Nick Horne was a British national at a telecommunications
company in Jordan who decided on a career change that led him to Iraq. He
started working with Iraqi refugees in Jordan immediately after the 2003
invasion, but then hopped in a taxi, went to Baghdad, and caught on with the
Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). His first job was on waste management in
Baghdad, but then he quickly moved on to become an adviser to the Electricity Ministry,
and then the Baghdad provincial council. Horne symbolized the idealistic staff
of the CPA who worked hard to help Iraq despite having little experience in
rebuilding countries.
1. Let’s start off
with the beginning of your story. You were originally a volunteer with the
Jordanian Red Crescent to help with refugees fleeing the 2003 invasion. You
then decided to jump in a car and travelled across Anbar to Baghdad where you got
a job with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). What was that first job
like, and how did you work that out just driving across country to Baghdad and
getting hired?
I set my mind on a career change away from
Telecommunications to management consultancy. I’d been working in Jordan as a
consultant on a Telecoms project for the government when I met a group of
British people setting up a refugee camp with the Jordanian Red Crescent along
the Jordanian-Iraqi border. It was quite clear that there was going to be a war
at that point. I had worked out that I wanted to change careers to something
that was more interesting and probably more me. I ended up resigning from my
company and working for the Red Crescent. That was an interesting experience,
but it was relatively short lived, and I hoped that it would lead on to working
in Iraq.
It didn’t immediately. It put me in this crowd of people who
were NGO workers and those who worked for the U.N., but they already had their
teams in place, because they had enough warning of the war in Iraq. So I was
job hunting effectively in Amman, working contacts, going to meetings, and it
wasn’t looking all that promising. I wasn’t giving up, but I thought I might
have to go to the Congo or something for a job, but since I was in the area why
don’t I try a couple weeks in Baghdad and see what happens.
At that time, there were people crossing the border quite
regularly in SUVs. From the camp I got dropped off at the border and there was
an old Iraqi taxi and I took that to Baghdad. I had no communications. No real
contacts with anybody. And it was potentially risky. If I’d tried that journey
3-4 months later I think it would have been incredibly foolhardy. At the time
it was a bit foolish, but it worked out. Obviously some of the areas I went to
went badly wrong. In fact, we even broke down outside of Fallujah as night was
falling due to a lack of fuel, and we carried on.
I arrived in Baghdad, and I had a few friends that I’d been
working with in Jordan who were there working for OXFAM, so I could stay at the
same hotel as them. I met them in the hotel for a beer one night when I ran
into the head of OXFAM for Iraq, and he said he couldn’t offer me a job, but he
needed somebody to help set up his operation. He said that if I could help with
that he would help me network, and he could pay my hotel bill, so I said yes
absolutely.
I spent a week shopping for OXFAM. It was a good
introduction to the city [of Baghdad]. I went around to all the markets,
meeting the expatriates and meeting Iraqis. I thought things might come from
that.
I turned up at the coordination meeting of the CPA, and
there was an announcement at the end that said, “We’re looking for help with solid
waste management in Baghdad. Anyone interested come along and let us know.” So
that was how I ended up using my Red Crescent badge to get into the Green Zone,
and ended up knocking on the door of the palace, and that was how I got my
first job.
Baghdad had some fairly wealthy districts and quite a lot of
poorer districts. With the invasion and war the municipal services completely
ended. So you had a backlog of trash. You had bomb damage. You had vehicle
hulks. You had a lot of mess. By the time I started, which was June 2003 my
colleagues in the CPA had already worked with the Iraqi authorities. People had
gone back to work to an extent, there were municipal services even though their
offices might have been looted, and the workers might have stolen the trucks. There
were things happening, but it wasn’t happening at a fast enough rate.
The CPA was a kind of overlay on top of what existed and
remained of the Iraqi government. So I was trying to work with few colleagues
particularly some from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to try to build up
capacity of the government, and also to do a bit of oversight. I had to develop
a strategy fairly quickly because the military were pushing for cleaning up
Baghdad. I wrote this plan that was fine in theory, but I suspected at the time
was totally unrealistic.
I did manage to get out quite a bit because I wasn’t under
the security restrictions at that time because I was a volunteer. At that time
the city was quite benign. I was taking taxis, getting local drivers. I went to
every one of the nine municipalities of Baghdad and toured them with ministry
officials. So I got a good idea of what was going on in the city, and what the
problems were.
One interesting thing was that you could see how the whole Iraqi
system had been run by Saddam based upon fear. Without that in place, and all
the looting that had happened immediately after the war there was a sense that
there was no government, and no law. People who were used to a very
authoritarian system with strict rules, but so long as you kept within those
rules you were generally okay. Things sort of worked on that. After that there
was basically a free for all. There was chaos in many ways, and people seemed
to think that democracy means you can do what you want, and there are no rules.
That was mostly true. That was very interesting to see that.
The officials at the local government level in Baghdad were
saying that workers used to be frightened of us, and now we’re frightened of
them. They couldn’t issue instructions, and hope to have them followed. That
was a problem across the board.
2. After waste
disposal you got a job with the British Department for International
Development to work on the power system?
That’s right. The solid waste management coordination was
unpaid. I could afford to work unpaid for a bit. I moved into the Al Rasheed
Hotel, which was where most of the CPA officials in Baghdad resided in. The
food was provided by KBR, so most of my expenses were pretty much covered. This
was a career change, so I needed to get a bit beyond that, and that other thing
wasn’t going to lead anywhere.
I met with a U.K. officer at the bar at Al Rasheed Hotel,
and we chatted for quite a bit, and I was set up with an interview with the Department
for International Development. Then I was offered a one month contract as a
policy adviser to the Electricity Ministry. I was a bit surprised. I happened
to be in electric engineering, but I’m not a specialist, and I’d not really
worked in government before. I also assumed at that point since we were a
couple months in, power was known to be a major problem, so I thought there
would be a lot of capacity on the Coalition side. That there would be
engineering firms, there would be some of the world’s leading experts working
on it, and I found there really wasn’t. Bechtel had a contract from USAID, and
they had a number of discreet projects. The Army Corps of Engineers were pretty
good, but they didn’t have the contracts. So there was just very, very little
going on. I think the reason why the British government hired me was first I
was there so I was convenient, and there would be no delay, but also they
wanted to find out why nothing was going on. What were the problems going on
with power? So I was a bit of a man on the inside, a bit of a spy in that sense
for them.
I started that job in July 2003.
3. One of the biggest
complaints from Iraqis was the lack of power after the invasion. Paul Bremer
had all these grand plans of 24 hours of electricity, to raise the capacity
back up to pre-war levels, and then he said he was going to expand that
afterward. What exactly happened to all those plans the CPA had?
There were no plans pre-invasion. When I came in there were
bits of plans, but there was nothing coherent, nothing comprehensive. The
pre-war levels of power were estimated to be about 4,400 megawatts. At the time
I started we were at an unreliable 3,000 megawatts.
This was because the infrastructure was very, very old, and
in incredibly poor condition. Up until the late-80s it had been world class, 24
hours of power in the whole country more or less. Than it was targeted in ‘91
quite extensively. And then with sanctions they weren’t ever able to rebuild
the infrastructure. The Oil For Food Program allowed them to do a certain
amount, but it was so tortuous and that was all they could do that it wasn’t particularly
effective. We were dealing with a system at that point that was just being patched
up here, breaking down there. I mean it was a real mess.
The other thing is, immediately following the war a lot of
the pylons, the towers, were looted and demolished. I think it went beyond
economic looting. It was a wholesale destruction of transmission networks.
So you had Baghdad as the capital, but power for the most
part was generated in the north where the oil is or in the south where Rumaila
oil field is, and Basra; it being easier to move electricity than the fuel. What
happened was during the period of the 90s Saddam had directed all the power
from those areas to Baghdad. So Baghdad had a reasonable amount of power, but
the regions had very, very little. By destroying the transmission lines as they
did Basra became an island of power. It had more than it needed. And there were
other areas like that as well, and the power wasn’t getting to Baghdad.
Bremer’s policy was for equitable power across the country.
That was criticized even by some of my colleagues. I don’t even think there was
even a choice at that point anyway, because you couldn’t move the power because
the transmission system wasn’t there. So think it was pragmatic as well. It was
principled in that sense, but it was never properly implemented anyway. When
you have more demand then you have supply that leads to load shedding, brown
outs, rolling blackouts whatever you want to call it, whereby different lines
in the distribution network are turned on for different periods of the day. Now
people would either threaten the guy in the substation or bribe the guy or rely
upon religious or tribal affiliations [to not turn off the lines], so that
policy at the substation level was never properly implemented. From our
perspective it was impossible to really monitor.
We were able to restore power to pre-war levels of power at
4,400 megawatts by the end of September. That was due to a number of factors,
but mostly it was having people who were members of the military reserve with
backgrounds in project management and with engineering skills. They were
identified, and then assigned to work in power stations and with us. So we got
better information and we were more mobilized. We got some spare parts, but not
much in that time scale, and a few other things. We were able to get up to that
level for a week or two before the scheduled maintenance.
The fact is the demand for power we estimated at 6,000-7,000
megawatts. It might have been going up because the amount of domestic
appliances going into Iraq was incredible. Air conditioning units for example,
fridges and TVs, the amount of stuff that was coming in to increase demand was extraordinary.
So demand was shooting up and no one was paying their electricity bills, so we
were chasing this moving target.
Typically it takes three years to build a big power station,
and that’s when you don’t have an insurgency. All the cost estimates we
initially made we had to practically double or triple because of the increased
danger for contractors. Everything became incredibly hard. People were on
lockdown all the time. Infrastructure was being attacked as it was being built.
We started with a relatively tiny team, but we changed that reasonably
quickly by mid to late August. By September there really was a lot going on,
and that really ramped up during the period of the CPA, but it was getting
harder and harder. And perhaps during that short honeymoon period if we had
been better organized and something had been planned before the invasion maybe
that could have done something, but actually probably not.
I got a little bit frustrated when you would read in the
press for example that the Americans hadn’t even been able to sort out the
electricity yet as if electricity was very simple. It’s not. It’s very
complicated and very expensive. It’s incredibly difficult, and I think with the
level of effort made from late-2003 onward probably not much more could have
been done, and it’s still nowhere near good enough.
4. You worked with
two different Electricity Ministers. The first was appointed by the Americans,
Dr. Karim Waheed al-Aboudi, and the second was put in place by the Iraqi
Government Council, Ayham al-Samarraie. What were those two men like?
It was entertaining. Dr. Karim was actually the
Commissioner, because originally it was the Commission of Electricity, and then
it got changed to the Electricity Ministry. He was an engineer. He was very
well liked by our team. I felt like he wasn’t always straight with us. And I
think I might be a little bit overly suspicious, because what I did find amongst
Iraqi colleagues was a culture of fear. People were frightened of telling the
truth upwards. People would not speak the truth onto power because it could
cost them their jobs, their lives, their livelihoods, etc. And so we were not
getting straight talk from people we were hoping to get straight talk from. Dr.
Karim was certainly in that category, but I think his motivations were good.
The minister the Governing Council appointed Ayham al-Samarraie who is back in Chicago
now was an entertaining character. We liked him, but he spent most of his time
out of the country. We would follow his progress around the world through press
releases saying that just did a deal with the Chinese or the Russians or the
Indians or wherever he happened to be to buy capacity and services. We were
just going what? He doesn’t have any budget for any of that. He was a
character. One might question his motivations for cutting all these deals, but
nothing was ever proven. He did have an engineering background. He would bark
orders to his Iraqi staff and they would try to satisfy them.
With some amusement I read about his escape out of the Green
Zone [in 2006], and his way back to Chicago, and the various interviews that he
gave [afterward].
5. Moving on from
electricity you then worked with the various councils within Baghdad. This was
another part of the American’s plan. They wanted to decentralize power to try
to stop another authoritarian government coming. So they set up local councils,
district councils, and provincial councils. It seemed like a lot of this was done
ad hoc. Some military unit would go into a neighborhood, and sometimes they
would elect people, sometimes they would appoint people, and they were creating
dozens and dozens of these councils, and it didn’t seem coordinated at all.
There was some good work done. I’ve been working with the
military for the last two years, and they are enthusiastic, committed, and
brave. They’re on the ground when a lot of other people aren’t or where they’re
not. They would see a vacuum and want to fill it, but some of the stuff they
did was probably unhelpful.
When I went to Iraq I was very new to the international
developmental game. What I have seen since then is that the most urbane, best English
speaking, suit wearing people are generally the biggest crooks. But we tend to
fall for them. It’s not just the military, we all do because they talk the same
language, they know what to say, and we tend to believe them. So I think some
of the people the military appointed in those early days in Iraq were out and
out crooks.
There was no consistent policy. You had people on the ground
doing what they felt needed to be done, because there was a sense of urgency.
I felt that decentralization was a generally good thing, and
that the experiment possibly could have worked if the CPA had lasted for a
longer period of time. But anything that you do at the subnational level is
going to challenge the national level Iraqi politicians who are very much against
any type of decentralization.
They [the councils] weren’t properly resourced. And by the time
that I came in which was about April 04 the CPA was preparing to go home and
disband, and therefore didn’t want to make any challenging decisions. To a
certain extent the Iraqi local councils, the district councils, the
neighborhood councils were abandoned to their fate and that was incredibly
frustrating because I felt that was probably the right way to go.
Within Baghdad setting up a city council, and a district
council, and a provincial council was overly complicated. Wherein the States
where it just about works, in Iraq it just doesn’t. So having three different
councils with overlapping mandates was just a recipe for a problem. I think it
was a year or so later that the Baghdad governor ejected the mayor with a whole
lot of armed men. So that’s Iraqi governance. Again it was a very interesting
experience, but quite frustrating. We were failing at that point and we had
somewhat given up.
6. Was that the point
where you realized that things were too much of a mess in Iraq, and things
weren’t working out or did you come to that realization at an earlier time in
your experience?
I think I only did that around April 04. I like everyone in
that line of work starts off enthusiastic, idealistic, bright eye and bushy
tailed. Also when you’re in an environment like the CPA, particularly with a
lot of military around people are very much drinking the cool aid and you’re in
a bit of a bubble. You very much want to believe in what you’re doing and its
ultimate success. I think it was April during the uprisings and various other
problems and the difficulty of the job that the penny started to drop and I
realized that we really weren’t going to succeed. I think we were failing.
Now what was the prescription for that? What the solution
was I didn’t know, and I still really don’t know. But things were really
falling apart. Obviously it really went downhill until 2006-2007, back up
again, and now back down again.
I was reading a lot more books. For example I was reading Pity The Nation about Lebanon by Robert
Fisk. And it was quite interesting with the U.S. led multinational force in Beirut
in 1982-83. There was this air of optimism that the Americans are here, and now
things are going to sort their way out, and it actually didn’t. Understanding
more, talking more, it opened my eyes a bit more and I realized we were not
succeeding.
7. You talked about
the Iraqi government, and I think this is important because probably a lot of
those people, the lower level Iraqi bureaucrats, are still working for the
government. You talked about the culture of fear that was from Saddam, people
didn’t want to pass bad news upwards. You had all these different councils
being formed throughout Iraq. What was your general impression about how the
government worked and didn’t work? The average bureaucrat what kind of
impression did they have of their job?
One of my first questions was why my Iraqi colleagues were
not psyched about rebuilding their country. I was trying to build power
stations for example. They weren’t particularly bothered. They weren’t their
project. They were our project. No, I told them these are your projects. And
they said no, they’re your projects and we’re just helping you with them. Well
they weren’t because they weren’t getting a cut.
Official salaries were so incredibly low that the whole
system became based upon corruption. The capital budget wasn’t a capital
budget. It was all extra payments and bonuses. Likewise everything else was
riddled with corruption and kickbacks. If people were not getting a cut on a
project then it was just more work for them, and why would they want it to go
ahead? So there was no motivation there. You had the fear, but you also had the
incentivization through corruption right throughout the entire system.
But another factor that came into play as we were there that
probably became more extreme since was the Sunni, Shiite, Kurds confessions being
played out within the ministries, particularly ministries becoming fiefdoms of
certain factions, and not working together. The Ministry of Finance lording it over
the others, the Ministry of Oil not getting along with the Ministry of
Electricity. There was nothing to bring these ministries together because of
the way that jobs had been handed out within the new Iraqi government. Ministries
became a fiefdoms of a particular confession, and they would pack them full of
people. It was patronage based and totally inefficient and bloated when I was
there, and it’s probably gotten worse since.
I did like the Iraqis a great deal. I thought their sense of
humor was great, and they were all very brave. With increasing violence I think
things have gotten worse within the Iraqi government.
