Muntheria

Hello everyone,

I trust that everyone has been getting their fair share of the Olympics, and more importantly, pre-season football. I haven't had the opportunity to see much of either. I didn't even get to watch the 9 year-old Chinese girl lip-synching during the opening ceremonies, so I guess I am missing out on some good stuff. I did read an Op-ed where the writer blames that incident on the US because of the emphasis on beauty in the States. The "Hate America First" crowd doesn't let up.

As part of my ongoing collection effort, I spent some time out east on the Iraq-Iran border gathering information on Port of Entry Transition Teams (POETT). Closely related, but not quite the same, is the Border Transition Team (BTT). The BTT works with the Iraqi version of our Border Patrol, and the POETT works with the customs, passport, and immigration people at the (legal) border crossings (as my wife asked, "Do they really have people immigrating to Iraq?).

The Port of Entry (POE) which I visited is called the Muntheria POE, which sits near a city called Khanaqin. Khanaqin is in the northeastern area of Diyala Province. This area has a heavy Kurdish population, and the Kurdish tribal affiliation crosses the border into Iran. Interestingly, the water and electric lines coming into Muntheria come from Iran. The cell tower sitting on Muntheria is Iranian. Unfortunately, although electricity still flows to the POE from Iran, the Iranians cut off the water when the US POETT moved onto the port. A somewhat high level priority is for a desert based port of entry to have water, so that issue is being worked by someone (I think).

The terrain up in the Muntheria area is similar in appearance to eastern Utah, with hills and rock outcroppings everywhere. The trip out there could only be accomplished partially by helicopter, with the final two hours being accomplished on the road in a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle, or MRAP. The ride was somewhat like a 2-hour serpentine course, with the vehicles weaving in and around holes from previous IEDs. In addition to the IEDs, the whole area up there still has its fair share of mines from the Iraq-Iran War in the 80's. Tank and field artillery fighting positions are still present, and they face both east and west, which speaks to the back and forth nature of that fight. On the way to Muntheria, we passed by a small village that sat probably 200 yards off of the road. As we approached, it was obvious that the kids in that village had ears for the MRAPs. These kids came pouring out of the village and running towards the road. The gunners threw what little toys and candy they had out to the kids, and, as in any survival of the fittest situation, the big burly kids made sure that they took anything that the little kids picked up.

The POETT at Muntheria has done a great job at building up trust with the Iraqi personnel at the POE. Overall, the Iraqis working there seem to possess a good deal of competence. The POE commander, a Brigadier General (BG) Kahlid, comes down hard on corruption, and he even signed paperwork to fire a corrupt employee while we were meeting with him in his office. The POE only handles pedestrian traffic at this point, with buses (or relatives) transporting Iranian visitors to their destinations once they are inside Iraq. Many visitors come from Iran to visit the Shiite holy cities of Karbala and Najaf in Iraq. The exception to the pedestrian traffic is that oil tankers roll from east to west continuously. The tankers transport unrefined crude oil into Iran, and they return empty or with refined fuel. The goal of the POE is to eventually open up to other types of commercial traffic. Prior to 2003, the POE supposedly processed 2000 people per day. That number today is somewhere around 300 people per day. The POE commander does not believe that he receives enough funding from Baghdad to get the port to the performance or appearance level that he wants. Being that this is a Kurdish region, and since the area might end upin the Kurdish autonomous zone after the elections, the central government is not eager to spend money up in the Khanaqin area, although the government is more than happy to receive the income from trucks coming through from Iran.

Besides US military personnel working on the POETT, there are also Department of Homeland Defense and Border Enforcement Administration employees assigned there. These guys are the experts at running border ports and securing the border (go ahead - insert wise crack about the US border security). Despite the well run nature of the POE, there are unofficial border crossing points where other types of products and people enter the country, just as happens in the US. Some of those people belong to the Iranian Special Groups. With the new toned down nature of the Shiite Mahdi Army in Baghdad, the Iranians are supposedly training operatives to get back into Iraq to target US forces and Iraqi leaders for assassination.

As always, I had the opportunity to visit with Iraqi leadership and drink Chai tea while I was traveling. I was able to meet the POE Commander, the POE fire chief (he wanted the US to buy him a bigger TV), and the Director of Passports & Immigration. In the first attached picture, I am seated next to COL Shugart, who is the Director of Passports and Immigration. He reminded me of my grandma in that he wouldn't stop sticking those pastries in our face. The next picture is of BG Kahlid, who is celebrating in traditional Iraqi fashion after the grand opening of a shooting range complex on his POE. First lesson - stop shooting your weapon straight in the air when there are people standing around you. The third picture is obviously towards the Iranian side of the border.

Let me do something different and share a couple of observations from outside of Iraq. If anyone still tries to make a moral equivalence between US and Russian forces as they did during the cold war, they only need to look at the Russians today to see the major difference. Saddam and his cronies raped and pillaged their own people all across Iraq until the US showed up. Now that type of behavior is unacceptable in this country. The Russian army showed up in Georgia, and now they are running around raping, pillaging, and looting that country. While a Russian officer was forcing some Georgians to work for him, he said to an AP reporter that, "You can even make a monkey look human by putting him to work," and then he threatened to arrest the reporter if she used his name or took his picture. I hope people are paying attention.

While the US Army is conducting plenty of non-traditional missions over here, it is now resorting to non-traditional missions back in the US. Acouple of years ago, someone warned the nation's youth that they had better do well in school or they will end up in the Army. The reality is that they had better do well in school or else they will need to get a waiver to have the privilege of serving in the Army. GEN William Wallace, the commander of the Army's Training & Doctrine Command (under whose command I currently fall), is extremely concerned about studies that show that only 28% of US 17-24 year-olds meet the Army's physical, intellectual, and moral criteria for enlistment. As a result of his concern, the Army is opening a charter school in South Carolina to get students qualified to join the Army. The Army charter effort will soon move to other states as well. Yes, we have a crisis in education in the US, and yes, it does ultimately affect our national security.

I will be pulling a different type of duty for the next couple of weeks. I will be sitting on a board at a US detention facility in southern Iraq in which we will be reviewing Iraqi detainee files to make recommendations for the release or further detention of the Iraqi prisoners. It should be interesting.

Take care.

Moving Forward

Hello everyone,I don’t have much in the way of personal travels to write about this time around. The continuing saga of sand storms has made traveling a real hit or miss experience. I have spent the last couple of weeks stuck on Speicher, and the issues that I have been working on here are not interesting enough to make you want to read about them (or me to write about them).


There is obviously still plenty going on in Iraq in general. Although the government was hoping to hold provincial elections on October 1st, that timeline won’t be kept. The sticking point is the failure of the Parliament to pass a Provincial Elections Law before adjourning for the remainder of August. One of the major stumbling blocks has been the status of Kirkuk Province up here in the north. Kirkuk is heavily Kurdish, and there is a lot of oil coming from the province. The Parliament has been trying to figure out how to frame the elections in Kirkuk. The Kurds want Kirkuk to be a part of the autonomous Kurdistan region, while the national government does not want this. According to reports from Kirkuk, many Arabs living there are content to allow the Kurds to govern their region because the Kurdish regions have been the most orderly and stable in Iraq since Saddam was removed. The Kurds in Kirkuk will not accept a proposal to have the elections set up so that there are equal numbers of seats in the Kirkuk provincial government to divide power equally between Kurds and other factions. Most reasonable people don’t see how the elections can occur at all in 2008 based on the fact that this Kirkuk dispute is holding up the entire election law process. Voter registration is moving forward, however. I’ve read comments that although the security has improved in Iraq, the political process is still broken because there are still some stalemates. Doesn’t the fact that there is a stalemate in Parliament rather than a shootout in the streets of Kirkuk over this issue mean that the political process IS working?


In an interesting turn of events, Muqtada al-Sadr from Sadr City has called on his Mahdi Army to lay down their arms. He issued a document that says that his followers will now be guided by Shiite spirituality instead of anti-American militancy (let’s hope that there is a difference). The document says that the new focus of the Sadr sect will be on education, religion, and social justice. Under Islam, I don’t know how much separation there is between those three focus areas.


Sadr has been responsible for a lot of violence in Baghdad, but he began to lose influence when he ran away to Iran. Although there are plenty of Shiites in Iraq and Iran, thousands of Iraqis lost relatives in the war with Iran. They don’t appreciate Iran’s influence. The people of Sadr City have grown tired of being locked in their homes due to the fighting that at first Sadr, and then the Iranian special groups, have caused in their neighborhoods. Sadr has very much been forced to play catch up to remain relevant. Several months ago, he ordered his men to fight, and many said that they were tired of fighting, so he changed his mind and said that they should have a cease fire. Then the Iranians kept trying to keep the fight going, and the people realized that he is nothing but an Iranian stooge. Then Sadr said that his sect would boycott the elections, but then his own people said that they were going to participate anyway or else they would have no power, so then he said that what he meant was that some of his party could participate if they wanted to. And then Sadr said that he would no longer target Iraqis and that he would just kill Americans, but his people asked him why because the Americans keep helping them, so now he says that there will be no more focus on anti-American militancy. Let me summarize what I just said in five words or less: I think we beat him.


So what does that mean to the Sunni fight that is taking place up here in the north? Although the Sunni and Shia groups dislike each other, they feed off of each other. When you have a major group like the al-Mahdi Army laying down their arms, that is a morale breaker for other criminal groups in country. Every time peace breaks out somewhere in Iraq, the people living in areas where the terrorists are still active start to understand that peace is possible, and they start to turn against the terrorists. Every time the security improves in different regions, the Iraqi Security Forces gain credibility, so people begin to trust them and feed them information. Al-Mahdi was heavily influenced by Iran, and the Iraqis didn’t like that. AQI is largely a group formed of foreign fighters. The Iraqis are not happy about that, either.


The Sunni Awakening, as it is called, began over in Anbar province just to our west. Fallujah and Ramadi sit in Anbar, and some of the most violent battles of Iraqi Freedom occurred in those towns. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi ran his main slaughter houses out of Anbar until two F-16 pilots sent him to his Maker via two 500 pound bombs. Anbar was supposed to be turned over to be fully administered by the Iraqis back in May (the US Marines run the security in Anbar). Weather problems initially caused a delay in the handover process. Now that we are in August, the turn-over of Anbar from US to Iraqi control has not yet happened, and the reason is because the Iraqis in Anbar don’t want it to happen. Here is a quote from the Anbar area: “The people in Anbar love the US Marines. If anyone tells you any different, they are lying.” Now you would expect that I would mention that the quote came from a US Marine spokesperson, but it didn’t. The quote came from Iraqi Army Brigadier General Ali, who is the military commander in the Fallujah area. The Iraqi people do not want to take back governing authority because they think that means that the Americans will leave, and they don’t want that. Not to be repetitive, but I believe that we won in Anbar province, too.


Moving on to a final topic, there was a US GAO report recently released that claims that the Iraqis are not doing their share to fund reconstruction efforts. Let me touch on that just a little bit. First of all, a read of that report shows that it compares US spending from 2003 through the present. It only shows Iraqi spending from 2005 to the present. Keep in mind that after we invaded, Iraq had to rebuild a central government from scratch. Saddam did not have a mature centralized budget process. If he wanted money to go towards “X,” he ordered it to go towards “X.” It has been a total cash society. The figures in the GAO report show huge US reconstruction spending in 2003/2004, which is true. We went in right behind our combat troops and began to rebuild when the Iraqis literally had no government of their own. Since 2005, once the Iraqis had established a constitutional government, they have budgeted more money towards their own reconstruction than we have budgeted. For 2008, in fact, the Iraqis have ten times more money budgeted towards their construction than the US. While there is a large oil surplus here, that was not expected. No one saw the price of oil hitting almost $150 per barrel. Due to the large surplus, the Iraqi government passed a supplemental $22 billion budget on August 7th in which they directed $8 billion towards their reconstruction. Their reconstruction budget is 10 times more than the US is directing towards reconstruction here.


Once a budget is established, the government then has to have systems in place to disburse and spend that money. That may not be as simple as it seems. Until you have the technical ability to conduct funds transfers and similar electronic transactions, how do you transfer a couple million over here and a couple million over there in a cash economy? The Iraqi officials had to learn everything from scratch. What is the contracting process? Who can bid on the jobs? What is the payment process and what are the payment terms? Add to that some misguided US projects that were turned over for upkeep to Iraqis who had no technical ability to maintain the project, and you have a lot of money spent. Executing a budget is not exactly straight forward when a society has never executed a budget before.


That is probably much more information on that topic than anyone really wanted, but I have no war stories to tell this time around. The pictures aren’t necessarily related to anything that I just wrote about. The one picture shows how Iraqis get gas without waiting in long lines in this country with so much oil. I have no idea where the roadside gas sellers get their gas. The other picture shows how Saddam spent his budget when he ran it. That is called the Moon Palace, which just another Tikrit area getaway for the tyrant.


Everyone take care.