NATION BUILDING IN MESOPOTAMIA: U.S. MILITARY ENGINEERS IN IRAQ

Army, Feb 2005 by Hawkins, Steven R, Wells, Gordon M

American and Iraqi engineers faced each other for the first time in the heart of Baghdad, which was still being subdued by U.S. forces. Their initial meeting was unique. Nevertheless, everyone promptly agreed that the key mission at hand was the reestablishment of power in Baghdad. Despite language barriers and the fact that we were still at war, as fellow engineers we quickly found common ground in our shared desire to improve the quality of life for millions of Iraqi civilians. All of us knew that potable water, sewer systems and hospitals would not function without power, and the suffering of the Iraqi people would become unbearable.

The pattern that developed that first day would continue for several months as JTF Fajr worked hand-in-hand with Iraqi engineers to rebuild the Iraqi utility infrastructure. We would meet each morning to assess the current situation and define the tasks for the day, then set out to solve the most important tasks in priority order. Initially, tensions were high between U.S. and Iraqi engineers. Despite the fact that most of the Iraqis we worked with were technicians and, at best, low-level Baathists with minimal ties to the former regime, the process of building trust was our most important initial task. The palpable fear etched on the Iraqis' faces was stark-after years of living in what may well prove to be one of the most horrific regimes the world has ever seen, it was difficult for them to place their trust in anyone.

Our efforts were further complicated by the fact that the Iraqi governmental system was compartmentalized to the extreme. One day we asked the chief of water and sewer utilities for Baghdad, Paris, and his counterpart for electrical distribution, Muhammad, to show us on a map of the city where their key facilities were in relation to each other so we could jointly plan how to best get power to the critical water and sewer facilities. Two aspects of that event were unforgettable. First, these two gentlemen had never met and were obviously not used to working together. second, they had trouble reading the map because under Saddam Hussein, maps were controlled items and not commonly used. Imagine a major U.S. city operating with the senior utility managers not even knowing each other and not knowing how to read a city map!

Despite our encouragement, initially it was a significant challenge for the Iraqis to work across functional lines. They had grown up in a society in which information was power and decision making was highly centralized. When we showed up and simply expected them to work within multidisciplinary teams and at whatever level it took to get things working again, they undoubtedly thought we were from another planet. Our greatest challenge was not technical, but cultural, and not ethnic culture, but organizational culture. In the democratic, free-market economies of the West, and particularly in America, we tend to be relatively entrepreneurial and are not necessarily constrained by organizational structures and procedures if they don't make sense. For the Iraqis, structure and procedure were all-important, and deviation from either under Saddam Hussein could be terminal.