Reconstructing Iraq:
A front line journal by LBJ
School Graduate Matt Fuller

May 12, 2003
I have been in Baghdad for exactly 72 hours now. This is certainly going to be a big introduction to "the field". Things are tense and extremely dangerous. Today it was 104 degrees. They say it gets to 130 or 140 in the summer. We will be working seven days a week for about 16 hour days in this heat and this danger. Just an hour ago there was a huge explosion outside. You hear sporadic gunfire all over the place. We are working and living in a compound that is housed in one of Saddam's palaces. It is opulent to say the least, although we are sleeping twenty in a room that was one of the kitchens on cots and under mosquito nets. This place makes the White House look tiny and simple. The pool is awesome, although empty. They say that this is one of the least of his palaces. The palace next door belonged to Uday and it was destroyed by the bombing. Unfortunately it housed the cooling tower for this complex meaning no air conditioning for us.

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Ambassador Bremer arrived today and we had a meeting with him and Jay Garner tonight . . . a kind of passing of the torch. Everyone here is still getting organized. Security is the biggest issue. Most of our meetings revolve around that and the issue of de-Baathification. There are 24 ministries we are trying to revive but at the same time we are trying to come up with a policy that does not re-instate Baath party members into top posts. But everything hinges on security. Bottom line is that it is still a very very dangerous place. Looters and and kidnappers are ruling the streets. Stories of rapes and robberies are pouring into here every day. The stares of the Iraqi workers on the grounds here are intense.

We are living here with a large amount of soldiers (military police), a huge delegation from Washington, some Brits, Aussies, and even a team of deminers from Mozambique.

There are Nepalese Gurkhas guarding the doors of the palace. We are eating distinctly American food. Bacon and eggs for breakfast. Burgers or sloppy joes for dinner. Personally I would prefer some shawarma but it is just not safe to go out. Anytime we roam outside we have to wear flak jackets and helmets. You feel like a target wearing that stuff.

This is going to be a long and intense experience.

May 16, 2003

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Howdy from Baghdad. I thought I would send some pictures that I took on a walk around the compound this week; in the safe zone around the compound that was the entire Republican Guard headquarters, Uday's house, Qusay's house, etc. This was the first time that I have actually been able to leave the palace. It was extremely interesting talking to soldiers. They are all tired and ready to get out of this heat and go home. Today they said it was pushing 120 F outside.

One guy from Utah was sitting just outside the gate that was that ubiquitous image during the war coverage of a tank busting through the gates of Saddam's headquarters. He showed us around the inside of the tank and talked about the fire fight that took place in that very spot just a few weeks ago. His mom had just sent him a bunch of ramen noodles and a clipping from a recent Time magazine with a full page image of his face for the cover story on the war. He then led us over near his tank to a makeshift jail where they had just caught a looter in one of the palaces next door. Behind some beat up filing cabinets in a three-wall shed was an Iraqi man sitting Indian style with his hands tied with plastic ties. At one point he started yelling 'ali babba no' to say that he wasn't a thief. Strangely, he had a huge wad of dinars in his shirt pocket. The soldier said at the end of the day they would let him go and would expect to find the same exact guy again the following day looting once again.

We wandered up to a really nice Republican Guard villa where some troops were living. Outside the gate was a fifteen foot image of Saddam (the head had been removed) and on the back side of the villa was a huge tiled image of Saddam standing in the snow with a huge smirk on his face. The guys in there had pulled a trampoline out of Uday's gym complex and set it up behind their tanks. They also told us about finding Uday's lions and his bear, which was on the loose for three days before they finally trapped it. Now it is in the Baghdad zoo. I happened to meet the guy renovating the zoo the other day too, a South African who was working for WildAid on a project in Israel when they asked him to get to Iraq in a hurry. He lives in the red zone downtown and pays forty bucks a day for a car with a driver. It sounds expensive, but the driver has successfully eluded two car jackings to date.

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Today I finally escaped into central Baghdad for a meeting at the ministry of Industry and Materials with a bunch of heads of state owned enterprises. We crossed the Euphrates and saw to a line for gas that was farther than I could see out to the horizon. For the first time today US troops began providing security at the gas stations. When we arrived at the meeting in our Suburban (we flew in 200 brand new GMC Suburbans for this operation - very weird weaving in and out of traffic in Baghdad next to the local cars) we saw a man carrying a child with some type of horrendous skin graft asking for help. The ambassador we were with advised him to go to the nearest hospital and offered to pay for it. The meeting consisted of a bunch of industry people wanting security for themselves and payments for their workers. These are two of the biggest things we are working on.

Tomorrow night the ambassador is inviting over the Leadership Council (the council of five former opposition parties that is slated to lead Iraq) for a discussion and dinner. For this reason, tomorrow night the rest of us have to eat MREs, or meals ready to eat (or meals rejected by Ethiopians according to the soldiers) which come neatly compressed into a plastic brick and are downright nasty. But if it's for the cause, I suppose it's alright.

Meanwhile, conditions in the palace get better everyday. Two of us were heroes and not zeroes for getting CNN, BBC, etc. with DVD and video hooked up in our office (formerly the grand ballroom). Tonight we were able to watch Bremer in his first press conference. Until now, because of very limited internet access, we actually have had less access to info and what the media is saying than y'all do. They have installed another set of showers (cold only), instituted a laundry service, and are starting on air conditioning. Currently there is a huge snoring problem in our barracks. But we really get very little sleep anyway.

Currently our group is working on policy recommendations that get refined and refined and then forwarded up to the ambassador. The biggest issues right now are emergency payments, de-baathification, and as always, security concerns. I am now collaborating on policy papers on the logistics of emergency payments to civil servants, creation of business to business contacts, and one on emergency telecom as a means for security (no one has any access to phones yet -no one can call the police to report crimes, we cannot call each other).

May 23, 2003

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May 27
They have moved me into Ambassador Bremer’s office which means I am closer to the action but sometimes asked to do administrative tasks. For my part, I am excited just to be here. Everyone focusing on substantive tasks needs help though and I am getting in where I can. We are still working from 7 a.m. to midnight seven days a week. There is no way we can maintain that kind of pace…

My first task in this office was to coordinate the Ambassador’s trip to Al-Hillah and Karbala last Thursday to visit one of the mass gravesites that has been uncovered. It was my first chance to see the rest of Iraq. Rolling through the villages along the way all of the kids run out to the street giving thumbs up signs. Most of the adults stare indifferently. It is this way throughout Baghdad as well. Only a few seem to shake their fists, for now at least. The devastation is clear, and much of it is not a result of recent bombs or looting. Saddam’s decadence combined with a decade of sanctions has left this place in bad shape. Nearly all of the images of Saddam all over the country have been shot up, torn down, or otherwise defaced.

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After briefings at ORHA South and with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force (1 MEF) we took a tour of Babylon where the 1 MEF is camped out. It was awesome to be at Babylon and the site where the Garden of Eden was, but it was also disappointing. For one, the real Ishtar Gate and most of the artifacts from Babylon itself are in Berlin. Everything left here is a cheap replica. Saddam has actually built on top of the ruins with bricks inscribed with something like ‘this is the work of the great Saddam.’ Saddam’s new walls have a cheap castle look, kind of like one of those bouncy castles for kids at a carnival.

Next, we went out to the mass gravesite where they have uncovered about 8000 bodies thus far. There are sites like this being discovered all over and we have only begun to uncover them. The folks in the human rights section here say that the count could reach up to 1 million bodies. When we showed up at this particular site it was basically a large plowed field lined with white plastic bags. Very eerie but at the same time very organized. Families have been arriving in droves to find missing relatives. The challenge is to manage the discovery and documentation of the bodies while at the same time being sensitive to the families that are finding their people were buried there.

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From here we went on to Karbala, the second holiest site in Shia Islam. The Ambassador had a meeting in the governorate building and the rest of us waited outside. This was the first time that we have really had a chance to mingle with Iraqis. We played soccer with some kids and chatted with the soldiers as well. We gave the soldiers our satellite telephones to make as many phone calls home as they could in the time the Ambassador was in his meeting. Some of them hadn’t called home for weeks. Some of the kids started asking us if the new American president was inside that building. The British guy who was translating was hesitating to answer and looked at me. Quickly, I responded that it was me who was the new American president in town. We had a big laugh about that.

Karbala is a Shia area and a place where we are generally welcomed. The governorate lies just down a long avenue from the mosque of Hussein, the mecca in this city. When the meeting wrapped up the troops asked us if we wanted to ride in their humvees as they gave the ambassador a tour around the city. A coworker and I jumped in the lead humvee in the motorcade. The road lead straight toward the mosque, a place that troops have been explicitly told not to go near. Traffic was awful and soon we were crawling at a snails pace down a commercial street while literally thousands of Iraqis were coming out to see what the motorcade was all about. The crowds surged forward and were reaching into the vehicles. The 18-year-old marines we were riding with got out and walked along side the car with their M16’s handy. I think they were mostly curious but it certainly felt like a situation that could have turned in a split second as, after all, we were creeping towards a holy site. Eventually we made a left turn. One of the kids on the street asked if Saddam Hussein was in the stretch suburban “hard car” carrying Amb. Bremer…

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I have been getting out into Baghdad more often than before There seems to be a direct correlation between the amount of consecutive hours spent inside this palace and the willingness to risk your life by going out to lunch or dinner. The chicken nugget dinners in the palace make it well worth the risk taken in seeking alternatives. Riding around in a beat up taxi in Baghdad actually feels a lot safer than riding military convoy with the usual requirements of humvees in front and back, at least one shooter in each car, and everyone dressed in flak jackets and helmets. Riding in a beat up unmarked car somehow attracts less attention. I got into the back of one car that was filled with gasoline containers. A lot of taxi drivers have simply found it more lucrative than taxi driving to wait for hours in the gas lines, fill up several containers and then set up a lemonade stand style gas station on the side of the road. Watching the microeconomics of this whole thing has been interesting. Currency is another one. The Saddam dinar has strengthened in value over the last few weeks since the conflict ended, making the dollars that we are paying in emergency payments worth less. Furthermore, the highest denomination being used is the 250 note while the exchange rate on the street is 1000 dinars on the dollar. All of this means that paying for a meal is basically done in quarters. It took a briefcase full of money for us to pay for the group at one place…

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One day last week at the last minute I was asked to drive out to the airport to meet the Ambassador’s party that was coming in from Mosul. Because we were already late we were racing across the desert in a three car convoy with Arab pop music blasting. Although this seemed fun at the time, on the exact same route yesterday one of our humvees got hit by an RPG followed by some sniper rounds, killing two soldiers and wounding several. Simultaneously there was an explosion on a bridge just outside the safe zone with no injuries. Today two more soldiers were killed by RPG attacks in Fajullah. By now we are used to hearing periodic explosions during the day that rattle the windows. Most of the time the soldiers are exploding ordinances that have been stockpiled.

Obviously, yesterday was different. My naive attitude is that I am probably in more danger in here from an accidental discharge with all of the weapons around. This place is like a gun show. There are AK47s and M16s and various pistols around every corner. The personal security guards for the higher ups are packing smaller versions of uzis, not to mention the arms attached to the humvees that escort us around. A lot of the civilians even carry 9mms. The Gurkhas are posted at every door to the outside with M16s. All that is missing is free popcorn and hotdogs for the kids…

June 18
I am not sure what you are seeing on the news today but we are all safe. There was an ambush at the front gate a few hours ago and I just noticed it was on CNN’s website. That gate is about one mile north of our front door. A crowd mobbed a humvee that was entering the compound. Believe it or not, we are getting our info from cnn.com here in the office at this early stage…

Work has me busy supporting the Ambassador and all of his movements around the country. One day we went out to get a briefing from one of the army divisions and on the way we stopped at a market. Walking the streets we were mobbed by kids and adults alike asking for anything from autographs to solutions to their problems. One guy had his car stolen and said the police had just told him to go away. People complain about security mostly, and salaries. One of the biggest issues now is what to do with the former Iraqi military officers. They want their salaries paid and they want it done now…

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Some of the more interesting trips have been just south of here around Babylon in what is considered the Shia heartland. This was the area hit hardest by Saddam both over the entirety of the regime and during the uprisings after the Gulf War. One day we went to an irrigation summit and listened to local engineers get up one by one and explain the problems they were facing. Someone mentioned that this was most likely the first time since secondary school that these guys had been able to address their problems and resource needs in public. Not to mention the fact that it was in front of the top American official in the country.

Afterwards, we were invited way out into the country for lunch with a bunch of sheikhs, probably 40 or so. In total they represent a half million Iraqis. Having lived under Saddam, these guys love us. Many of them have fathers and relatives who held positions in government when the British were in control here. In fact, in a real way they want to push reset and go back to those days. After some discussion and a procession of sheikhs to meet the Ambassador, we ate lunch standing at long banquet tables with huge platters of rice with lamb. The sheep’s head was in the middle and they sheikhs joked about the guests having to eat the eyeballs. Luckily, the moment passed before Amb. Bremer was able to delegate that task.

We went to the same area a week later for more meetings and dinners with sheikhs, allowing them to express their views on current needs and what needs to happen for the future…

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From the helicopter you can see that the country is not war ravaged. Impoverished, yes, but not war torn. People have fields that are kept up and are being worked. Flying over Baghdad, you can see that the results of the surgical air strikes are amazing. One building will be completely gutted and its frame hanging from the shambles. Next door will be a fully functional office building with people going in and out regularly. Compared with six weeks ago when I got here, there are a lot more shops and restaurants open. A ton of satellite dishes, refrigerators, and window units are for sale on the streets. Gas lines are much shorter but are certainly still there…

All of those improvements noted, it is still dangerous out there as you must be reading in the papers. Saddam let thousands of criminals out just before the conflict started and the Fedayeen are still out there as well. So far, there doesn’t seem to be a concentrated, organized effort, just potshots here and there…

The other day, I was tasked with coordinating the Iraqi Special Olympics team’s trip to the airport to catch a donated plane to Ireland for the games. These guys had no car and no communications and from a third source I heard they were not even in town yet, but on a road trip back from Damascus to get Irish visas. The Special Olympics folks had been in touch with them before the war and had finally regained contact through a friend of a friend on the ground in Baghdad. Having never spoken to them, I rounded up a bus and a humvee escort and went down to the Palestine Hotel (which is exactly where that statue of Saddam that was torn down on CNN that morning at the end of the war) hoping that some kids in tracksuits would be waiting. They were there and they were pumped up. I loaded them into the bus and then when I boarded and hollered, “are y’all ready?” There was a resounding “YEAAHH” (after the translation from their coach ), and the humvees rumbled off, leading us to the airport. On the way to the airport we cut through the safe zone where our palace adorned with the heads of Saddam is located. They were completely awe struck. The coach explained that before they would have been shot for looking in the direction of those grounds. No one had any idea what was actually back there.

When we got to the airport there was a G-5 plane that had been donated for the ride to Ireland. We stopped at the terminal to get them checked in and were in for a bigger surprise. Quincy Jones was standing in the lobby. Here on a humanitarian mission on mass graves, he took photos with the kids and was actually en route to the Special Olympics himself. We took a team photo on the tarmac and sent them on their way. It was good to see something positive, even if it was small-scale…

Last week I also went over to the intelligence agency, the Mukhabarat, to look for some documents that were supposed to be in the basement. As you can imagine this place was bombed to high hell. There was a crater in the ground where one guy explained that a two thousand pounder had skipped off the roof, hit a side wall and landed in the ground and not detonated. We had to climb over rubble and shambles down into the basement which was full of three feet of water after the pipes flooded. There was a section for each country, all under water. Those guys also had a hot tub, sauna, and pool table down there. There were looters and squatters everywhere and they all came out to see the Americans with our flak jackets and guns. Literally everything of even slight value was gone. People were stripping wires for copper. We left before the crowd got too big...

Aside from the heat, we are also living more comfortably these days in the Al Rasheed Hotel. No more mosquito nets and mile walks to the group shower. This hotel is the place where all the CNN reporters were broadcasting from during the first Gulf War. It is also the hotel that since that time had the infamous mosaic of George Bush the first on the floor as you walked in and over it. It isn’t there anymore because the troops broke it up first thing when they arrived…

It is a bizarre scene, like most everything else here. Half the guests are soldiers carrying around AK47s. There is a bar, a coffee shop, 4 restaurants, a bowling alley, salon, a small bazaar selling overpriced trinkets and rugs to soldiers, and even a cabaret upstairs with a revolving dance floor and a gigantic disco ball. The staff said it hasn’t been used since ’93 because of a big gunfight that took place…

The Al Rasheed was infamous in previous years for being a listening post of the Mukhabarat (the Iraqi intelligence agency). A lot of us wonder about the staff who have been working here for years. This is in itself indicative of the dilemma we are facing here in getting this place going again. Are they simply people who have hotel management skills and need jobs, or are they Baath party collaborators, or both? Regardless, we are living there...

Just over a week ago one of the MP’s (military police) from our building was killed in an accident while escorting civilian government people like me. They held a memorial service for him in the room that we are using as a chapel. It happens to be the room that Saddam used to hold court in, with a mural of his missiles on one side and the dome of the rock in Jerusalem on the other. It was an intense ceremony and a ton of people from the building were present. The night before I had to type the letter from our office to his parents letting him know that he died support of a noble cause in the reconstruction of this country. A woman sang Amazing Grace and they played Taps. Then they did a roll call down through the whole group and came to his name and called it three times with no answer to end the ceremony…

July 4, 2003

Hope everyone is gearing up for a big old fourth of July barbecue right about now. They’ve got a barbecue planned for us out at Uday’s amazing pool (which according to the maintenance guys was built after the first gulf war and never used once until now) and the guest of honor is none other than Schwarzenegger. Perhaps the Terminator is going to help us find Saddam.

Things have become a bit more tense since the last time I wrote. We do seem to be losing soldiers every day and this is tough to hear about when you know the towns and cities and intersections and roads where these are occurring. In fact, the road between here and the airport, one which we are often forced to travel, is one of the primary targets for RPG’s. Generally, we don’t get out and about as much as we used to except for when we are with the ambassador and are in an armored car and followed by a great deal of personal security. However, I will say that things are not exactly as the papers and websites would have you believe. We are not watching bombs or RPGs fly overhead and Baghdad is not smoldering. Today the ambassador attended the reopening of the museum while at the same time 4 RPGs simultaneously struck coalition vehicles nearby. As you well know, it is the RPGs that make the front pages. Believe me though, people are out on the streets selling anything from cigarettes to window AC units, and going to school and going to work. It is unfortunate that some individuals are able to dominate the headlines by creating incidents on a daily basis.

Two weeks ago we traveled to Amman with Ambassador Bremer to the World Economic Forum. It was exhilarating to escape from the Palace here in Baghdad. As you can imagine, the boss was in high demand. We were met on the tarmac in Amman by a long convoy of Mercedes from the Royal Jordanian police force and whisked straight to the Marriott downtown, all traffic being pulled aside for us. We had about an hour to enjoy our landing in civilization before being scooped up again and raced out to King Abdullah’s house for a meeting and lunch with him and Secretary Powell (I had to wait at the guard shack where they served the best meal I have had since being in the region). After lunch the long convoy (with its completely insane, defensive chase car drivers sending oncoming cars diving off the side of the road) made its way downhill to the Dead Sea resort where the conference was being held. First on the agenda was a meeting with the congressional delegation attending the conference (Biden, Lugar, Hagel, etc.) and Secretary Powell. After a series of questions about the region and Iraq, we wrapped it up and headed for the opening session. The highlight for me was standing outside when Queen Rania drove up in her own SUV and got out and waltzed into the royal tent. She has got to be the most beautiful woman in the world.

On the trip, we took with us an all Iraqi press pool and three Iraqi businesspeople. Most of the press had never been out of Iraq. Throughout the conference they seemed a bit lost, but they were right there with the big guns. If you have seen Weird Al’s film “UHF” they reminded me of the TV crew from Channel 62. After the queen, the highlight for me was on Sunday when we met with Kofi Annan and some UN folks in another hotel in town. After the meeting the press was let in and the first question went to the Iraqi Media Network, followed by Fox and the Wall Street Journal. The speech went well that day and we reluctantly headed back to Baghdad. One morning later we flew into Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown and still home to some of the fiercest regime loyalists, for a briefing with the 101st . From the air it was palace upon palace upon palace. Flying over desolate farmland for miles, we suddenly came upon this. I can’t really call Saddam’s lavishness unbelievable anymore because it is all around us every day, and even more so in Tikrit.

Small girls were all dressed up in beautiful dresses and everyone stood in a line to shake hands and throw rose petals at us. This is very much like a political campaign when we arrive at these places. Everyone wants to be on our good side, especially the Kurds. After ten years or so of economic development they are organized and wealthy enough to pull off such a welcome. The leaders of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (the party that controls the area and rules autonomously) met us with a convoy of nearly 100 cars and drove us to our hotel. Literally every twenty feet there was a sign thanking us for freedom in one way or another or welcoming Paul Bremer. We also passed a fake McDonald’s named “MaDonal’s” with all the same lettering and arches. I guess that it is a true sign of almost having freedom.

After sitting down to serious discussions, their convoy carried us up into the mountains for an amazing dinner outdoors. It was exquisite to say the least. Family style Lamb, beef, chicken came until we had to say stop. It was almost like the Salt Lick back home, although there were guys with tech 9 machine gun pistols standing every few feet around the table. They told us that for the fourth of July they were going to shoot mortars and RPGs off the side of the mountain. Somehow that was a bit unsettling.

The next morning on our way to Irbil for lunch and meetings with Kurdish Democratic Party (the PUK’s big rival) we landed six helicopters in a tiny village to look at a water project that we funded to remove sewage from their drinking water. These people had literally only seen a handful of foreigners in their lives much less a helicopter. We landed and everyone ran out to greet us. We marched, Amb Bremer leading the way, several hundred yards through the village with everyone walking almost at a skipping pace to inspect the project. Everyone one in the village was crowded around to see the guy that is effectively the leader of their country. It is strange to think of it that way and probably even stranger for them. On these trips people constantly come up and hand me pieces of paper both in Arabic and English explaining their sad stories or asking for help in one way or another. I seem to end up with a pile of them after every trip. When we left the Kurdish political parties gave us a literal truckload full of honey and nougat. Little did they know but they lost some of the political capital gained over the weekend (at least in my mind) when the crates of honey exploded either from the air pressure in the C130 or from the 125 degree heat and got all over all of us and our clothes.

Back in Baghdad, not only are we seeing attacks against personnel in the country but against infrastructure. Last week, someone bombed the central power station and cut off the entire city from power. We often have no power in the Al Rasheed Hotel either. This also means no pump to get the water up to the top floors where we are. So for the past several mornings I have worn a head lamp to brush my teeth and showered with several bottles of water. The good news is that when there is electricity they have opened a disco on the second floor, complete with the biggest disco ball I have ever seen. It has the Baath party star logo in the center of the rotating dance floor as well.

I suppose that is about it for now. Keep in mind as you read the papers that there are people here risking their lives every day to go out and meet with Iraqis and get things rolling again. This is extremely complicated stuff and there are a lot of dedicated people here working on it, particularly at the top. I hope everyone has a real nice fourth of July. Somebody smoke some ribs and chicken for me.