Maine Owl

BDN Profile of Navy officer from local area tells an incomplete story

A front-page story in the Bangor Daily News today describes the work of a 50-year-old captain in the US Navy who grew up on Mount Desert Island and serves as a reconstruction adviser for the city of Fallujah in Iraq:

Bangor: Navy officer from Maine helping Iraq city rebuild
By Toni-Lynn Robbins - Wednesday, January 16, 2008 - Bangor Daily News

BANGOR - ...

McLaughlin, 50, deployed to Iraq in June with an embedded provincial reconstruction team, where he serves as the governance and public works adviser for the city of Fallujah. He works directly with Iraqis to help rebuild the city’s business sector and promote economic development.

On Tuesday, he attended a council meeting during which the panel discussed improving the quality of life for the residents of Fallujah — initiatives that include improving water and sewer systems, trash removal and the availability of electricity, McLaughlin said in a satellite interview. The council’s drive to improve city infrastructure destroyed by war and violence is encouraging, McLaughlin said, as is the group’s increased focus on rebuilding rather than simply security.

"It has been an interesting change," McLaughlin said about the council meetings. "They have literally gone from three-hour meetings where 70 percent of the time Americans were doing the talking [about security issues], whereas today they were just discussing quality of life and we spoke for maybe five minutes."

...

McLaughlin said he no longer wears heavy body armor while attending the city council meetings, and he often has luncheons with the mayor and chief of police to discuss security and rebuilding. Losing the body armor is a large step in the right direction, he said, especially since the first four council chairmen were assassinated.

In the historically violent city just 43 miles west of Baghdad, even the recent assassination of Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto did not seem to have a large effect on the population, McLaughlin said.

"Their country has had a violent past. They haven’t reacted to world events as we might have heard in the U.S.," he said. "Those kinds of events haven’t affected them quite like you would imagine."

...

"Those normal, economic incentives for growth that we take for granted in the U.S. are taking hold pretty quickly here," he said. "I found that Iraqis, like others worldwide, have the incentive to work and do well and want the economic prosperity to take back their country."

Here I will not disparage anything Captain McLaughlin is doing. And, I support every decent effort to rebuild Fallujah, even if I do believe there could be a better vehicle for Iraq reconstruction than the US military. However it's done, Iraq certainly needs clean water, sewers, electricity, and all of its infrastructure repaired.

But there are two aspects of this article I find very troubling. First, it seems to me that expansion on the notion of Fallujah being "historically violent" is necessary. Sadly, the greatest purveyor of violence in Fallujah has been the US military itself. During the course of two major 2004 sieges, it has been reported that the US caused the deaths many civilians. Published reports demonstrated that the Pentagon used a chemical munition known as "white phosphorous" in civilian areas. The city was totally sacked by the attacks with at least 200,000 of its residents displaced and 70% of its buildings totally destroyed or rendered uninhabitable. Chris Floyd has assembled a page revealing the entire story of "historically violent" Fallujah during late 2004. A caption for a disturbing media piece accessible on this page describes a scene where US troops first shoot up a civilian bus, then try to save their victims. Floyd writes of the confusion of destruction and reconstruction that characterizes the US in Iraq, "...the mix of emotion that rumbles through the soldiers as they morph from killers to healers in an instant."

Second, conditions in Fallujah, and in fact in much of Iraq, are not as cheerily returning to normal as the article implies. It is difficult to find reliable, independent reporting that digs deeper into the situation. But there are a number of recent stories posted for Inter Press Service by the very reliable Dahr Jamail. (Dahr gave a fine talk at the University of Maine a little over a year ago.) The following is a fact that emerges from Jamail's reporting: The US military keeps Fallujah under an aggressive, brutal occupation not unlike the Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

Below is a quote from a source inside Fallujah quoted by Dahr Jamail in an article published January 12. The article starts by noting the big headline from that day everyone reported, the US will "hand over" Anbar Province (where Fallujah is located). Reality against the "false news" sets in a few graphs down...

Less Violent But Not Less Hellish
Inter Press Service - By Ali al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail

FALLUJAH, Jan 11 (IPS) - U.S. and Iraqi officials claim that security is improving across al-Anbar province and much of Iraq. Security during the last half of 2007 was indeed better than in the period between February 2006 and mid-2007. But this has brought little solace to many Iraqis, because violence is still worse than in 2005 and early 2006.

Top Iraqi and U.S. officials and politicians have been saying that Iraq is back on its feet and that security has been established in the most volatile provinces like al-Anbar, to the west of Baghdad. Security responsibilities here will be handed over to Iraqis in March, the U.S. military says....

Many people in Fallujah say they simply want the U.S. forces to leave. "If the U.S. generals mean they will hand over security to Iraqis and leave the province, then I will salute them all," retired Iraqi army colonel Salman Ahmed told IPS in Fallujah. "But I know it is just another comedy like that played elsewhere in Iraq, where Iraqis (officials) are just ropes for American dirty laundry. We want our country back for real, not just on paper."

People in Fallujah, the second biggest city of al-Anbar province after capital Ramadi, say they are still in the grip of draconian security measures implemented and backed by the U.S. military.

"If security is so good then let them end the tragedy of our city," a member of the Fallujah City Council, speaking on condition of anonymity told IPS. "We want our freedom back and we want to leave and enter our city without this humiliation by soldiers and policemen. Fallujah is dying, and our masters (Americans) are bragging about security and prosperity."

Again, I don't disparage Captain McLaughlin or any US military or contractors genuinely trying to help the Iraqis. But the Bangor Daily News article cited previously left out a lot. It's not that I blame the writer who filed the story. The entire environment in which news is reported in America about Iraq is broken. The Pentagon very much loves local papers to report the "good news" and not the bad. So far in 2008, it is getting what it wants.