Since We Were There Anyway, We Could Have Done Some Good. Failure of leadership in Iraq

If I had to use one word to describe my three year experience in Iraq, one word which could say how I feel without discounting or dismissing the good things I personally saw and experienced, that word would be DISHEARTENING.

Unlike many Americans in Iraq, my experiences there brought me close up and personal to the Iraqis and their day to day lives. I worked with them and I lived among them in the red zone of Baghdad. As the V.P. of Aviation and marketing for the Sandi Group, a DC based Iraqi-American Corporation, I live on one of the city blocks in the middle of Baghdads Red District, away from the Green Zone and the protection of U.S. Forces. Those assigned to protect me were Iraqi, mostly Kurds from the Northern region of Iraq.

Every day as I traveled throughout Baghdad in the course of my work, it was Iraqi body guards who saw to my safety. We did not have armored cars, or soldiers to accompany us, as I would have later, being appointed into a U.S. Diplomatic mission in Baghdad. I trusted my Iraqi guards and befriended them. They never betrayed that trust. On more than one occasion, while on ambush alley in Baghdad, those Iraqi guards would cover me with their own bodies to ensure my safety when snipers opened up on our cars.

I saw and experienced a side of living in Iraq that few Americans will ever know.
After being displaced by the war, the average working Iraqi was then displaced even further by Coalition forces and the ensuing stampede of U.S. and British contractors who helped to transform the American face from liberator to conqueror in very short order.

I arrived in Iraq as the CPA Airport Director for Basrah International Airport which is located in the Southern part of Iraq where the British forces had control and responsibility. Basrah is the second largest city in Iraq with a population of over two million, mostly Shia Muslims and Christians.

After having arrived I needed to begin the re-assimilation of Iraqi Airport employees, about 400 of them, back into the airport operation. U.S. and British forces were arriving everyday and the USAID, NGO and contractor flights were arriving in mass as well. My mission was to make the airport work smoothly and manage its operation in the name of the CPA.

I needed to quickly organize. I sought out the former Iraqi Airport management personnel. I found my Iraqi counterpart, Mr. Abdul Razzaq Kasim, and all of his subordinate managers in a dingy little office space, of no use to the British Army, who by then, was occupying every single useful office space in the Airport. The dingy room was shared with several of the airport's chief Iraqi engineers and former managers. They shared several chairs gathered around two desks.

I had only been there three days and was already appalled at the treatment we had already begun of these people who had believed their freedom was our reason for coming to Iraq. They thought we came for the purpose of freeing them. (They didn't have a clue).

I was later able to commandeer suitable space for them, but only after hearing loud objections from British military officials claiming they needed additional sleeping quarters "closer to the terminal". As the senior CPA Official in Southern Iraq the British were careful about crossing me to much and did not strongly resist when I ordered several dozen British Army members to vacate a series of offices in the Airport Engineering building which was directly across the street from the main terminal.

I arranged for new office furniture from Basrah city merchants and placed all of the Iraqi Airport Management staff in those office spaces with me and three U.S. staff members.

At my own expense, I had the offices painted and cleaned. Potted Plants were brought in and I hired Iraqi secretaries for myself and the Iraq Airport director and his staff. I informed the people I reported to in DC that I had hired these office workers out of my own pocket rather than wait for an allocation of funds, or permission to staff my office. The office in DC was not happy, but relented and eventually reimbursed me and began to pay the salaries of those I had hired. Thus, I had started my work in Basrah, Iraq.

In Baghdad, the Saddam (Baghdad) International Airport was liberated by U.S. Coalition forces after days of intense battle, and the country exploded with joy and excitement for the rescue of the Iraqi people. For them, freedom was at hand. They really did not know that we had come to find the weapons of mass destruction. They thought we had come to liberate them from Saddam Hussain.

American and British humanitarian and reconstruction machines geared up. Military and defense contractor plans were finalized. Somehow though, the Head of the CPA, Paul Bremer, decided that the Iraqi people themselves were not to be included in the process of reconstruction. The process of exclusion of Iraqis from their own reconstruction had begun.

Order was eventually established at Baghdad's Airport and a working environment was back in place for the "rescued" Iraqi citizens. When they returned to their offices and work places at the Airport what they found startled them. They found their offices and work places fully occupied and utilized by the Armed Forces and civilian contractors who had flooded in.

Many Iraqi workers were told to go home. Others were hired as servants for the soldiers and cleaners, or janitors for the U.S. Contractors.

I personally witnessed American workers for a security contractor breaking into a large office complex at the Baghdad Airport belonging to the Iraqi Airport Authority. They threw out and destroyed all the furniture that had been used by the Iraqi aviation officials, then began remodeling the entire floor for their own use -- all without any authorization by the Coalition or compensation to the Iraqi Airport Authority. Even my own counterpart, the American Director of Baghdad Airport did not question their actions.

Educated Iraqi engineers and administrators were then relegated to serving tea to the contractors and cleaning the very offices they had once worked in. In the South (Basrah), where I was assigned as the Airport Director, the British Army's treatment of the Iraqi Airport staff was even more dismal. Without my knowledge British Army Intelligence randomly and routinely selected unsuspecting airport worker for interrogation.

Intelligence officers would come into the Iraqis work area, randomly select a couple of workers, bind their hands and blindfold them, all in the presence of their fellow workers.

They would be taken away for questioning and released without ever having been told why he had been treated with such hostility and violence, terrifying them and their fellow Iraqi workers. In one day alone following such an incident, eleven of the workers at Basrah Airport quit for fear of being next.

When I was made aware of this practice by the Iraqi Airport manager, I spoke out on behalf of the Iraqi workers and the British curtailed this practice but not completely. I witnessed too many examples of this kind of conduct, each as misguided as the next.
(I caution the British not to challenge me on this. I retained the emails I sent regarding this issue and the replies of indifference I received from the British. The emails are more detailed than what is mentioned here. Names to note; Gen Wall, Gen. Lamb and Intelligence Warrant officer Lines. British Legal representative Lt. Col. Sally Purnell was among those who answered my written protest. Before suggesting that I am not telling the truth, I strongly suggest you ask them. At your request I will make my emails and all the content public).

The Iraqi people needed, and thought they had in the U.S. forces, a champion, someone who could vanquish the tyrant who tortured them for so many years. America became that hope, a candle in the darkness.

However misguided our decision to invade Iraq, we were there. We could have ceased the opportunity to do a good work. Now, we had already began managing to make enemies of those we rescued, further complicating what began ill-advised, but having been executed, could have been a very noble quest.

Now in 2007, having fully miscalculated how our behavior would turn the Iraqis against us, our President looks for the justification to "stay the course" as though he really had one to begin with. Our new "surge", simply more of the same. Our military stretched to the braking point with some units in their third and fourth tours in Iraq. Over 3,200 dead American soldiers, most young and eagerly looking to the future, cut down in battle. Tens of thousands American soldiers and civilians wounded, my own son among them.

Our priceless Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines killed and wounded in battle that may have been avoided had our President sought out and considered the ramifications of opening a second front in the war on terror, based on bad, contrived and misleading information. We do know our President will be replace in 2008. We also know he will fight to keep the Iraq war going in spite of the overwhelming failure it has become.

Although our Iraq policy has been a failure in Diplomacy, Sound Judgment, Deliberation, International relations, Forward Thinking and Consideration for the American Public and its welfare, this President assures the world he will not be deterred.

Chaos reigns in Iraq today, despite our greatest efforts. Chaos will continue there for a while after we are gone, but until we are gone, there will be no beginning to the end of chaos in Iraq.

Having almost abandoned our pursuit, in Afghanistan, of those who attacked us on 9/11 we now find ourselves locked in the battle in Iraq of not wanting to stay, not able to leave.

God help us.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marshall is a retired US Marine Vietnam veteran who became an Aviation Management/Logistics consultant in 1992.

Marshall worked in the Kuwait recovery of 1992-93.

He was the Senior Aviation Logistics Manager for Kaman Aerospace in Egypt US Government programs for four years.

Marshall was in Iraq from mid-2003 until late-2006 where:
In 2003 he was the US Coalition Airport Director for Basrah Int'l Airport in Iraq.

In 2004 he was VP for Aviation Development with an American Int'l Corporation in Iraq.

In 2005 Marshall was a Department of State US Advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of Interior and with the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT) where he was on the staff of the National Coordination Team (NCT) in Baghdad.

Marshall returned to the USA in September 2006 and is currently on staff as a Senior Analyst for a DOD project.

Marshall and his wife Becky (3rd grade teacher) have been married for 37 years and have four children, Paul, Veronica, William and Benjamin, and eleven grandchildren.

Their sons William and Benjamin, served in Iraq in the US Army. William was wounded in action on July 2nd 2006.

Marshall and Becky reside in Jacksonville North Carolina.

Note: Marshall Adame is a 2008 Democratic candidate for Congress in North Carolina and is a supporter of John Edwards for President