visions périphériques

It’s 2 a.m. and I just returned from the Goal Café, just a couple of blocks away on Oum Khalsoum Boulvard, facing the Nile. Theo called at about midnight to tell me that he’d run into two Iraqi friends that he’d told me about previously. Abu Bashr and his wife wanted to meet me, he said, and I sure as hell wanted to meet them. I was under the impression that these Iraqi friends were young—in fact, Abu Bashr is in his forties and he has three children. His wife, whose name I didn’t catch, unfortunately, appears younger, but perhaps she has simply aged more gracefully. They have three youngish children, one of whom was patiently contenting himself with Abu Bashr’s cell-phone while he waited for social hour to end. I don’t know if kids stay up this late all year long, but they definitely stay up late during Ramadan. A lot of people stay up until the sohour hour and then sleep all day, so maybe that’s what Abu Bashr’s family plans to do.

Abu Bashr wanted to talk about one thing and one thing only: the war. I expected that he would want to talk about the war, though I decided I wouldn’t be the first to mention it. Abu Bashr took all of five minutes to begin his litany of complaints about the American occupation and the rampant corruption that began tearing his country apart toward the end of 2003. He is a civil engineer by trade, and his firm contracted often with the Coalition in the early years of the war. He told several stories about contracts that paid Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) contractors hefty sums while doling out pittances to the Iraqis who actually brought them to completion, out under the Iraqi sun and amidst the anti-Coalition forces that made his life a living nightmare. “In 2003,” he said, “Americans, Iraqis, everything okay.” It was after the first battle of Fallujah in April, 2004, according to Abu Bashr’s account, and especially after the second battle of Fallujah in November of that year, that things really started to fall apart. And as things began to tumble, Abu Bashr’s company was there to pick up the pieces—unfortunately, his was an exercise in futility. More frustrating than the destruction consuming his native Baghdad was the corruption and lopsided contracting that seemed to make reconstruction impossible. Abu Bashr listened as Civil Affairs officers discussed construction projects with KBR contractors, he heard the contractors rattle off sums like $100,000 or $30,000, and he felt personally wounded when his share of the contract came through, always a mere fraction of the sum paid to KBR. Worse, he watched as KBR contracted construction companies to rebuild the same sites over and over again in a moneymaking scheme. I’m not sure how jaded Abu Bashr’s memories are—I’m sure he embellished certain details, and I’m sure his anecdotes would carry far more authority in his native Arabic—but I am sure that his memories strike closer to the mark of what I saw in Iraq and what the American people are beginning to learn about than the proclamations of successful reconstruction efforts constantly proffered by the Bush administration.

“Fraud, Waste, and Abuse” is the term the Army uses to describe any situation that results in improper expenditure of American resources. It’s no secret now that KBR abused their no-bid contracts: spending fortunes on fleets of brand new SUVs, one for each employee in some places, no matter how little driving that employee did or how low on the totem pole he or she happened to be; paying base level employees outrageous salaries, double or triple the salaries of young enlisted soldiers and only a sliver of the same exposure to danger, and almost none of the contractual obligations. Abu Bashr’s stories brought all of the anger I felt toward the Coalition Provisional Authority and Paul Bremer surging to the fore. And what could I say? I just said, “Yes, it’s terrible. KBR is Ali Baba.” Ali Baba is Iraqi slang for “thief.”