Waging Peace : A Special Operations Team's Battle to Rebuild Iraq

Waging Peace : A Special Operations Team's Battle to Rebuild Iraq Rob Schultheis Date: 23 June, 2005   —   $17.16   —   Book product page Rating:

This book is the most inspiring and frustrating book on Iraq that I've read. Schultheis spent about six months of 2004 in Iraq with an Army Civil Affairs Team, CAT-A 13. These are the guys who build the schools and hospitals, teach the Iraqis about democracy, and even get the sewers unclogged. Their mission is nation-building. Unfortunately, there aren't enough of them deployed, they're poorly used, and generally too busy watching their backs to be as effective as they need to be.

Schultheis starts the book with a short history of Army Civil Affairs operations, then talks a bit about his experience with Chiclet-5 (Coalition Humanitarian Liaison Cell, CHLC, or "Chiclet") in Afghanistan in 2002. That got him interested in Civil Affairs Teams (CATs), so he made a bunch of contacts and got himself an invitation to Iraq.

The CAT's job is to go into a neighborhood in occupied countries like Afghanistan and Iraq (and Germany and Japan and Vietnam in previous conflicts) to live with the people, gain their trust, and help them rebuild and prosper. Although the CATs main job is civil affairs, they are also trained soldiers (many are ex-special forces), so they typically help out where no NGO dares to tread.

Schultheis embeds himself with CAT-A 13 in al-Khadamiyah, a suburb of Baghdad, and gives us an excellent portrait of the men and women who, as far as I'm concerned, are the real heroes in Iraq. These guys build soccer fields, set up garbage dumps, and get basic city services back up and running, all the while dodging IEDs, snipers, and al-Sadr's Mehdi Army. And more importantly, a big part of their job is just to take daily strolls through their neighborhood, talk to the locals, and go shopping. It's all about getting things back to normal, and you can't do that hunkered down in isolation in the Green Zone.

Unfortunately, the Pentagon doesn't think too much about nation building or CATs, there are fewer than 5,000 of them and 97% are reservists. Civil affairs techniques are not taught at West Point, and it's a dead end career track for officers. These are the guys who win the peace, yet they're "the Pentagon's bastard stepchild" as one CA officer describes them.

Anyhow, the book is packed with action and insight. Schultheis gives us a glimpse of Iraq that we don't get on CNN or FOX. For example, you hear very little about how corrupt the Iraqi police, judges, and community leaders are, much less how US troops interact with them. We also get a look at how the different factions operate, and we get a soldier's-eye view of what needs to be done to win,

"What we should have done in places like Abu Ghraib [the neighborhood] and Sadr City is just come in, paved the streets, put in sewer lines, fixed the power grid and given everybody air conditioners, TV sets, satellite dishes and computers hooked up to the Internet," a 1st Cav officer told me. "Who cares how much it cost? It would be cheaper than fighting these people. Shit, buy their loyalty, Kill 'em with kindness. Why not? How much is an American soldier's life worth anyhow?"

The CATs are doing really good work, and making a real difference in the lives of Iraqis, but it seems like they're constantly running into brick walls thrown up by their own commanders. At one point, CAT-A 13 stumbles across hundreds of tons of industrial chlorine gas in a warehouse -- enough to kill thousands of people if it was stolen and weaponized, or just hit with a stray mortar round one night. They try to get someone up the chain of command to secure or move the canisters, but are told there just aren't any troops to spare, "It is the same old story here as it is all across Iraq: not enough boots on too much ground."

Schultheis ends the book pretty disheartened, but convinced we can still win in Iraq IF we make some changes right now. He provides a list of "Seven Ways We Can Save Iraq (and the rest of the world)",

1. Recruit ten times as many civil affairs soldiers (John Kerry brought that up last year)
2. Greatly increase pay and benefits for everyone in the military... An all-volunteer Army has to be able to compete with the private sector to attract the best and the brightest
3. Establish a Civil Affairs military academy and make CA an independent command (Thomas P.M. Barnett, in his excellent book, "The Pentagon's New Map", also suggests this)
4. Combine CA troops with special forces troops and civilian aid workers into self-sufficient nation-building teams, like NATO's successful Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Afghanistan
5. Stop trying to pretend we're not at war. Open up press offices in Iraq, and make sure the American public knows what we're doing there and is emotionally involved in it
6. Teach American soldiers Arabic before they go over to Iraq
7. Triple the number of troops in Iraq until real security has been assured. You can't build a nation when you're being blown up or shot in the back

I really wish I could write a review that does justice to this book. "Waging Peace" absolutely should be on your must-read list.