovernmental, international and private-sector organizations that have emerged over the past generation to combat many of the factors that contribute to the outbreak of conflict. Explosive ordnance disposal and mine-warfare commands continue to demonstrate their utility, just as they have since the towers fell in New York and the Pentagon still smoldered.
BEING THERE
Much has been written about the need for partnerships. In fact, the entire drumbeat of the “1,000-ship Navy” proposal of a few years ago is a constant reiteration of the need for partnering with global and regional actors to meet the growing threats and demands of the post-9/11 paradigm. There is, of course, a problem with this approach. Neither the U.S. nor any other global power is able to count on another power as a permanent partner in the pursuit of its interests. It is often said that the U.S. is always one election away from losing an ally, but the shift in government leadership in Great Britain, long the benefactor of a special relationship with the U.S., from Tony Blair to Gordon Brown, has demonstrated that an election is not even required in some cases for U.S. interests to be undercut. The United States’ history stands as a testament to its need for a self-sufficient military that possesses a full spectrum of capabilities.
To achieve this lofty goal, a new set of capabilities needs to be created if we are to be successful in implementing the new maritime strategy. We need frigates, or maybe not frigates. It doesn’t matter what we call them, but we need about 90 small, sturdy ships with enough basic capabilities to defend themselves, defeat local threats and uphold the interests of the U.S., and we need enough of them to blanket the increasingly unstable insurgent and pirate hot spots in the western Pacific, Asia and Africa. Great Britain, at the height of its power, kept its large capital vessels close to their homeports but covered the ocean with frigates to collect intelligence, counter its enemies and show the flag. Technology has not changed this simple precept of power; there can be no virtual presence, and you cannot surge credibility.
The new maritime strategy attempts to fudge on this point, alternatively using the phrases “persistent presence” and “selective control” as if they were interchangeable. Persistence is defined as “lasting without change.” This tempo of operations characterized Navy operations for most of the post-World War II era. “Selective” implies an action of choice — choosing to do one mission or another but not both. Although I recognize that “presence” and “control” are two different missions, let us be clear to the American people where we intend to be and what we intend to do. The U.S. is either present or it is not. If it is not, someone else, either an insurgent group or a peer competitor, can and will attempt to fill the void.
If it is our intention to remain present persistently, we will need more L-class amphibious warfare ships. If we can all agree that it important for the Navy-Marine Corps team in an ESG to provide credible interaction at the lower end of the engagement scale and we agree that the new maritime strategy calls for just this type of capability, then we need to build the type of ships that will allow us to operate in the littoral, close to that 80 percent of the world’s population that lives near the sea. Maj. Gen. John F. Kelly, commanding general of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, recently commented that when Marines dream, they dream of L-class ships, and that if you were to open a Marine’s locker, you would find a pin-up of an L-class. Although I think there is something unsettling about this mental image, I will take the general at his word and suggest that Marines instinctively know that L-class ships provide them with the type of stable, sustainable afloat staging bases that will allow them to significantly influence events ashore.
To accomplish a goal of fielding these ships, we need them to be cheap enough to be built in large numbers and simple enough to go through the procurement process quickly. Unfortunately, the U.S. defense industry does not seem capable of this type of effort, nor would it pursue this course naturally if it is attempting to be true to its fiduciary responsibilities to its stockholders. In the end, the Defense Department probably will need to purchase these ships from abroad.
Difficult as it is to say, Dwight Eisenhower was right about the military-industrial complex, and now it includes the Pentagon, the defense industry and those delegations of Congress that view defense contracts primarily as jobs programs for their home districts. The result is that we have gold-plated ourselves out of the marketplace, and until we can get our acquisition programs under control, we should examine opportunities to work with shipbuilders in Norway, Germany and Australia who are building capable small combatants and submarines for pennies on the dollar. This is the only type of wake-up call that our home industries will listen to. There is, however, another alternative. We could ask again for an increase in the defense budget.
If we are at war, and all evidence suggests that we are and that it will be a long one, then we need to be funded at wartime levels — and no, I am not talking about the supplementals that can go away at a moment’s notice. In World War II, the percentage of the gross domestic product devoted to defense was 38 percent. During the Korean War, the number hovered around 13 percent. Even as late as Vietnam, the nation committed 8 percent of its GDP to the defense of another nation and wrote off the sacrifice as a necessary campaign in the Cold War against Soviet communism. Today, we find ourselves fighting an enemy who has attacked us on our own soil, murdering 3,000 of our fellow citizens, and we seem unwilling to codify our commitment to fight in real, programmed dollars. Something is wrong here.
Just to reiterate, I don’t want to give up carrier strike groups. They have demonstrated their utility in upholding U.S. national interests too often to be dismissed as out-of-date. However, the current and projected realities of the international system require capabilities that will allow us to interdict terrorism at the local level, before it can get a toehold. If we are not able to secure funding for these new platforms, then we will have to make the uncomfortable choice of realigning our capabilities and our procurement strategies.
We have no peer competitors at sea, and even China’s investments in its navy seem focused on becoming a regional maritime power. Should the People’s Republic choose to undertake a massive carrier-building program — a possibility that I am willing to consider, although one I can see no strategic imperative for — we can realign our forces back to the 10 or 11 carrier strike group force structure. It is our responsibility as the “Shield of the Republic” to face the nation’s enemies during a time of war. To do so within the operational and fiscal restraints that we are now under, we must align our procurement strategy and change our force structure.

March 20, 2008
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Afghanistan’s New Deal

By ZALMAY KHALILZAD
BAN KI-MOON, secretary general of the United Nations, has appointed a seasoned Norwegian diplomat, Kai Eide, as his special representative to Afghanistan. Mr. Eide’s success will depend not only on his skills, but also on the friends of Afghanistan at the United Nations providing him with the proper mission, mandate and resources.

The most important task for the new special representative is to form a trusting, collaborative relationship with President Hamid Karzai, enabling them to agree on Afghanistan’s key challenges and on how aid money and military assistance can best be used. Today in New York, the Security Council is scheduled to extend the mandate of the United Nations’ Assistance Mission in Afghanistan for another year — the perfect chance to provide a clear set of priorities.

This resolution rightly gives Mr. Eide the powers to directly coordinate all of the support provided by international donors. As things stand, more than 30 national embassies and bilateral development agencies, several United Nations agencies, four development banks and international financial institutions, and about 2,000 nongovernmental organizations and contractors are involved in rebuilding in Afghanistan.

However, because of a lack of coordination among these donors, reconstruction resources often fail to arrive in a timely way after areas have been cleared of the enemy. Hundreds of projects are undertaken by allies and nongovernmental groups without coordination with the Afghan government, leading to cases of “ghost” schools or health clinics that are built but sit idle because they cannot be staffed or equipped.

Ministries are often hamstrung by having to comply with the varying procurement and accounting rules of dozens of foreign agencies, many of which are not consistent with Afghan law. This puts the international community at cross purposes with our goal of helping Afghanistan build coherent national systems for education, health and other services.

There is only one way to end the confusion: the United Nations must take on the primary coordination role, and donors must show a willingness to be coordinated. The new resolution allows this to happen in a number of ways.

First, Mr. Eide will need to oversee the coordination of civilian assistance with military efforts of the two military organizations operating in Afghanistan, NATO and the International Security Assistance Force. While it’s promising that those two organizations are meeting in Bucharest, Romania, next month to discuss better integrating their efforts, success against the insurgency will require efforts to ensure that military actions to secure areas from the enemy are coordinated with civilian efforts to establish good governance and economic development.

Second, Mr. Eide must coordinate the efforts of the international community to support the Afghanistan Compact, a five-year plan agreed upon in 2006 by the government of Afghanistan, the United Nations and the international community that requires Afghan leaders to take steps in reform and institution-building in exchange for commitments of sustained support. The United Nations must have a stronger role in overseeing the increasing capacity of Afghan ministries and their anti-corruption efforts.

Third, the new United Nations special representative should help the leaders and people of key donor countries understand achievements and challenges. This is the only way that the friends of Afghanistan can fully appreciate the return on their investments.

Last, Mr. Eide will have a mandate to engage Afghanistan’s neighbors to help stabilize the country. In the aftermath of 9/11, regional powers came together to support the so-called Bonn agreement, which enabled Afghans to freely choose their own government. Reclaiming the spirit of Bonn must be a priority.

The United States is fully behind the United Nations in the mission. Afghanistan is important not only because it was the origin of the attacks of 9/11 but also because it is the keystone of the geopolitical stability of Central and South Asia. Moreover, success in Afghanistan will be a major step in helping to create security, stability and progress in the broader Middle East, which is the defining challenge of our time.

Zalmay Khalilzad is the United States permanent representative to the United Nations.

March 20, 2008
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Beyond America’s Original Sin

By ROGER COHEN
There are things you come to believe and things you carry in your blood. In my case, having spent part of my childhood in apartheid South Africa, I bear my measure of shame.

As a child, experience is wordless but no less powerful for that. How vast, how shimmering, was Muizenberg beach, near Cape Town, with all that glistening white skin spread across the golden sand!

The scrawny blacks were elsewhere, swimming off the rocks in a filthy harbor, and I watched from my grandfather’s house and I wondered.

Once, a black nanny took me out across the road to a parapet above a rail track beside that harbor. “You wouldn’t want me to drop you,” she said.

The fear I felt lingered. I returned recently to measure how far I would have fallen. In memory, the abyss plunged 100 feet. Reality revealed a drop of 10. That discrepancy measures a child’s panic.

A “For Sale” sign was up on what had been the family house. I inquired if I might visit and received a surly rebuff. But not before I glimpsed the mountain behind where my father hiked and where I feared the snakes among the thorn bushes.

Fear, shadowy as the sharks beyond the nets at Muizenberg, was never quite absent from our sunlit African sojourns. My own was formed of disorientation: I was not quite of the system because my parents had emigrated from Johannesburg to London. So, on return visits, I wandered into blacks-only public toilet or sat on a blacks-only bench.

Blacks only — and I was white. Apartheid entered my consciousness as a kind of self-humiliation. The black women who bathed me as an infant touched my skin, but their world was untouchable.

Only later did a cruel system come into focus. I see white men, gin and tonics on their breath, red meat on their plates, beneath the jacarandas of Johannesburg, sneering at the impossibility of desiring a black woman.

A racial divide, once lived, dwells in the deepest parts of the psyche. This is what was captured by Barack Obama’s pitch-perfect speech on race. Slavery was indeed America’s “original sin.” Of course, “the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow” lives on in forms of African-American humiliation and anger that smolder in ways incommunicable to whites.

Segregation placed American blacks in the U.S. equivalent of that filthy African harbor.

It takes bravery, and perhaps an unusual black-white vantage point, to navigate these places where hurt is profound, incomprehension the rule, just as it takes courage to say, as Obama did, that black “anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”

Progress, since the Civil Rights Movement, or since apartheid, has assuaged the wounds of race but not closed them. To carry my part of shame is also to carry a clue to the vortexes of rancor for which Obama has uncovered words.

I understand the rage of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, however abhorrent its expression at times. I admire Obama for saying: “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.”

Honesty feels heady right now. For seven years, we have lived with the arid, us-against-them formulas of Bush’s menial mind, with the result that the nuanced exploration of America’s hardest subject is almost giddying. Can it be that a human being, like Wright, or like Obama’s grandmother, is actually inhabited by ambiguities? Can an inquiring mind actually explore the half-shades of truth?

Yes. It. Can.

The unimaginable South African transition that Nelson Mandela made possible is a reminder that leadership matters. Words matter. The clamoring now in the United States for a presidency that uplifts rather than demeans is a reflection of the intellectual desert of the Bush years.

Hillary Clinton said in January that: “You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose.” Wrong. America’s had its fill of the prosaic.

The unthinkable can come to pass. When I was a teenager, my relatives advised me to enjoy the swimming pools of Johannesburg because “next year they will be red with blood.”

But the inevitable bloodbath never came. Mandela walked out of prison and sought reconciliation, not revenge. Later Mandela would say: “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”

Like countless others, I came to America because possibility is broader here than in Europe’s narrower confines. Perhaps it’s my African “original sin,” but when Obama says he “will never forget that in no other country on earth is my story even possible,” I feel fear slipping away, like a shadow receding before the still riveting idea that “out of many we are truly one.”

Blog: www.iht.com/passages

March 19, 2008, 2:47 pm
Hounded by Iraqi Musclemen, a Journalist Awaited His Own Liberation
By JOHN F. BURNS

Iraqis trampled on a statue of Saddam Hussein, seconds after U.S. forces in Baghdad pulled it down. (Photo: James Hill/The New York Times)
At the outset, for me, the approach of American troops to Baghdad was an issue of intense personal concern, as much as professional. The Army and Marine units that arrived at the outskirts of Baghdad in the first days of April 2003 were viewed, then, by an overwhelming majority of Iraqis as liberators from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. But they were my liberators, too.

Ten days earlier, Saddam’s thugs had come for me in the middle of the night in my room at the Palestine Hotel beside the Tigris River in the heart of the Iraqi capital, during a lull in the American bombing. I had been expecting them; in the last weeks before the invasion, the menacing character who acted as ringmaster for the foreign press in Baghdad in his capacity as the regime’s information director, Uday al-Tai’ee, had taken to mocking me as “the most dangerous man in Iraq” for stories I had written
about Saddam’s merciless terror on his own people, and I had understood the code.

“Brave fellow, aren’t you?” al-Tai’ee seemed to be saying. “But just wait. You can insult Saddam with impunity now, because you know we won’t kill a reporter for The New York Times as long as there’s a chance of avoiding this war. So you’re shooting from behind a blind, and that doesn’t take so much courage. But once the war starts, and we’re free to do what we please, that’ll be a different matter. Then we’ll see how tough you really are.”

The practitioners of Saddam’s miseries were brutal, but they were also cowardly and venal, and the plug-uglies who stormed into my hotel room were true to form. I told the lead thug, a man assigned to me by al-Tai’ee a few days before the war as my “minder,” and whom I knew to be from the Mukhabarat, Saddam’s secret police, that his name was known to my editors in New York (true) and that if anything happened to me, they’d pass his name to the Pentagon and he’d end up in front of an American firing squad (pure fiction). With frontline American units advancing rapidly on Baghdad, I thought it might catch his attention. “You’re threatening me,” he said.

“Yes, I am,” I said, “just as you’re threatening me.”

The man, Sa’ad Muthanna by name, huddled with his fellow musclemen in a corner, and left, saying he would be back. I told the others that there was a stash of American dollars in the room, and that they could have it if they left the room for two minutes, and let me slip away. Once Muthanna returned, they knew the money would be his, not theirs. They huddled, and walked out. It was pitch dark, since the hotel had no electricity, and they had arrived with flashlights. I waited a minute, looked down the corridor for any sign of glowing cigarette ends, and seeing none, ran for the fire staircase and raced the 11 floors down to the hotels’ side exit. For the remainder of the period it took American troops to occupy eastern Baghdad, I was on the run.

So when the marines crossed the Diyala River and took control of the Palestine on April 9, helping the crowd to topple the statue of Saddam in the square beside the hotel, they seemed like ministering angels to me. And, for all that came later, that’s how many Iraqis saw them, too. There were flowers thrown at the tanks, and hugs and ululating welcomes for the Americans. That changed rapidly when the Americans failed to halt the looting, the first of many mistakes in planning and execution that were to
follow, and which changed the way many Iraqis saw their liberators. Pretty soon, it became common among Iraqis to call the American presence an “occupation.”

There have been some truly terrible failures that have stained American military honor, to be sure: Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Mahmudiya, among a lengthening list of instances where rogue American troops behaved no better than Saddam’s thugs. But like Ernie Pyle, Edward R. Murrow and others who covered American campaigns in World War II, most of us who have ridden to war in Iraq with American soldiers and marines, and come to know their officers and commanders, would say that America’s armed forces, man for man, woman for woman, day by day, have tackled an almost impossible mission in Iraq with a resilience, resourcefulness and civic decency of which America, whatever the war’s outcome, has reason to be proud.

March 19, 2008, 12:57 pm
On the Trail of the Rebuilding Story, Littered With Broken Parts
By JAMES GLANZ

An oil pipeline outside Basra was damaged in an attack in June 2004. (Photo: Shawn Baldwin for The New York Times)
It was June 2004, about a month after I had arrived in Iraq for the first time. It was my second night in Basra, and I’d never been so sick in my life.

Suspicion centered on something resembling liver on a kebab in the restaurant at the Qasr al-Sultan Hotel, where I was staying with a Western photographer and four Iraqis: two drivers, a local fixer named Fakher Haider who set up interviews and did some translating, and a guy with a pistol jammed into his trousers who was there to look after me.

But as I guzzled water and tried to keep the Cipro down, it didn’t really matter what had caused the explosive intestinal and stomach illness that, with the break of dawn, left my room in a condition I hope never to see again. I was in Iraq, the place I had asked to go to and cover the reconstruction of a nation, and in the morning I gathered my notebooks, pulled on the high-end leather boots I’d bought at Harry’s Shoes in Manhattan, and went out into the heat to report.

The night before, I’d had my introduction to what it would be like to work in Iraq as well as a lesson in how to deal with it all. A gunfight broke out on the street after dark. My room was on the second or third floor; I didn’t feel particularly threatened, but thought that it all seemed rather Wild West.

Shawn Baldwin, a veteran war photographer with a beard and the blankest stare I’d ever seen outside of movies when he was out in the streets, was working with me and staying in the room next to mine. I said to him in the morning, “I was surprised that battle went on for two hours last night.”

“Oh did it?” Shawn said. “I went to sleep after 10 minutes.”

But he turned out to be one of the friendliest people I’d worked with in any profession. (You had to get beyond the stare, which was so expressionless that I would see armed men at checkpoints size him up, all 5-foot-7 of him, and nervously wave him through without searching his equipment. Another lesson.)

I got over the bad liver somehow. We were able to get around Basra and the surrounding desert without too much trouble - or, it seemed, peril. The months of relative calm after the chaos of the invasion had ended, but the violence was still patchy and we were not sure what shape it would take.

We started chasing the reconstruction story, which I had imagined, as I bought those boots at Harry’s, would be a story of great engineers and heroic workers, something like the building of the Brooklyn Bridge in a war-torn Middle Eastern country: the Roeblings on the Tigris.

Instead we found an infrastructure so decrepit, smashed and oversubscribed after decades of war and neglect that nothing the American engineers did, with billions of dollars at their disposal, seemed to work. Oil pipelines burst after they were repaired; canals ruptured again and again when the pumping stations pushing fresh drinking water through them were fixed; ancient power stations with control rooms out of ‘’Das Boot'’ shorted out and went dark no matter how many times flabbergasted American engineers tinkered with the turbines.

Instead of John Roebling, we found Thomas Stahl, regional representative for southern Iraq for the United States Agency for International Development. Mr. Stahl grew up in Basra and other towns in Iraq and Kuwait as the son of missionaries in the 1950s and ’60s.

“If you think of Iraq as a used car,” Mr. Stahl said, quoting an epigram that he said was making the rounds among development officials, “Saddam sold it just in time.”

Iraq as a used car. That was not the story line I had prepared. And if the infrastructure did not break down often enough on its own, insurgents, smugglers and local militias started sabotaging it for a variety of reasons that would take us years to understand.

The story was especially compelling in the south, where Iraq’s oil reserves are concentrated. That summer we spent a day in the 120-degree heat of the desert watching engineers try to plug a gash that saboteurs had left four days before in a pipeline crossing the southern desert.

But the oil kept bubbling up. It had been leaking so long that strangely shaped lakes with the sickly sweet smell of crude oil meandered off into the distance. And the repair never happened that day. Specialized equipment for stopping oil leaks did not arrive. Convoys carrying technical experts took hours to organize. At least one vehicle got stuck on the ravaged Iraqi roads. The Americans at one point threatened to drive off if Iraqis who were smoking and using spark-prone pumps near the sea of oil did not pull their equipment back.

A spark, the American engineers said, could create a huge fireball. An American swore and the day went on, miragelike.

A few days later we drove back to Baghdad - the last time we would ever drive such a distance on our own - with a new story to tell. As for the south, there were dark days ahead. Shiite militias began fighting each other for control of the city and its oil business, local security forces were implicated in violent crimes themselves, and one summer later Fakher was murdered - taken from his apartment by men in police gear - probably because he was reporting on some of that malfeasance for us. The reconstruction of the south went nowhere.