Iraq

Leaving Iraq – February, 2006

I had wanted to stay past the end of 2005 when the permanent government would be elected.  We all knew that the Sunnite insurgents and Al Qaeda would, regardless, continue to contest the future of Iraq on the streets but we could also see that these two forces were increasingly hostile fellow travelers with the later still driven by the vision of their Caliphate and the former hanging on to privileges in a nation-state. 

The Avant Garde: How we left Iraq...

It was the summer of 2005 and for the time being a group of us humanitarian workers had found an acceptable security situation in Khanaqin, a town in eastern Diyala a few kilometers from the Iranian border.

"They are imbuing the soil with their blood", I had said. "Sanctifying it and making it them. The field of Black birds for the Serbs", I had added as I turned toward my Serbian program director,  "versus the foot-loose, the homeless, and the multinational who will not die for soil."

From Hanoi to Baghdad. The Avant Garde of Western Civ.

Later on, that year, there were a growing number of Op-eds and other such analyses that were comparing Iraq to Vietnam and which, as a veteran of the later, interested me. While I had no doubt that the same ending for both could be achieved, the actual variations were often more difficult to discern.

An Increasingly Lonely Pursuit – March 2005

As Spring approached I had left my assignment in Iraq, briefly, to attend an NGO (Non Governmental Organization) meeting in Amman, Jordan.

Green Zone: February, 2005

Co-incidentally there was a meeting of the minds (mine and the donors) that this was an appropriate and historic time for me to go to the Green Zone to both put faces to the emails and to have them review the program - as I would present it.

The Election

By January of 2005, the whole world was watching the great presumption of George W. Stumbling though the process had been - at times like a drunken sailor - through the blood and mayhem, the nation had moved toward national elections, the first in a series of 3 for the coming year.

R and R - December 2004: San Sebastian, Spain

The road back, I suspected, would be tough. I had told my wife that I only had about one more of these assignments in me - maybe two.  

Relocation – April, 2004

There are only a few months when the weather is pleasant in South Central - when one's brain is not starting to boil from the heat or when one is not forced to bury into a pile of Iranian blankets at night and cocoon within them against the desert cold.

April is one of them. What green there is shows itself then. You can sleep straight out under one blanket and yet not have to recline with the roar of the air cooler.

South Central, Iraq: January 2004

January in Kut was dismal. There was no infrastructure for draining the black water which covers the town during the rains and the hardscrabble surface didn't allow for any percolation downward.

Kuwait – September, 2003