He would have liked Iraq to become the fifty-first state

It's Impossible to Leave Iraq by Dimiter Kenarov

Esquire, August 2010

"In his forties, with silvery hair and a black mustache accentuated by a clean-shaven cleft chin, Sa'don resembles a man who could be either a war hero or a war criminal, depending. Although his rank is commissioner, he wears a U.S. Army sergeant major patch, and everybody addresses him as "Sergeant Major." He's short and fit, with the build of an anvil, a sharp contrast with other Iraqi cops, who are either too chubby or too gaunt for the job. He's obsessed with muay Thai boxing and all sorts of martial arts that involve breaking large stacks of bricks in front of large audiences. He can draw his gun in less than a second and hit a soda can sixty feet away, then clear the shell from the chamber and catch it midair. Before the American invasion, he worked as security detail for government VIPs.

'Do it again,' a voice yells from the sidelines. People are standing in a circle now, forming a small arena, like spectators at a street fight. The Americans have all taken out their fancy video cameras; the Iraqis shoot with their cell phones.

Beat up but still obedient, Anmar picks up the toy gun again and points it at Sa'don. In the next second he's lying down on the ground, his face contorted. Satisfied with his performance, Sa'don takes out a pack of Gitanes from the side pocket of his fatigues and lights up a cigarette.

Sa'don is good, a cop to the bone. What very few people know is that a few years ago U.S. troops shot dead his nine-year-old son while he was playing with a toy gun out in the street. Afterward they wanted to compensate him, but Sa'don refused. So many Iraqis had died in this war that he wasn't sure who to blame anymore. Plus, he really liked the Americans, despite the tragedy he had suffered. He thought of them as efficient and professional, not unlike himself. If he could choose, he would have liked Iraq to become the fifty-first state. 'Americans really know their stuff,' he says. 'If they were left alone, they could really build up this place.'" (p. 119-20)

"They come from all around Baghdad. Former cabdrivers. Former car mechanics. Former high school teachers. Former bakers. A few ex-soldiers. Every morning sixty of them show up at the main gate of Camp Liberty, ready for another day of training at the Criminal Justice Center, an American-run police academy tucked away in a shady grove of date palms and eucalpyti, stone paths and artificial canals. They are all Baghdad shurtas, hailing from the various police services: Patrol Police, local police, highway police. Some of them wear their blue police uniforms, but most come to training dressed casually--they don't want anybody out in the city to know they are cops. The sectarian militias disappeared a few years ago, but everyone knows they simply joined the Ministry of the Interior." (p. 120-1)

"He explains that in the Iraqi model, the police are seen by Iraqi politicians as a lever of power rather than a tool of public safety. It's a culture that breeds corruption from the top down. The Americans could train a hundred thousand more cops, a million before they leave for good, yet numbers would remain meaningless if national and local leaders continue to use the police as their personal armies to protect and consolidate power. The Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Defense are near enemies, defending different political interests and fighting over control of Iraq's internal security. The new prime minister--the way he shapes the government once the U.S. withdraws--will determine whether the police forces Currier leaves behind will succeed or fail." (p. 132)

2 months later

"Currier remains stoic. 'The capability of the police has not changed,' he says. 'They continue to improve, but it has been difficult for them operationally, because the longer the government goes without having been seated, the more difficult it is for them to respond to the proper political authorities.' His voice is less assertive than it was a few months before. He's talking with greater deliberation than usual. 'It's a slow road when you're trying to put a country together,' he continues. 'I think we have a lot to be encouraged about. But we're not overly optimistic. The Iraqis could fail...'

He pauses, as if visualizing the words, then snaps back. 'We set them up for success. We gave them the tools they need to succeed, and they're going in the right direction, but it's really time for us to leave. I hope and I believe that the Iraqis are going to make it.'

Another pause.

'But they might not,' he says. 'There's always that chance. But we'll always know that we did what we could for them.'" (p. 133)

I hope one day I have the courage to write this kind of story. A part of me really really wants to, the other part, the much bigger part, is terrified. Esquire notes that, 'Dimiter Kenarov traveled to Iraq on a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a nonprofit organization that supports international journalism on underreported topics.' It's unbelievable to me that the war in Iraq, arguably the biggest problem our nation has faced in the past 7 (?) years is an underreported topic. Kenarov did an OUTSTANDING job with this story and I'm really glad that some media source thought it important to inform the public on what the hell is going on there as our troops prepare to head out. The last excerpt I posted makes me so angry. We are setting them up to fail. I understand that we want our troops to come home--and I'm sure that the fact that I don't have a loved one overseas makes it much easier for me to say, that, at the same time, if we're not even sure that they're going to succeed, then, what the fuck? If we're going to leave we should be damn sure that they're ready for us to. We just wasted 7 years, billions of dollars and thousands of lives. But we all knew that from the beginning, didn't we? We knew this would fail. When is war ever a good idea? I just think that no good will come of us leaving now. It was too late and now too soon. My generation will have to deal with the repercussions for years to come.

edit:

I just found this post written by Kenarov for Esquire.com's Politics blog: "Five Things Obama Won't Tell You About the End in Iraq."

In California, they've displaced the horned toad

Invasion by Tom Junod

Esquire, August 2010

"Wilson wrote The Superorganism under the spell of the leaf-cutter ant, which began growing and harvesting mushrooms twelve million years before humans did and so can make the claim to being among the first of the planet's civilizations to practice agriculture. The Argentine ant grows nothing but more Argentine ants and practices nothing but ubiquity. It is not a mound ant; it nests in topsoil or mulch or pine straw and moves around the country with potted plants and seedlings. It is a transient species--what entomologists call a tramp species--that takes advantage of human transience." (p. 111)

"They are both more hawkish on the subject than E.O. Wilson could ever be, and both do what he would never do, sharing their knowledge with private exterminators. "It'll take a lot more than boric acid," Rust says. "It won't control them, believe me. They're a fairly major pest problem. They displace other ants, other inspect species. In California, they've displaced the horned toad." (p. 112)

"My first thought was that I had been poisoned. Also that I had swallowed a live wire and had been electrocuted. Also that I might go into some kind of allergic shock and die. They hurt, you see. They were barbed things, and they were in my throat, and they felt like iron filings and they tasted like aspirin. Though some of them were already down the hatch, I ran to the bathroom and started spitting them out, while at the same time trying to determine how many I had swallowed. I spat into the sink, and the spittle was not just flecked brown, it was marbled red. I had ants in my mouth, and my tongue was bleeding." (p. 135)

Entertaining (and really informative) story about Tom Junod's experience living with 50 million Argentine ants.

This is new space.

The Man Who Would Fall to Earth by Luke Dittrich

Esquire, August 2010

This month, Esquire's theme is The Impossible. The issue features a series of articles that investigate and prove that what may have previously been considered impossible, is actually very possible--and happening. Some examples include leaving Iraq, living with 50 million ants and skydiving from space. I haven't yet read the articles about the first two, but the one about skydiving from space was really fascinating. I've always always loved the concept of space. When I was younger, I wanted to be an astronomer and spend my life studying the universe. And I've always dreamed of going, though never actually wanted to become the astronaut for the privilege. Now, among many other really cool things, "The Man Who Would Fall to Earth," informs that some organizations are now designing the necessary machinery and experimenting with the necessary science to create programs that will eventually take TOURISTS to space. In my lifetime!!

"The first thing they did, right there at Ellington Airport was separate Iain from Clark. A CACO drove away with Iain, and Clark learned later that they had gone on an outing to the Kemah Boardwalk. Another CACO took Clark home and helped guide him through the first steps of the grieving process. The CACO got him drunk. Very, very drunk. He stayed drunk for a solid day and a half." (p. 88)

"That same slogan is embroidered onto a predistressed baseball cap available for sale on Felix's Web site, but Felix himself is not wearing any sort of hat today. A hat might have messed up his hair, which early on this Thursday morning, in this hot drop zone, was spiked to perfection with gel. The gel was a problem. The gel could kill him. In the pure-oxygen environment that exists in a pressure suit, a petroleum-based product like hair gel becomes as volatile as napalm. Even the tiniest spark--the merest crackle of static electricity, say--could ignite it, setting his handsome head ablaze." (p. 91)

"He has sat down with Felix and patiently explained some of the things that could go wrong during this sort of jump, many of which he experienced himself. On that day in 1960, for example, the glove of his pressure suit experienced a small leak, and although a wrist seal prevented any other part of his body from taking a hit, his hand underwent partial ebullism, swelling quickly to at least double its size, the limits of the glove the only thing that prevented his hand from ballooning even further." (p. 91)

"To understand what happens next, it helps to first understand that we humans, in our normal earthbound lives, live at the bottom of an extremely deep ocean of air. The air at the bottom of this ocean, at sea level, sags under the weight of the seventy-five miles of air above it, and the oxygen molecules at lower altitudes are consequently squashed together much more densely than those at higher altitudes. This is why a person accustomed to breathing the rich, thickly oxygenated soup that exists at sea level will very quickly become hypoxic, or oxygen deficient, if he tries to subsist for long on the thin gruel doled out at twenty-five thousand feet." (p. 136)

"There's still a long way to go for Stratos. The plan is to make two preliminary jumps, one at 60,000 feet and one at 90,000, before making the final one at 120,000. That jump is currently slated for August, but who knows. Delays are inevitable with these sorts of things. Regardless, Clark is already looking beyond that third jump, above 120,000 feet, faster than Mach 1. There's another company he's involved with, something called Excalibur Almaz, and in the next decade it plans to send tourists up past the stratosphere, into true space, into orbit." (p. 136) !!

"This is new space. This is passion and capitalism stoking the same grand ambitions that fear and nationalism once did. This is corporations picking up the reins of manned spaceflight at the moment when the government's will is at its lowest ebb. This is realizing that before spaceflight can ever become routine, before the ultimate human diaspora can truly begin, spaceflight will first have to be safer, right from the start. This is taking a simple statement about what is possible--the vehicle broke up at an altitude that was not survivable--and working as hard as you can so that someday, next time, it won't be true." (p. 137)