Thinking Small in Iraq with Nick Berg

The NewsBusters poster "upcountrywater" included a link about Nick Berg in a comment under one of my diaries yesterday, and after some reflection I decided to write a little rememberance and tribute to Nick, even though I never met him, and only heard his name mentioned once before he was killed by insurgents in Iraq.

In the winter of 2004 I was running around Washington trying to persuade various offices in the Department of Defense to think small about repairing the infrastructure of Iraq, and the only reason I ever got in the door anywhere was that many serving officers in Iraq had come around to approximately the same point of view.

A year after the invasion virtually nothing actually functioned anywhere between al Basrah and Mosul, between the Persian Gulf and the border of Kurdistan, and any of the giant projects that the CPA had contracted out to American corporations like Halliburton could be shut down with a few rounds from a primitive mortar.

It's wonderful to have huge and highly efficient electric generators and water-purification plants, provided that they actually produce clean water and electricity, but if one round of mortar-fire shuts down the electricity for an entire city, and it happens again and again and again, it may be time to rethink the multi-billion contracts that are totally non-performing and try to generate electricity where it's needed, instead of 40 miles away at the other end of an insecure powerline that leads to a broken mega-generator.

A lot of colonels at DoD understood the situation at least as well as I did, but the Army isn't exactly a bottom-up sort of organization, and since protocol prevented the colonels from pushing this idea themselves, they more or less had to rely on whoever volunteered to make the case  to Congressional staffers and the civilian hierarchy at the Pentagon. Unfortunately for so many people, I was the only volunteer, and I screwed it all up so miserably that four years later not much more actually functions between al Basrah and Mosul than functioned in 2004.

In March 2004 I was delivering my spiel to a Deputy Assistant Undersecretary of Defense who kept asking me how I even got through the front door of the Pentagon, when suddenly his eyes lit up for the first and only time in the interview.

"You're like that kid who wants to build tinker-toy towers all over Iraq," he said.

That kid was Nick Berg, and he was about a hundred times smarter than the Deputy Assistant Undersecretary of Defense who was laughing at him. The "tinker-toys" that this moron was laughing at were Bovl Blocks, Nick's invention that you could build out of sand and stack into stable 40-foot towers. Since Iraq ("Sandbox") had an unlimited supply of sand and not much else, this was a genius solution to the problem of building telecommunication towers in a wasteland, and meanwhile the mega-corporations who had been contracted to build telecommunication towers out of more conventional materials were totally failing to build them.

Nick apparently had a small contract in Iraq for a while, but it was cancelled for some unknown reason, and while he was wandering around off the grid, trying to get started again, he was kidnapped by al Qaeda and beheaded.

I wrote this brief remembrance and tribute to Nick Berg because it seems to me that he is mainly remembered now as a victim, but he was also a brilliant engineer as well as a brave and generous human being who took terrible risks and died trying to help the suffering people of Iraq.