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Kurdistan, the Iraq worth fighting for
18.9.2007
By Brian Mockenhaupt
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Kurdistan is safe, orderly, and bustling with
economic development. It's what we hoped Iraq would
become. And it's time to make sure it stays that
way.
September 18, 2007
From Baghdad, I flew north on a Japanese air force
C-130 to meet a Department of Defense task force
charged with economic development in Iraq. I landed
at Erbil airport, deep into the Kurdistan autonomous
zone, and stepped into a sort of Iraqi Bizarro
world. I had been in Kurdistan at the beginning of
the war, on that very spot, when the airport was
just a landing strip surrounded by wheat fields.
What had simply been a safe city before was now
booming.
A couple dozen construction cranes poke into the
skyline around the city. The outskirts are crowded
with housing developments with names like Dream City
and American Village, the most ambitious being the
cluster of twelve high-rise buildings of upscale
apartments -- two-bed, two-bath, two thousand square
feet, $150,000. In every way, this isn't Baghdad.
New malls, car dealerships, and restaurants line the
streets. The roads are clear, free of checkpoints
and gun-laden convoys. The stoplights work. Traffic
police marshal cars, and the drivers obey. Flowers
adorn median strips and public parks. For the first
time since I'd been in Iraq, I didn't wear body
armor. I rode in an unarmored truck. I felt naked
and giddy. |
Erbil-Hewler, Kurdistan region "Iraq" |
This is the Iraq of our prewar fantasies, the Iraq
worth fighting for. Kept secure by a strictly
enforced no-fly zone since the first Gulf war, Iraqi
Kurdistan has become a country within a country,
seemingly a million miles away from all the trouble
not far from here.
Bob Love, a former Marine colonel who works for the
task force, spun around in his seat and flashed me a
showman's smile as we drove through town. "This is
the other Iraq," he said. "This is the future."
The Kurds certainly see it this way, playing it up
on their Web site, theotheriraq.com: "Have you seen
the Other Iraq? It's spectacular. It's peaceful.
It's joyful....Arabs, Kurds, and Westerners all
vacation together."
And lately, it's become an attractive locale for Al
Qaeda as well, which has also decided that Kurdistan
is worth fighting for. That morning, in an
unsettling breech of normalcy, a truck bomb blew up
outside the Ministry of the Interior in Erbil,
killing fourteen. This week Love was hosting
businessmen from America and the Middle East,
encouraging them to invest in the region. The group
had been eating breakfast at their hotel when the
bomb detonated a half mile away. "The bomb meant
nothing. I kept eating," Elie Ajaka said. He manages
Quiznos shops across the Middle East. "It's
something us Lebanese are accustomed to. But it's
not a good thing for foreign investors. Why would an
investor bring his money into something that might
go up in flames at any moment?"
That's a good question, and one that America has
largely ignored, giving good insight into how
haphazardly economic development has been figured
into the global war on terrorism
I saw how such efforts might be handled in the
future from one of the most unlikely
counterinsurgents in Iraq. Paul Brinkley, deputy
undersecretary of defense for business
transformation, left a West Coast fiber-optic
manufacturing company two years ago to
lead a massive effort overhauling the Pentagon's
business processes. Dispatched to Iraq, he was
approached by Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli,
then commander of American ground forces in Iraq.
Chiarelli wanted him to visit a factory. Brinkley
balked but went: "We saw an idle but viable factory,
and we started asking questions. There's inventory
here. Why isn't it going out?" The factory, in
Iskandariya, south of Baghdad, employed three
thousand people to build buses, tractors, and
agricultural equipment until it was shuttered by the
Americans in 2003. U. S. forces in the area had
since been catching IED triggermen who had once
worked at the factory. They said they needed the
money. Chiarelli wanted them put back to work.
Before the war, Iraq had 192 state-owned factories,
which employed five hundred thousand people. Some
were destroyed in the invasion, and the Coalition
Provisional Authority closed the rest. Free markets
emerge the fastest in countries that quit subsidized
industry cold turkey, went the reasoning. It was an
interesting theory, but Washington didn't follow
with economic assistance, private investment never
arrived, and high unemployment added to the chaos.
"Imagine if you shut down all interstate commerce in
the United States," Brinkley said. "How long would
it take before people started to secede?" The one
factory visit turned into a serious push by the DOD
to restart the factories. Nine, including the
tractor factory, are run-ning now. Brinkley hopes to
have a couple dozen more running by year's end.
"Every person who goes back to work is going to have
more of a stake in social stability. That's just a
universal truth about people," he said. "In the
absence of economic and political development,
you're not going to see stabilization."
Brinkley's work has drawn criticism from elsewhere
in the Bush administration, with State Department
officials in Baghdad calling him a Stalinist for
championing state-owned factories. He said the
philosophical agreements have since been settled.
The effort has suffered recently from internal
problems as well, with the Defense Department's
inspector general starting an investigation into
various task-force matters. As of late August, when
Esquire went to press, the investigation was
ongoing.
Brinkley has been traveling to Iraq every two weeks
for the past year, but he didn't come to Kurdistan
until December. During his first meeting with
Kurdish officials, they told him they had been
abandoned by the United States. Four years. Nothing.
Brinkley responded by quoting Churchill. "You can
always count on Americans to do the right thing," he
said, "after they've tried everything else." The
Kurds smiled. He and his team are now regulars in
the area. They tour businesses, meet with governors,
and play matchmaker for the executives.
Late last year, the government made its first big
push to attract outside investors, when Brinkley's
task force started bringing business executives to
Iraq to tour the factories, hopefully moving them to
place orders. Brink-ley's team would have been happy
with commitments to build a few fast-food
franchises; four and a half years after the
invasion, the bar for success remained
embarrassingly low. For a war sold in part on the
notion that a free market would spring up allowing
Iraq to take care of itself, remarkably little had
been done to help the country on its way. Even now,
Brinkley acknowledged progress across the country
has been slower than he hoped.
On our last night in Kurdistan, we ate dinner with
the governor of Sulaimaniyah, his aides, and a dozen
local businessmen. We sat in an outdoor garden at a
long table, twenty to a side, the air still holding
the warmth of day. The servers brought us Bitburger
beer and Johnnie Walker Black. The Blue Label would
come out later. The table slowly filled with huge
trays of whole fish, rice, chicken, and lamb.
Bottles emptied and voices rose. This was a working
dinner of sorts, with Iraqis and foreigners pairing
off in quiet conversation to pitch each other
business ventures. But as the night wore on, serious
talk subsided. The beer and whisky ran out, giving
way to vodka and loud toasts. This doesn't happen
much in Baghdad.
"War is easy. Anyone can shoot. Anyone can have a
gun," Hewa Jaff, the province's foreign and
public-relations director told me the next morning
as we toured the site of a new luxury hotel. "But
this is difficult. This takes a brain. This takes
thinking. This takes planning."
esquire.com
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