A Different Street Fight in Iraq

U.S. General Turns to Public Works in Battle for Hearts and Minds

BAGHDAD, May 26 -- The American counterinsurgency effort in Iraq's largest urban war zone is being fought in the sewers. Maj. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, an earnest tank officer who recalled that he once dreamed of commanding "large mechanized formations across vast open deserts," is instead knee-deep in a very different fight.

The recently arrived commander of the Army's 1st Cavalry Division pulled up Wednesday to a trash-strewn lot in Al-Rashid, a treacherous southern suburb of Baghdad. A moat of sewage ringed the neighborhood, giving off an eye-watering stench in the noon sun. People assembled before easels and a podium. In front of them, huge pipes, pieces for a sewer system in a neighborhood that has never had one, waited to be set into the cracked mud.

"Your struggle is not with the occupation," Chiarelli told the several dozen community leaders and a pack of local reporters seated on plastic chairs before him. "Your struggle is right before your eyes."

A career tank officer who once taught political science at West Point, Chiarelli contends that public works projects may be more effective than guns in deciding the future of Iraq. He said he fears that time might be running out for the U.S. occupation after a year of enduring war and sluggish reconstruction that has left many Iraqis not knowing where to turn.

Chiarelli, the U.S. officer responsible for greater Baghdad, is among a number of commanders in Iraq who blame the U.S. civilian authority for many of the missteps that have plagued the occupation and turned many Iraqis against U.S. forces. The U.S. effort to improve the lives of ordinary Iraqis, hailed by President Bush this week as a notable achievement over a difficult year of occupation, has been largely forgotten in the recent surge of violence.

The armed resistance has targeted U.S. reconstruction efforts in the hopes of demonstrating to Iraqis that the U.S. occupation, despite its $18.4 billion development budget, has been a failure. If the resistance is successful, U.S. officials here fear, the Iraqi government scheduled to assume political authority from the Americans on June 30 would begin with very little public support.

Chiarelli described the next five weeks as the equivalent of an election campaign, and he said he intends to win it by drawing on lessons he once imparted to students: Understand your constituency and deliver on promises. He is targeting Iraq's "fence-sitters," his term for the mostly poor or barely middle-class Iraqis who he estimates account for 40 percent of the population.

They are deciding now, as the handover date approaches, whether to back the next government or an insurgency working in such neighborhoods as Al-Rashid to undermine it.

Chiarelli is tall and lanky, standing a head higher than most of his officers or the Iraqis he works with. His face is long, and his short black hair is graying at the temples. His arrival in March coincided with an upsurge in armed resistance, and he worries that beleaguered Iraqis may turn to the insurgency after months of neglect by U.S. civilian officials.

In a convoy of armored Humvees, Chiarelli rumbled Wednesday into a section of Al-Rashid known as Al-Shurta, the Arabic word for police. During ousted president Saddam Hussein's rule, members of Hussein's security services received free houses in the neighborhood. U.S. officials say those disaffected officials make up the backbone of the resistance.

Chiarelli kicked off two sewer projects that will cost $31 million, part of a $240 million pot of money he has to spend on public works construction and power generation. Instead of hiring private contractors, Chiarelli intends to turn senior military officers into project managers, saving the high security costs that have become a part of doing business in Iraq.

To prepare for the rebuilding, Chiarelli sent his brigade commanders to four months of civil affairs training, including a three-day seminar with the city planning department of Austin. From headquarters on the Baghdad International Airport grounds, the division peppers Austin planners daily with questions over a direct Internet link.

But those early perceptions of a nation-building operation vanished in the first days after the division's arrival. Intense street fighting in the concrete mazes of Al-Rashid, Sadr City and the town of Abu Ghraib during the first weeks of April stunned Chiarelli and his senior officers at a time when they expected to be dealing with the conflicting interests of Iraqi civil society. "If you'd have told me I was going to lose 36 soldiers in less than 45 days," said Chiarelli, his voice trailing off. He commands about 15,000 troops here. "The key to winning this is that we've got to show them progress."

"We're fighting at night and building by day," said Col. Steve Lanza, the burly, affable brigade commander from Brooklyn, N.Y., in charge of southern Baghdad.