FLOWERS Infrastructure is key to stability.

One year after coalition forces swept into Baghdad, there is tangible evidence of progress, but security issues continue to dominate on the ground in Iraq and in the international press. "Many believe that we are engaged in a cataclysmic battle," says Lt. Gen. Robert S. Flowers, outgoing chief of the Army Corps of Engineers. "If we can stand up democracy here in Iraq and Afghanistan, we will shorten the global war on terror considerably." Flowers visited the region late last month for the "sixth or seventh time" and says conditions are improving "little by little. The key is infrastructure–power, water and oil exports. The people will definitely enjoy a higher standard of living this summer than last."

Signs of consumer optimism are omnipresent. Satellite dishes–invitations to steep fines or imprisonment under Saddam Hussein’s regime–adorn residential rooftops in the cities and villages. A newly reconstituted merchant class is fueled by brisk sales of air conditioners and refrigerators. To run them, many must rely on neighborhood-based generators. On the national grid, power production is improving, but still spotty. Generation has been at about 4,150 Mw in recent weeks, and engineers are confident that they’ll hit Coalition Provisional Authority chief Paul Bremer’s goal of 6,000 Mw by June 1.

Just as important, crews are making good progress raising towers and stringing 400-kv transmission lines. The added capacity will be needed when 660 Mw from Haditha Dam’s refurbished generators come back on line later this month, for example.

TOUGH ENOUGH Strykers’ success has prompted insurgents to move to softer targets.

Since last May, an estimated 300,000 cars and trucks have entered Iraq, mostly through Turkey, Syria and Jordan. The U.S. is subsidizing fuel deliveries from Kuwait and Turkey. The new Iraqi dinar is strengthening and the most optimistic reports claim that unemployment has been cut in half since the war ended, from 60 to 30%.

Oilfield production and distribution work continue to advance; exports have put $7 billion into the Iraqi economy to date, says Flowers. Billions of dollars of coalition-funded infrastructure repair work is well under way. CPA is pushing another $12 billion worth of construction work through its Project Management Office, starting this month.

But the security issue has persisted like a bad cold. The Army says the number of attacks in Mosul is decreasing but tensions are worse than a year ago, say Iraqis working for U.S. forces there. Then, city residents were known to invite civil affairs officers home for dinner.

Those days are long gone. Providing security in the region now that the 101st Airborne Division has left is the Fort Lewis, Wash.-based Stryker Brigade and 300 of its distinctive 11-soldier lightly armored personnel carriers. The high-tech APCs, designed to fit somewhere between a Humvee and a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, were initially designed for peacekeeping forces.

Engineers modified the APCs for Iraq, the 19-ton troop carrier’s first wide-scale field test for U.S. forces. An external steel grill "bird cage" is designed to detonate a rocket-propelled grenade away from the external skin, minimizing damage. The Strykers have drawn some small arms fire, rocket-propelled grenade blasts and improvised explosive device attacks, sources say. But frustrated insurgents have moved on to softer targets.

Most at risk in Mosul appear to be engineers, their security guards and Iraqis working with the coalition. On March 28, terrorists near Mosul attacked the convoy of Iraqi Public Works Minister Nasreen Barwari. She escaped, but a driver and bodyguard were killed.

On the same day, gunmen killed two guards–a Canadian and a Briton–who were guarding four General Electric engineers working on a powerplant in East Mosul. Earlier in the month, insurgents shot five American Southern Baptist missionaries working on water projects. Four of them died.

Iraqis drawing coalition paychecks are also especially vulnerable. Translators are routinely branded as "spies," say two men who work for the Corps of Engineers on the "Bomb Palace" in Mosul, hit last year with a cruise missile and a 500-lb bomb.

The men are working on the building’s rehabilitation and spoke at length about conditions in Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city. They asked not to be photographed or named. They earn $425 a month as translators, about twice their pre-war earnings.

Both hold engineering degrees, but were unable to work in their field because they refused to join the Ba’ath Party. Now, they’re eager to upgrade to engineer, not so much for the negligible bump in pay but for pride and safety.

All coalition employees are at risk–a laborer was beheaded last month, they claim–but a special measure is reserved for translators. The insurgents "are ignorant, uneducated people. But they are dangerous," says one of the men. Last month, a translator working for the deputy commander of coalition forces in northern Iraq was killed by drive-by shooters on her way to work. Her two sisters were wounded.

In Baghdad, the so-called "Green Zone" around CPA headquarters is as secure as any place in Iraq, but safety comes with a price. The razor wire perimeter isolates the CPA from the people it is trying to help, blurring the line between liberation and occupation.

NASH PMO chief grapples with security, organization.

David Nash, the retired U.S. Navy rear admiral who heads the coalition’s Project Management Office, has awarded 17 reconstruction contracts worth some $12.6 billion (ENR 3/22 p. 15). The work will straddle the June 30 transition from CPA to Iraqi sovereignty.

Nash last month had to allay Flowers’ fears that the PMO was building a parallel structure for quality assurance and project management, intending to draft Corps personnel on an ad hoc basis. A series of calls between Nash, Flowers, Acting Army Secretary Les Brownlee and Maj. Gen. Ronald L. Johnson, commander of the Gulf Regional Division in Baghdad, reportedly smoothed things over. As it now stands, PMO will disburse funds and coordinate between CPA and the Iraqi ministries, while the Corps will provide operation boots on the ground at the project level, sources say.

Nash is more concerned about security for the work force now ramping up for the PMO construction contracts. An estimated 15,000 private security forces are in Iraq. Most companies have exhausted the first-string players–veterans of U.S. Special Forces or Delta Force, U.K. SAS, or apartheid-era South African military, for example. Nash is worried that contractors might have to hire second- and third-tier security forces. "We’ll be working hard on integrating security on the ground with the coalition and Iraqi forces that are available to us," he says.

Flowers and Nash both say the same thing when asked about how long they expect U.S. forces to be in Iraq: "As long as it takes."

(Photos by Andrew G. Wright for ENR)