One Utah

The pony search committee comes up empty handed again.

The New York Times reports that U.S. government-sponsored reconstruction projects in Iraq are failing due to neglect. The Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction inspected eight different projects that had been touted as successes by the Department of Defense. They wanted to review more, but “they were constrained from taking a true random sample in part because many projects were in areas too unsafe to visit.” Some $30 billion has been spent on Iraq reconstruction projects.

Of the eight projects, “seven were no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting and expensive equipment that lay idle.” These included a maternity hospital, barracks for an Iraqi special forces unit and a power station for Baghdad International Airport.

The new findings come after years of insistence by American officials in Baghdad that too much attention has been paid to the failures in Iraq and not enough to the successes.

Brig. Gen. Michael Walsh, commander of the Gulf Region Division of the Army Corps, told a news conference in Baghdad late last month that with so much coverage of violence in Iraq “what you don’t see are the successes in the reconstruction program, how reconstruction is making a difference in the lives of everyday Iraqi people.”

I have personal experience in this area, after two years in Yemen with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). Development aid is very profitable for companies in the donor countries, which get lucrative contracts and sell expensive gear to aid projects. More often than not, local government entities derive little or no benefit from these projects because efforts to train the locals to use and maintain the new equipment fall short. In Yemen, for example, salaries of government employees are seldom paid– which understandably translates into less than total commitment to project viability, especially once the foreigners who initiated it go home. Cultural friction plays a role, as new technology from the West often is hard to integrate with existing ways of doing things. Yemen is littered with the rusting remains of aid projects that were once called successful. Whole books have been written about these problems.

Now the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is trying to rebuild Iraq in the middle of a civil war. They are discovering that even in the best circumstances, development aid can be a dead end. It takes longer than planned, costs more, and the long-term results often turn out to be negligible.

UPDATE: IraqSlogger has a link to the full Inspector General’s report. The report also accuses Parsons, one of the largest contractors employed in reconstruction projects, of double-billing US taxpayers for $77 million.

______________________________________________________

Just as an aside, let me defend the snarky tone of this and some of my other posts. Here’s the basic critique (from someone we know):

It really seems to me like the liberals are so bent on bringing the troops home that they get excited every time something goes wrong.

It is a pile of crap in Iraq right now for a lot of reasons (generally–Bush mistakes and liberal cheerleading against democracy). But we’re there, and we need to consider the ramifications of just packing up and leaving. It’s not nearly as simple as Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are trying to make it.

First of all, I don’t answer to the label “liberal.” I’m still a registered Republican, however I ought to change that to Independent because, thanks to Bush, I will never vote for a Republican again under any circumstances.

Like the rest of the reality-based community (which includes some liberals), I have been experiencing waves of shock, anger, grief and despair for years. We have an ignorant, incompetent, comically inarticulate president who lacks legitimacy and lies to America on a daily basis– and once screamed at aides, “Stop throwing the Constitution in my face! It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!” Talk about cheerleading against democracy.

Thanks to Bush’s invasion, Iraq is now ruled by a Shiite theocracy allied with Iran. We need to consider the ramifications of trying to occupy a country of 25 million people in the wake of an illegal invasion. We’re helping Al Qaeda. Losing control of Afghanistan. Our Army is headed for collapse. The death toll continues to soar, and the U.S. military alone has suffered about 30,000 casualties. Taxpayers have lost $421 billion so far (remember when they told us Iraqi oil would pay for everything?) Not much we can do about it at this point. It’s not the fault of “liberals.” It would be nice to have our forces simply pack up and leave Iraq, but it isn’t that easy and Democrats in Washington aren’t proposing that. If some of us poke fun at the Iraq fiasco sometimes, believe me, it’s just for stress relief.

UPDATE: The Congressional Research Service reports that Bush’s funding request for Iraq fiasco takes the cost so far to $564 billion. Before the war, Bush administration officials confidently predicted that the conflict would cost about $50 billion.

This entry was posted Saturday, April 28th, 2007 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Disaster, Iraq, War. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.