Nickdfresh
10-11-2005, 06:46 AM
October 9, 2005
A Central Pillar of Iraq Policy Crumbling
Bush's administration has insisted that political progress would quell the insurgency. But the reverse may be true, U.S. analysts say.
By Tyler Marshall and Louise Roug, Times Staff Writers
WASHINGTON — Senior U.S. officials have begun to question a key presumption of American strategy in Iraq: that establishing democracy there can erode and ultimately eradicate the insurgency gripping the country.
The expectation that political progress would bring stability has been fundamental to the Bush administration's approach to rebuilding Iraq, as well as a central theme of White House rhetoric to convince the American public that its policy in Iraq remains on course.
But within the last two months, U.S. analysts with access to classified intelligence have started to challenge this precept, noting a "significant and disturbing disconnect" between apparent advances on the political front and efforts to reduce insurgent attacks.
Now, with Saturday's constitutional referendum appearing more likely to divide than unify the country, some within the administration have concluded that the quest for democracy in Iraq, at least in its current form, could actually strengthen the insurgency.
The commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Army Gen. George W. Casey, has acknowledged that such a scenario is possible, while officials elsewhere in the administration, all of whom declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject, say they share similar concerns about the referendum.
Iraq's Sunni Muslim Arabs, who are believed to form the core of the insurgency, are bitterly opposed to a constitution drafted mainly by the country's majority Shiite Muslims and ethnic Kurds. Yet from all indications, the Sunnis will fail to muster enough votes to defeat it.
"It could make people on the fence a little more angry or [make them] come off the fence," said a senior U.S. official who requested anonymity.
A growing number of experts outside the administration and in Iraq agree with such assessments.
"If the constitution passes in a non-amicable way, the violence will increase," said Ali Dabagh, a member of Iraq's transitional National Assembly who is believed to be close to Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari.
The White House has consistently linked the building of democracy in Iraq and the broader Middle East with the defeat of the insurgency.
President Bush repeated that assertion Thursday in a policy address to the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington. "If the peoples of [the Middle East] are permitted to choose their own destiny and advance by their own energy and by their participation as free men and women," he declared, "then the extremists will be marginalized and the flow of violent radicalism to the rest of the world will slow and eventually end."
Vice President Dick Cheney has put it more succinctly. "I think … we will, in fact, succeed in getting democracy established in Iraq, and I think when we do, that will be the end of the insurgency," he told CNN in June.
Those comments echoed an assertion put forward earlier by the Pentagon: U.S. forces could not defeat the insurgency through military might alone; success required redeploying troops to protect the nascent democratic process. That process, commanders said, together with military force, would eventually smother rebel violence.
Despite what Bush on Thursday called "incredible political progress" in Iraq since Saddam Hussein's fall 2 1/2 years ago, the Iraqi insurgency has grown in strength and sophistication. From about 5,000 Hussein loyalists using leftover Iraqi army equipment, it has mushroomed into a disparate yet potent force of up to 20,000 equipped with explosives capable of knocking out even heavily armored military vehicles.
"The surface political process has stumbled forward, but the insurgency came up and kind of stayed that way," said a U.S. government analyst with access to classified intelligence. Several analysts, who spoke on condition of anonymity while discussing intelligence, indicated that initial evidence of the disconnect began to surface in the spring — after Iraq's first national elections on Jan. 30 — and it has gradually become clearer since.
Doubts about such a central pillar of Iraq policy come at an awkward time for the White House: Polls show eroding public confidence in Bush as a leader and in his management of the war. In recent days, Bush, Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have tried to shore up public support for staying in Iraq.
But Middle East experts say they have found little correlation between Iraq's emerging democracy and the rebellion's strength.
"The democratic process as it has worked so far has certainly done nothing to undermine the insurgency," said Nathan Brown, who researches Middle East political reform at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
Robert Malley, co-author of a September report by the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit organization that deals with conflict resolution, concluded that approval of the draft constitution could make things worse. Malley called the administration's Iraq policy "a case study of pinning too much hope on an electoral process without doing so much of the other work."
Success in Iraq "is not about democracy or non-democracy; it's about reaching consensus on a political pact that all parties agree to," said Malley, a former advisor to President Clinton on Arab-Israeli affairs. "If they don't agree, the political process won't help."
The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, is reportedly trying to broker eleventh-hour changes in the draft to ease Sunni concerns, but even if he succeeds, the effect of such concessions would not be immediately clear, analysts said.
A Western diplomat in Baghdad, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said a government that is unable to provide for basic needs such as security, electricity, potable water and jobs commands little loyalty.
Brian Jenkins, a terrorism specialist at the Rand Corp. think tank in Santa Monica, said that a cursory look at history shows "there is no guarantee that political progress diminishes political violence." He cited Colombia, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Northern Ireland, noting that insurgencies have lasted for decades in those functioning democracies with educated populations.
He said those militant movements were driven by various factors, including the political goals of aggrieved groups, profitable criminal activities and a lack of economic opportunities. Jenkins and others believe that Iraq's insurgency has already developed several motivating strands that would probably sustain it for years.
With the divisive constitutional referendum only a week away, the first trial of the deposed Hussein scheduled to begin this month and the prospect that the December election will produce a Shiite-dominated parliament, upcoming events may only further distance Sunni Arabs from Iraq's emerging democratic state, analysts say.
Sunnis, largely excluded from this summer's crucial negotiations on the constitution, see the document as rigged against their interests. They fear, for example, that blunt language outlawing Hussein's Sunni-dominated Baath Party could be used to block them from jobs in the public sector. The draft also appears to open the door to a loosely federated system that could deprive Sunni Arab regions of the benefits of the country's huge oil reserves.
Some Iraqis accuse the Bush administration of sacrificing a unifying political process in favor of speed and arbitrary deadlines needed to sustain American public support for the war and justify the politically important reduction in U.S. troop levels in Iraq.
"We're short of time — it's the fault of the Americans," Kurdish politician Mahmoud Othman said. "They are always insisting on short deadlines. It's as if they're [making] hamburgers and fast food."
Othman added: "If we'd had more time, it would have been possible to get Sunni participation. When Oct. 15 comes, many won't even have seen the constitution."
Marshall reported from Washington and Roug from Baghdad. Times staff writer Mark Mazzetti in Washington contributed to this report.
Link (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-disconnect9oct09,0,6375870,full.story)
-----------------------------------
Posted 10/9/2005 8:44 PM Updated 10/10/2005 12:09 AM
Iraq rebuilding slows as U.S. money for projects dries up
By Rick Jervis, USA TODAY (http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2005-10-09-iraq-rebuilding-cover_x.htm)
NASIRIYAH, Iraq — On paper, the Iraqi Army barracks was a gleaming example of the future Iraq. The plans called for a two-story, air-conditioned barracks housing 850 soldiers, a movie theater, classrooms, basketball courts, a shooting range, even an officer's club.
Laborers work on a massive water treatment plan near Nasiriyah, Iraq. Its cost has jumped from $80 million to $200 milion.
By Tom Clarkson, Army Corps of Engineers
But when the $10 million project in southern Iraq is finished this month, it will fall far short of those ambitious plans. The theater, classrooms, officer's club, basketball courts and shooting range have all been scrapped. The barracks will be one story instead of two.
The reason for scaling back the barracks? The U.S. government is running out of money. The higher than expected cost of protecting workers against insurgent attacks — about 25 cents of every reconstruction dollar now pays for security — has sent the cost of projects skyward.
The result: Some projects have been eliminated and others cut back.
"American money has dried up," says Brent Rose, chief of program/project management for the Army Corps of Engineers in southern Iraq.
And tracking the billions of dollars that flooded into a war zone in the wake of the U.S.-led invasion has proved difficult, too. Nearly $100 million in reconstruction money is unaccounted for.
The ultimate price of a slowdown in Iraq's reconstruction could be steep. U.S. strategy here is based on the premise that jobs and prosperity will sap the strength of the insurgency and are as important as military successes in defeating terrorists.
"A free and prosperous Iraq will be a major blow to the terrorists and their desire to establish a safe haven in Iraq where they can plan and plot attacks," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said last week.
But there are signs that some of the early momentum is gone, particularly for big infrastructure projects. The Ministry of Municipalities and Public Works initially planned to use U.S. funds for 81 much-needed water and sewage treatment projects across the country, says Humam Misconi, a ministry official. That list has dwindled to 13.
Canceled projects include the $50 million project that was supposed to provide potable water to the second-largest city in the Kurdish region, and a $60 million water treatment plant in Babil province, which would have served about 360,000 residents, Misconi says.
Some progress has been made. More than 2,800 projects have begun since the transfer of sovereignty last summer, and 1,700 of those have been completed, according to the Army Corps of Engineers. They include refurbished schools, new police stations, hospitals, bridges and new roads.
It is the larger, more expensive projects such as water treatment plants, sewage networks and power grids that are being cut back.
Congress appropriated $18.4 billion for Iraq reconstruction in November 2003, but last year nearly $5 billion of it was diverted to help train and equip Iraq's security forces as the insurgency grew in strength.
And the security costs keep increasing. Originally estimated at 9% of total project costs, security costs have risen to between 20% and 30%, says Brig. Gen. William McCoy Jr., commander of the Army Corps of Engineers in Iraq.
Power outages throughout Iraq
By 2003, Iraq's infrastructure was run down after years of United Nations-mandated sanctions and neglect. Rebuilding it has proved tougher than first envisioned. Nearly half of all of Iraqi households still don't have access to clean water, and only 8% of the country, excluding the capital, is connected to sewage networks.
And despite progress in fixing Iraq's antiquated oil production system, the country's oil wells produce about 1.9 million barrels of crude oil a day, lower than 2003 levels and well under the 3.5 million barrels Iraq was producing before the 1991 Gulf War.
Iraqi households still endure about 10 hours a day of power outages. In Baghdad, the power is out about 14 hours a day, according to the Electricity Ministry. Iraqi power plants are now generating nearly 4,800 megawatts, up from 4,400 before the U.S.-led invasion.
The increase hasn't been enough to keep up with demand. Since the end of the war, demand for electricity has increased by about 60% as Iraqis have bought new refrigerators, televisions, air conditioners and satellite dishes, says a Corps of Engineers spokesman.
The lack of dramatic economic progress has hurt efforts to win over Iraqis, says Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Unemployed young men are more easily drawn into the ranks of the insurgency than those with jobs.
And if other Iraqis don't see an improvement in their daily lives, they may sympathize with rebels. "The economy is not helping us win the war," O'Hanlon says.
The U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority originally set a goal of employing 50,000 Iraqis on reconstruction projects, but the target wasn't achieved, according to a recent report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In August, unemployment and underemployment were estimated at 50%, the report said.
Security is the largest obstacle to rebuilding. As of June 30, 330 contractors, mostly Iraqis, had been killed, according to the U.S. Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.
"It's a challenge," says Col. Larry McCallister, commander of Gulf Region South District, the Corps of Engineers unit in southern Iraq. "We can't get to projects as often as we'd like. In the U.S., you go to projects every day. Here, you get to them maybe once a week."
Western contractors can't visit projects without elaborate planning and preparation.
On a recent morning at Camp Adder, the fortified base near here where the Corps of Engineers is housed, a team of engineers huddled around the armored Ford SUVs of an Erinys International security team for the daily briefing. The Army Corps hires private security firms, such as Erinys, to take them to sites.
The civilian and military engineers are briefed before being ferried by the guards in a convoy of three vehicles. A guard sits in the back of the last vehicle, his assault rifle trained on any car that gets too close.
Missing $100 million
Ahmad Al-Rubaye, AFP/Getty
Workers roll out cable to be laid in ditches in Baghdad.
Besides escalating security costs, reconstruction also has been dogged by allegations of fraud and mismanagement. Nearly $100 million in Iraqi funds distributed by the Coalition Provisional Authority for reconstruction was either spent without supporting receipts or vanished, according to an April audit by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq reconstruction.
The U.S. Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation, says Jim Mitchell, a spokesman for the office.
The White House said it hasn't decided whether to request additional funds from Congress. "It is too early to know what may be needed," McClellan said.
If President Bush does ask Congress for more money, there will probably be tough questions about oversight and rising security costs.
"Reconstruction in Iraq has been slower, more painful, more complex, more fragmented and more inefficient than anyone in Washington or Baghdad could have imagined," said Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.), chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee on foreign operations, during a subcommittee meeting last month. .
Much of the security cost is buried in "cost-plus" contracts in which companies get reimbursed for all costs plus a percentage of those costs as a fee.
All 11 multinational firms working on projects through the Iraqi Project and Contracting Office have "cost-plus" contracts, says Karen Durham-Aguilera, the office's director of programs.
One "cost-plus" project is the water treatment plant under construction here, which is managed jointly by London-based AMEC and California-based Fluor Corp. The project was originally estimated to cost $80 million, according to Army Corps of Engineers records.
But the original Iraqi subcontractor pulled out after he was threatened. Delays, drive-by shootings and land-acquisition snags followed, driving security and other costs up, according to Corps officials and records. The project's estimated completion cost rose to $200 million, the corps said.
AMEC officials declined to comment. Bob Fletcher, Fluor's director of water programs, disputed the corps' figures but would not elaborate on the project's cost.
Iraqi contractors, not saddled by steep security costs, say they can do the work for less. The Ministry of Municipalities and Public Works is using Iraqi funds to build two similarly sized treatment plants in Karbala and Kut, says the ministry's Misconi. Combined cost of both projects: $185 million.
"We keep saying, 'Give us the money and we could do it better, cheaper,'" Misconi says. "Estimated cost of security on the Nasiriyah project is $54 million. We could build a whole new plant with this amount of money."
Salty water
As funds run dry, some projects are being handed over to Iraqis. In Najaf, for example, Army Corps officials bought parts to upgrade the city's electrical distribution system, including transformers, lines and wires, then handed them to local construction officials for them to do the work, saving millions on labor, security and administrative costs, McCallister says.
In the next few years, Najaf will benefit from 30 projects costing $100 million in U.S. taxpayer money, including new hospitals, clinics and police stations, McCallister says. But bigger projects, such as water treatment plants and electrical grids, are too expensive to launch, he says.
"Will (the projects) make a difference? Yes," McCallister says. "Will it make a major, major difference? No. We could continue putting three times that much money into that city."
The refurbished hospitals and new clinics in town are nice, says Abdul Hussein Ali, 52, a retired hospital worker living in Najaf with six children. But what would bring real joy, he says, is water that doesn't pour into his sink cloudy and salty and needing chemicals to purify.
"The water here is as salty as the desert," he says.
"Since the start of the war to today, you cannot say there has been remarkable change," Ali says. "The situation is improving, but very, very slowly."
Contributing: Richard Benedetto in Washington
A Central Pillar of Iraq Policy Crumbling
Bush's administration has insisted that political progress would quell the insurgency. But the reverse may be true, U.S. analysts say.
By Tyler Marshall and Louise Roug, Times Staff Writers
WASHINGTON — Senior U.S. officials have begun to question a key presumption of American strategy in Iraq: that establishing democracy there can erode and ultimately eradicate the insurgency gripping the country.
The expectation that political progress would bring stability has been fundamental to the Bush administration's approach to rebuilding Iraq, as well as a central theme of White House rhetoric to convince the American public that its policy in Iraq remains on course.
But within the last two months, U.S. analysts with access to classified intelligence have started to challenge this precept, noting a "significant and disturbing disconnect" between apparent advances on the political front and efforts to reduce insurgent attacks.
Now, with Saturday's constitutional referendum appearing more likely to divide than unify the country, some within the administration have concluded that the quest for democracy in Iraq, at least in its current form, could actually strengthen the insurgency.
The commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Army Gen. George W. Casey, has acknowledged that such a scenario is possible, while officials elsewhere in the administration, all of whom declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject, say they share similar concerns about the referendum.
Iraq's Sunni Muslim Arabs, who are believed to form the core of the insurgency, are bitterly opposed to a constitution drafted mainly by the country's majority Shiite Muslims and ethnic Kurds. Yet from all indications, the Sunnis will fail to muster enough votes to defeat it.
"It could make people on the fence a little more angry or [make them] come off the fence," said a senior U.S. official who requested anonymity.
A growing number of experts outside the administration and in Iraq agree with such assessments.
"If the constitution passes in a non-amicable way, the violence will increase," said Ali Dabagh, a member of Iraq's transitional National Assembly who is believed to be close to Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari.
The White House has consistently linked the building of democracy in Iraq and the broader Middle East with the defeat of the insurgency.
President Bush repeated that assertion Thursday in a policy address to the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington. "If the peoples of [the Middle East] are permitted to choose their own destiny and advance by their own energy and by their participation as free men and women," he declared, "then the extremists will be marginalized and the flow of violent radicalism to the rest of the world will slow and eventually end."
Vice President Dick Cheney has put it more succinctly. "I think … we will, in fact, succeed in getting democracy established in Iraq, and I think when we do, that will be the end of the insurgency," he told CNN in June.
Those comments echoed an assertion put forward earlier by the Pentagon: U.S. forces could not defeat the insurgency through military might alone; success required redeploying troops to protect the nascent democratic process. That process, commanders said, together with military force, would eventually smother rebel violence.
Despite what Bush on Thursday called "incredible political progress" in Iraq since Saddam Hussein's fall 2 1/2 years ago, the Iraqi insurgency has grown in strength and sophistication. From about 5,000 Hussein loyalists using leftover Iraqi army equipment, it has mushroomed into a disparate yet potent force of up to 20,000 equipped with explosives capable of knocking out even heavily armored military vehicles.
"The surface political process has stumbled forward, but the insurgency came up and kind of stayed that way," said a U.S. government analyst with access to classified intelligence. Several analysts, who spoke on condition of anonymity while discussing intelligence, indicated that initial evidence of the disconnect began to surface in the spring — after Iraq's first national elections on Jan. 30 — and it has gradually become clearer since.
Doubts about such a central pillar of Iraq policy come at an awkward time for the White House: Polls show eroding public confidence in Bush as a leader and in his management of the war. In recent days, Bush, Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have tried to shore up public support for staying in Iraq.
But Middle East experts say they have found little correlation between Iraq's emerging democracy and the rebellion's strength.
"The democratic process as it has worked so far has certainly done nothing to undermine the insurgency," said Nathan Brown, who researches Middle East political reform at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
Robert Malley, co-author of a September report by the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit organization that deals with conflict resolution, concluded that approval of the draft constitution could make things worse. Malley called the administration's Iraq policy "a case study of pinning too much hope on an electoral process without doing so much of the other work."
Success in Iraq "is not about democracy or non-democracy; it's about reaching consensus on a political pact that all parties agree to," said Malley, a former advisor to President Clinton on Arab-Israeli affairs. "If they don't agree, the political process won't help."
The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, is reportedly trying to broker eleventh-hour changes in the draft to ease Sunni concerns, but even if he succeeds, the effect of such concessions would not be immediately clear, analysts said.
A Western diplomat in Baghdad, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said a government that is unable to provide for basic needs such as security, electricity, potable water and jobs commands little loyalty.
Brian Jenkins, a terrorism specialist at the Rand Corp. think tank in Santa Monica, said that a cursory look at history shows "there is no guarantee that political progress diminishes political violence." He cited Colombia, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Northern Ireland, noting that insurgencies have lasted for decades in those functioning democracies with educated populations.
He said those militant movements were driven by various factors, including the political goals of aggrieved groups, profitable criminal activities and a lack of economic opportunities. Jenkins and others believe that Iraq's insurgency has already developed several motivating strands that would probably sustain it for years.
With the divisive constitutional referendum only a week away, the first trial of the deposed Hussein scheduled to begin this month and the prospect that the December election will produce a Shiite-dominated parliament, upcoming events may only further distance Sunni Arabs from Iraq's emerging democratic state, analysts say.
Sunnis, largely excluded from this summer's crucial negotiations on the constitution, see the document as rigged against their interests. They fear, for example, that blunt language outlawing Hussein's Sunni-dominated Baath Party could be used to block them from jobs in the public sector. The draft also appears to open the door to a loosely federated system that could deprive Sunni Arab regions of the benefits of the country's huge oil reserves.
Some Iraqis accuse the Bush administration of sacrificing a unifying political process in favor of speed and arbitrary deadlines needed to sustain American public support for the war and justify the politically important reduction in U.S. troop levels in Iraq.
"We're short of time — it's the fault of the Americans," Kurdish politician Mahmoud Othman said. "They are always insisting on short deadlines. It's as if they're [making] hamburgers and fast food."
Othman added: "If we'd had more time, it would have been possible to get Sunni participation. When Oct. 15 comes, many won't even have seen the constitution."
Marshall reported from Washington and Roug from Baghdad. Times staff writer Mark Mazzetti in Washington contributed to this report.
Link (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-disconnect9oct09,0,6375870,full.story)
-----------------------------------
Posted 10/9/2005 8:44 PM Updated 10/10/2005 12:09 AM
Iraq rebuilding slows as U.S. money for projects dries up
By Rick Jervis, USA TODAY (http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2005-10-09-iraq-rebuilding-cover_x.htm)
NASIRIYAH, Iraq — On paper, the Iraqi Army barracks was a gleaming example of the future Iraq. The plans called for a two-story, air-conditioned barracks housing 850 soldiers, a movie theater, classrooms, basketball courts, a shooting range, even an officer's club.
Laborers work on a massive water treatment plan near Nasiriyah, Iraq. Its cost has jumped from $80 million to $200 milion.
By Tom Clarkson, Army Corps of Engineers
But when the $10 million project in southern Iraq is finished this month, it will fall far short of those ambitious plans. The theater, classrooms, officer's club, basketball courts and shooting range have all been scrapped. The barracks will be one story instead of two.
The reason for scaling back the barracks? The U.S. government is running out of money. The higher than expected cost of protecting workers against insurgent attacks — about 25 cents of every reconstruction dollar now pays for security — has sent the cost of projects skyward.
The result: Some projects have been eliminated and others cut back.
"American money has dried up," says Brent Rose, chief of program/project management for the Army Corps of Engineers in southern Iraq.
And tracking the billions of dollars that flooded into a war zone in the wake of the U.S.-led invasion has proved difficult, too. Nearly $100 million in reconstruction money is unaccounted for.
The ultimate price of a slowdown in Iraq's reconstruction could be steep. U.S. strategy here is based on the premise that jobs and prosperity will sap the strength of the insurgency and are as important as military successes in defeating terrorists.
"A free and prosperous Iraq will be a major blow to the terrorists and their desire to establish a safe haven in Iraq where they can plan and plot attacks," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said last week.
But there are signs that some of the early momentum is gone, particularly for big infrastructure projects. The Ministry of Municipalities and Public Works initially planned to use U.S. funds for 81 much-needed water and sewage treatment projects across the country, says Humam Misconi, a ministry official. That list has dwindled to 13.
Canceled projects include the $50 million project that was supposed to provide potable water to the second-largest city in the Kurdish region, and a $60 million water treatment plant in Babil province, which would have served about 360,000 residents, Misconi says.
Some progress has been made. More than 2,800 projects have begun since the transfer of sovereignty last summer, and 1,700 of those have been completed, according to the Army Corps of Engineers. They include refurbished schools, new police stations, hospitals, bridges and new roads.
It is the larger, more expensive projects such as water treatment plants, sewage networks and power grids that are being cut back.
Congress appropriated $18.4 billion for Iraq reconstruction in November 2003, but last year nearly $5 billion of it was diverted to help train and equip Iraq's security forces as the insurgency grew in strength.
And the security costs keep increasing. Originally estimated at 9% of total project costs, security costs have risen to between 20% and 30%, says Brig. Gen. William McCoy Jr., commander of the Army Corps of Engineers in Iraq.
Power outages throughout Iraq
By 2003, Iraq's infrastructure was run down after years of United Nations-mandated sanctions and neglect. Rebuilding it has proved tougher than first envisioned. Nearly half of all of Iraqi households still don't have access to clean water, and only 8% of the country, excluding the capital, is connected to sewage networks.
And despite progress in fixing Iraq's antiquated oil production system, the country's oil wells produce about 1.9 million barrels of crude oil a day, lower than 2003 levels and well under the 3.5 million barrels Iraq was producing before the 1991 Gulf War.
Iraqi households still endure about 10 hours a day of power outages. In Baghdad, the power is out about 14 hours a day, according to the Electricity Ministry. Iraqi power plants are now generating nearly 4,800 megawatts, up from 4,400 before the U.S.-led invasion.
The increase hasn't been enough to keep up with demand. Since the end of the war, demand for electricity has increased by about 60% as Iraqis have bought new refrigerators, televisions, air conditioners and satellite dishes, says a Corps of Engineers spokesman.
The lack of dramatic economic progress has hurt efforts to win over Iraqis, says Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Unemployed young men are more easily drawn into the ranks of the insurgency than those with jobs.
And if other Iraqis don't see an improvement in their daily lives, they may sympathize with rebels. "The economy is not helping us win the war," O'Hanlon says.
The U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority originally set a goal of employing 50,000 Iraqis on reconstruction projects, but the target wasn't achieved, according to a recent report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In August, unemployment and underemployment were estimated at 50%, the report said.
Security is the largest obstacle to rebuilding. As of June 30, 330 contractors, mostly Iraqis, had been killed, according to the U.S. Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.
"It's a challenge," says Col. Larry McCallister, commander of Gulf Region South District, the Corps of Engineers unit in southern Iraq. "We can't get to projects as often as we'd like. In the U.S., you go to projects every day. Here, you get to them maybe once a week."
Western contractors can't visit projects without elaborate planning and preparation.
On a recent morning at Camp Adder, the fortified base near here where the Corps of Engineers is housed, a team of engineers huddled around the armored Ford SUVs of an Erinys International security team for the daily briefing. The Army Corps hires private security firms, such as Erinys, to take them to sites.
The civilian and military engineers are briefed before being ferried by the guards in a convoy of three vehicles. A guard sits in the back of the last vehicle, his assault rifle trained on any car that gets too close.
Missing $100 million
Ahmad Al-Rubaye, AFP/Getty
Workers roll out cable to be laid in ditches in Baghdad.
Besides escalating security costs, reconstruction also has been dogged by allegations of fraud and mismanagement. Nearly $100 million in Iraqi funds distributed by the Coalition Provisional Authority for reconstruction was either spent without supporting receipts or vanished, according to an April audit by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq reconstruction.
The U.S. Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation, says Jim Mitchell, a spokesman for the office.
The White House said it hasn't decided whether to request additional funds from Congress. "It is too early to know what may be needed," McClellan said.
If President Bush does ask Congress for more money, there will probably be tough questions about oversight and rising security costs.
"Reconstruction in Iraq has been slower, more painful, more complex, more fragmented and more inefficient than anyone in Washington or Baghdad could have imagined," said Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.), chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee on foreign operations, during a subcommittee meeting last month. .
Much of the security cost is buried in "cost-plus" contracts in which companies get reimbursed for all costs plus a percentage of those costs as a fee.
All 11 multinational firms working on projects through the Iraqi Project and Contracting Office have "cost-plus" contracts, says Karen Durham-Aguilera, the office's director of programs.
One "cost-plus" project is the water treatment plant under construction here, which is managed jointly by London-based AMEC and California-based Fluor Corp. The project was originally estimated to cost $80 million, according to Army Corps of Engineers records.
But the original Iraqi subcontractor pulled out after he was threatened. Delays, drive-by shootings and land-acquisition snags followed, driving security and other costs up, according to Corps officials and records. The project's estimated completion cost rose to $200 million, the corps said.
AMEC officials declined to comment. Bob Fletcher, Fluor's director of water programs, disputed the corps' figures but would not elaborate on the project's cost.
Iraqi contractors, not saddled by steep security costs, say they can do the work for less. The Ministry of Municipalities and Public Works is using Iraqi funds to build two similarly sized treatment plants in Karbala and Kut, says the ministry's Misconi. Combined cost of both projects: $185 million.
"We keep saying, 'Give us the money and we could do it better, cheaper,'" Misconi says. "Estimated cost of security on the Nasiriyah project is $54 million. We could build a whole new plant with this amount of money."
Salty water
As funds run dry, some projects are being handed over to Iraqis. In Najaf, for example, Army Corps officials bought parts to upgrade the city's electrical distribution system, including transformers, lines and wires, then handed them to local construction officials for them to do the work, saving millions on labor, security and administrative costs, McCallister says.
In the next few years, Najaf will benefit from 30 projects costing $100 million in U.S. taxpayer money, including new hospitals, clinics and police stations, McCallister says. But bigger projects, such as water treatment plants and electrical grids, are too expensive to launch, he says.
"Will (the projects) make a difference? Yes," McCallister says. "Will it make a major, major difference? No. We could continue putting three times that much money into that city."
The refurbished hospitals and new clinics in town are nice, says Abdul Hussein Ali, 52, a retired hospital worker living in Najaf with six children. But what would bring real joy, he says, is water that doesn't pour into his sink cloudy and salty and needing chemicals to purify.
"The water here is as salty as the desert," he says.
"Since the start of the war to today, you cannot say there has been remarkable change," Ali says. "The situation is improving, but very, very slowly."
Contributing: Richard Benedetto in Washington