Electricity and Water

Electricity and Water . . . . those were the two main complaints at the Northern City Council meeting yesterday. I was attending with the General yesterday, they are trying to lure internally displaced personnel back to a small village north of Northern City and the local sheiks requested he come to the meeting and discuss the security plan. The meeting started off with a recitation of all the projects that the city council wants to have done, water and electricity were the highlights of that list. I was feeling kind of bad because those are not easy things to do, and the city council has to try to take them on. In this region everything has to flow out of Bagdhad, including electricity and water. During the Saddam years Northern City was pretty much ignored, wrong party, wrong religious affiliation, bad location, etc. After 30 years of isolation, folks want to see things go their way right off the bat. For anyone that has an engineering sort of mind, or a basic understanding of water and electricity distribution, you know that is hard stuff to do (how do you establish and electricity grid in the middle of nowhere?), never mind the fact that there are no local public utilities organizations or corporations and your nation is 30 years behind the power curve and challenged in a million different ways.

Dealing with sheiks is kind of interesting, they lead a different sorts of lives. They are the head of their local tribe and have responsibilities to the members of that tribe. This is pretty much in competition with the local government, but not really. They know that they have to work with the local government in order to bring things to their tribes, so they maintain a careful balance between trying to be the tribe provider and talking down the government, and then working closely with the government. I think that most Iraqi government folks are used to the double sided nature of the sheiks, it is kind of difficult for Americans that are used to a smoothly operating system (trust me, it is) to understand the nature of getting stuff done around here.

After the town council meeting up north, we went down to South city to check up on some Sons of Iraq checkpoints that were involved in a firefight last night. The checkpoints are right on the boundary line between the National Police Brigade I work with and an Iraqi Army unit. The insurgents know where all of the boundaries are and are actively probing them to see if there is a weakness they can exploit. Last night they were firing from the Iraqi Army side at the SOI checkpoints to see their reaction and probably to get the SOI to shoot at the Iraqi Army checkpoints. Kind of devious, luckily nothing happened and the SOI took care of themselves.

We finished the day off by patrolling along the Diyalla River (one of the rivers that feeds the Tigris), it would be a nice drive, except for the fact this is Iraq and folks have been fighting for 6 years, there has been about 20 years of neglect and lack of services and the area is pretty poor. There were some really nice houses along the river, but they were run down from hard living. I would say that I would like to come back in 10 years and see how things look, but I seriously doubt I would want to leave the comfort and convinience of the US to come and see if Iraq has turned around.

Fantasy Football update: I probably won't be updating Fantasy Football for a while, putting all of my eggs in the Cowboy offense basket, making some bad trades early in the season pretty much doomed me to the basement.

Husker update: Smooth is now wearing my Special Forces tab and 6.5 pulled my radio watch last night. Nobody wants to bet on the Colorado game dang it.

OK, back to work here. I am having technical difficulties with the picture uploading, but I will figure that out.