September 18, 2007
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.
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 Irbil airport, deep into the Kurdish 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.
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 Website, 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 Irbil, 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 running 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. Brinkley'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 Sulaimaniya, 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 whiskey 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."