Planting democracy in Iraq; a private DCX?

View 765 Saturday, March 09, 2013

I have a lot of mail but no time, and my day has been devoured by locusts, but I thought this mail might be amusing:

The government builds a chicken plant 

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

A useful cautionary tale which, I think illustrates both our inability to "help" other countries and the weakness of our own when it comes to building ANY private enterprise.

http://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2013/03/09/the_biggest_blunder_america_ever_made_100603.html

"

In my act of the play, the U.S. spent some $2.2 million dollars to build a huge facility in the boondocks. Ignoring the stark reality that Iraqis had raised and sold chickens locally for some 2,000 years, the U.S. decided to finance the construction of a central processing facility, have the Iraqis running the plant purchase local chickens, pluck them and slice them up with complex machinery brought in from Chicago, package the breasts and wings in plastic wrap, and then truck it all to local grocery stores. Perhaps it was the desert heat, but this made sense at the time, and the plan was supported by the Army, the State Department, and the White House.

Elegant in conception, at least to us, it failed to account for a few simple things, like a lack of regular electricity, or logistics systems to bring the chickens to and from the plant, or working capital, or… um… grocery stores. As a result, the gleaming $2.2 million plant processed no chickens. To use a few of the catchwords of that moment, it transformed nothing, empowered no one, stabilized and economically uplifted not a single Iraqi. It just sat there empty, dark, and unused in the middle of the desert. Like the chickens, we were plucked.

In keeping with the madness of the times, however, the simple fact that the plant failed to meet any of its real-world goals did not mean the project wasn’t a success. In fact, the factory was a hit with the U.S. media. After all, for every propaganda-driven visit to the plant, my group stocked the place with hastily purchased chickens, geared up the machinery, and put on a dog-and-pony, er, chicken-and-rooster, show.

In the dark humor of that moment, we christened the place the Potemkin Chicken Factory. In between media and VIP visits, it sat in the dark, only to rise with the rooster’s cry each morning some camera crew came out for a visit. Our factory was thus considered a great success. Robert Ford, then at the Baghdad Embassy and now America’s rugged shadow ambassador to Syria <http://realclearworld.com/topic/around_the_world/syria/?utm_source=rcw&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=rcwautolink> , said his visit was the best day out he enjoyed in Iraq. General Ray Odierno, then commanding all U.S. forces in Iraq, sent bloggers and camp followers to view the victory project. Some of the propaganda, which proclaimed that "teaching Iraqis methods to flourish on their own gives them the ability to provide their own stability without needing to rely on Americans," is still online (including this charming image of American-Iraqi mentorship, a particular favorite of mine)."

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Hardly surprising of course; but we have all seen that chicken plant on the 6 o’clock news, more than once. This is called bringing democracy to the middle east. A policy of incompetent empire in action.

A follow up question.

A great part of the reason for the fiasco chronicled below in Iraq and also in the book "Little America " ( http://www.amazon.com/Little-America-War-Within-Afghanistan/dp/0307957144) is because we assumed that we could rebuild those countries as we did Germany and Japan after WWII.

Those events should be in your living memory. So question: Why did we succeed back then and so abjectly fail now? What’s the difference? Iraq and Afghanistan were every bit as prostrate as Germany and Japan were.

Respectfully ,

Brian P .

To begin with, we began training specialists in military government as early as 1943. We had also defeated Germany and Japan. The German economic miracle helped a lot, as did the Japanese customs of obedience and respect for law. Mostly, though, we sent competent proconsuls. Lucius Clay and Douglas MacArthur had their faults, but they understood the mission, they had the power to fulfill it, and competent advisors. We had Bremer.

That is the short answer. It would take a while to go through the details.

[B adds:

and we did not have an organization of left over Nazi’s and Japanese Imperialists sent by other countries to cause as much trouble as possible once the Axis were defeated.

which was certainly a factor.  In Japan the emperor ordered cooperation.  In Germany everyone was ready to denounce the Nazi’s. But in both cases we had proconsuls who knew what they were doing. Roland adds

How quickly we forget.

The date of this essay may be of interest, as well:

<http://www.hegemonist.com/hegemony/2003/07/how_quickly_we_.html>

How quickly we forget.

One of the most puzzling things about our adventure in Iraq has been the seeming near-total ignorance of anyone in government – including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who’s old enough to remember the events in question – of the methods we used to restore order in the last two countries which we occupied for any length of time.

I speak, of course, of Germany and Japan after their defeat in the Second World War.

Of the two, postwar Germany seems the closer analogy; a secular uni-party totalitarian state, a tyrant who met his self-inflicted end out of the public eye (to this day, there are those who claim that Hitler escaped to South America, or Antarctica, or what-have-you), a fearsome secret police apparatus, legions of petty bureaucrats who made their livelihood by serving the regime in one form or another, and a wrecked public infrastructure. The situation was complicated by legions of displaced persons (‘DPs’) comprised variously of unhoused civilians, freed POWs, and of course the survivors of the concentration camps.

Yet there were Civil Affairs units moving forward with the various armies as they advanced, setting up registration centers, issuing officially-recognized ID cards and scrip, and generally keeping order while the front lines advanced. And once Admiral Doenitz, Hitler’s successor, signed the instrument of surrender . . .

 

Roland Dobbins

The entire essay is worth your time.

Our Republic is founded on the principle that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Competent Empires have a different formula based on local leadership. Incompetent empires have no principle other than force.]

Dr Pournelle

SpaceX is gonna build your DCX.

SpaceX’s Grasshopper flies again

Grasshopper, the reusable launch vehicle (RLV) technology demonstrator developed by SpaceX, made its fourth flight on Thursday, according to government records. The list of flights performed under experimental permits issued by the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation <http://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ast/launch_license/permitted_launches/historical_launch/> now includes a flight on Thursday, March 7, by Grasshopper from SpaceX’s test site near McGregor, Texas. The entry offers no technical details about the flight other than it was a vertical takeoff and landing flight.

SpaceX developed Grasshopper to test technologies it plans to incorporate into a future reusable version of the Falcon 9. The vehicle is a Falcon 9 first stage with a single Merlin engine and fitted with landing legs. The vehicle last flew in December <http://www.newspacejournal.com/2012/12/24/grasshopper-hops-ever-higher/> , flying to an altitude of 40 meters and staying airborne for 29 seconds. SpaceX previously flew Grasshopper in September and November.

A SpaceX spokesperson did not respond to a request for information about the flight on Friday afternoon. In December, the company waited nearly a week after the successful test flight before releasing videos of the flight and other information.

–New Space Journal <http://www.newspacejournal.com/2013/03/08/spacexs-grasshopper-flies-again/>

Live long and prosper

h lynn keith

The specifications for SSX of which DCX was a scale model put savability up at the top of the requirements. Savable and reusable. Savable means multiple engines, with the capability to land safely with one engine out. (In practice that might mean two out, one shut down to balance the engine that went out.) I had a brief conversation with Musk on single stage to orbit vs. having a reusable first stage or perhaps a zero stage to gain altitude but not necessarily velocity. He, along with many in the modern rocket community, liked multiple recoverable stages. That adds operations complexity. Both concepts need some X projects.