Grounding Planes the Wrong Way

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101030714-463062,00.html?c
nn=yes

Grounding Planes the Wrong Way
Coalition troops looted and vandalized the Iraqi airport that now must be
rebuilt 
By SIMON ROBINSON/BAGHDAD

Much has been written about how Iraqis complicated the task of  rebuilding
their country by looting it after Saddam Hussein's regime  fell. In the case
of the international airport outside Baghdad,  however, the theft and
vandalism were conducted largely by victorious  American troops, according
to U.S. officials, Iraqi Airways staff  members and other airport workers.
The troops, they say, stole  duty-free items, needlessly shot up the airport
and trashed five  serviceable Boeing airplanes. "I don't want to detract
from all the  great work that's going  into getting the airport running
again," says Lieut. John Welsh, the  Army civil-affairs officer charged with
bringing the airport back  into operation. "But you've got to ask, If this
could have been  avoided, did we shoot ourselves in the foot here?"

What was then called Saddam International Airport fell to soldiers  of the
3rd Infantry Division on April 3. For the next two weeks,  airport workers
say, soldiers sleeping in the airport's main terminal  helped themselves to
items in the duty-free shop, including alcohol,  cassettes, perfume,
cigarettes and expensive watches. Welsh, who  arrived in Iraq in late April,
was so alarmed by the thievery that he  rounded up a group of Iraqi airport
employees to help him clean out  the shop and its storage area. He locked
everything in two  containers and turned them over to the shop's owner.

"The man had  tears in his eyes when I showed  him what we had saved," says
Welsh. "He thought he'd lost everything."

Coalition soldiers also vandalized the airport, American sources say.  A
boardroom table that Welsh and Iraqi civil-aviation authority  officials sat
around in early May was, a week later, a pile of glass  and splintered wood.
Terminal windows were smashed, and almost every  door in the building was
broken, says Welsh. A TIME photographer who  flew out of the airport on
April 12 saw wrecked furniture and  English-language graffiti throughout the
airport office building as  well as a sign warning that soldiers caught
vandalizing or looting  would be court-martialed. "There was no chance this
was done by  Iraqis" before the airport fell, says a senior Pentagon
official.  "The airport was  secure when this was done." Iraqi airport staff
concede that some of  the damage was inflicted by Iraqi exiles attached to
the Army, but  these Iraqis too were under American control.

The airplanes suffered the greatest damage. Of the 10 Iraqi Airways  jets on
the tarmac when the airport fell, a U.S. inspection in early  May found that
five were serviceable: three 727s, a 747 and a 737.  Over the next few
weeks, U.S. soldiers looking for comfortable seats  and souvenirs ripped out
many of the planes' fittings, slashed seats,  damaged cockpit equipment and
popped out every windshield. "It's  unlikely any of the planes will fly
again," says Welsh, a reservist  who works for the aviation firm Pratt &
Whitney as a quality-control  liaison officer to Boeing.

U.S. estimates of the cost of the damage and theft begin at a few  million
dollars and go as high as $100 million. Airport workers say  even now air
conditioners and other equipment are regularly stolen.  "Soldiers do this
stuff all the time, everywhere. It's warfare," says  a U.S. military
official. "But the conflict was over when this was  done. These are just
bored soldiers." Says Welsh: "If we're here to  rebuild the country, then
anything we break we have to fix. We need  to train these guys to go from
shoot-it-up to securing  infrastructure. Otherwise we're just making more
work for ourselves.  And we have to pay for it." 

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