by hilzoy
From the NYT:
"Iraq’s national government is refusing to take possession of thousands of American-financed reconstruction projects, forcing the United States either to hand them over to local Iraqis, who often lack the proper training and resources to keep the projects running, or commit new money to an effort that has already consumed billions of taxpayer dollars."
More below the fold.
The NYT story, continued:
"The conclusions, detailed in a report released Friday by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, a federal oversight agency, include the finding that of 2,797 completed projects costing $5.8 billion, Iraq’s national government had, by the spring of this year, accepted only 435 projects valued at $501 million. Few transfers to Iraqi national government control have taken place since the current Iraqi government, which is frequently criticized for inaction on matters relating to the American intervention, took office in 2006.The United States often promotes the number of rebuilding projects, like power plants and hospitals, that have been completed in Iraq, citing them as signs of progress in a nation otherwise fraught with violence and political stalemate. But closer examination by the inspector general’s office, headed by Stuart W. Bowen Jr., has found that a number of individual projects are crumbling, abandoned or otherwise inoperative only months after the United States declared that they had been successfully completed. The United States always intended to hand over projects to the Iraqi government when they were completed.
Although Mr. Bowen’s latest report is primarily a financial overview, he said in an interview that it raised serious questions on whether the problems his inspectors had found were much more widespread in the reconstruction program. (...)
In fact, in the first two quarters of 2007, Mr. Bowen said, his inspectors found significant problems in all but 2 of the 12 projects they examined after the United States declared those projects completed.
In one of the most recent cases, a $90 million project to overhaul two giant turbines at the Dora power plant in Baghdad failed after completion because employees at the plant did not know how to operate the turbines properly and the wrong fuel was used. The additional power is critically needed in Baghdad, where residents often have only a few hours of electricity a day.
Because the Iraqi government will not formally accept projects like the refurbished turbines, the United States is “finding someone at the local level to handle the project, handing them the keys and saying, ‘Operate and maintain it,’ ” another official in the inspector general’s office said.
If the pace of the American rebuilding program is a guide, those problems could quickly accelerate: So far, the United States has declared that $5.8 billion in American taxpayer-financed projects have been completed, but most of the rest of the projects within a $21 billion rebuilding program that Mr. Bowen examined in the report are expected to be finished by the end of this year. Some of that money is also being used to train and equip Iraqi security forces rather than finance construction projects."
About that electricity plant for Baghdad:
"Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week that Baghdad residents could count on only "an hour or two a day" of electricity. That's down from an average of five to six hours a day earlier this year."
An hour or two a day. In the summer. When it's 120 degrees. Goody.
Our response? Stop reporting the figures for electricity availability in Baghdad.
While I'm on the subject of Iraq, there's a very good summary of the current political situation here. It begins:
"Iraq is in the throes of its worst political crisis since the fall of Saddam Hussein with the new democratic system, based on national consensus among its ethnic and sectarian groups, appearing dangerously close to collapsing, say several politicians and analysts.This has brought paralysis to governmental institutions and has left parliament unable to make headway on 18 benchmarks Washington is using to measure progress in Iraq, including legislation on oil revenue sharing and reforming security forces. (...)
At the moment, Iraqi politicians are simply trying to keep the government from disintegrating. On Friday, top Iraqi officials were set to convene in the Kurdish north for a crisis summit, in the hopes that talks held outside of Baghdad's politically poisonous atmosphere may bring some resolution to the current political standstill. President Jalal Talabani and his two deputies, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the president of the semiautonomous Kurdish region, Massoud Barzani, were set to meet at the Salaheddin summer resort at the end of a difficult week."
I keep wondering: how is it possible that we screwed things up this badly? Wouldn't you think that sheer dumb luck would have made something turn out right, despite our worst efforts?
From yet another gloomy NYT story about ice factories:
Sometimes, I just want to cry.
Posted by: hilzoy | July 28, 2007 at 01:16 AM
Hilzoy,
It is no secret that the Ba'ath party is very, very good at terrorizing people, and it makes sense that they would be as good at terrorizing engineers as they were democrats, Shi'ites, communists, etc. for several decades. Likewise, the Shi'ite militias are also pretty good at this terrorizing business. They're especially good at terrorizing Sunnis, who tend to have a disproportionate number of the country's electrical engineers. Al Qaeda is also good at terrorizing people of pretty much every stripe and thus, it is statistically likely that their victims will include engineers.
I really don't see how--aside from the creation of the power vacuum in Iraq to begin with--this one can be laid at the feet of the Bush Administration.
Posted by: Andrew R. | July 28, 2007 at 01:51 AM
It's an expression entropy. There are many more ways to go wrong than there are to go right. Our rulers actively despise competance, hate the very idea of government, and reward cronyism and corruption. This is a recipe for consistent, universal failure.
Posted by: Doctor Science | July 28, 2007 at 01:53 AM
I actually more thoroughly read the article and noticed that #$%!@ Jabir (who basically turned the Interior Ministry into an arm of the Islamic Republic of Iran) was behind a lot of the problems mentioned with Iraqi taking over of these projects. Which still isn't much of a Bush Administration issue, though.
Posted by: Andrew R. | July 28, 2007 at 02:08 AM
I read another very sad thing in Paul Brinkley's recent Economic Report (PDF) on Iraq. He says that one of the goals was to get old state-owned factories up and running again. They needed $200 million and got $50 million from the defense supplemental. They wanted to get the remaining $150 million from the Iraqi government, but couldn't, because "under CPA orders that are now Iraqi law, the Iraqi budget cannot be invested in state-owned factories".
So they tried to set up low-interest loans through state-owned banks. Here's how that went:
This in a country with 18% unemployment, and 38% "underemployment" (under 15 hours a week of work "and at humanitarian risk").
Posted by: dkilmer | July 28, 2007 at 02:13 AM
Andrew R:
I really don't see how--aside from the creation of the power vacuum in Iraq to begin with--this one can be laid at the feet of the Bush Administration.
Why would I need any more reason than just that to lay it at the feet of the Bush administration? What if they didn't just create a power vacuum, but then sent out an invitation to Al Qaeda, Shi'ite militias and so forth to fill it? Could I lay it at their feet then?
Posted by: Ara | July 28, 2007 at 02:39 AM
Andrew R.: "I really don't see how--aside from the creation of the power vacuum in Iraq to begin with--this one can be laid at the feet of the Bush Administration."
Even the Bush admin knows enough to realize nature won't tolerate a true vacuum. They made the vacuum without planning who would fill it. Then they made it worse by disbanding the army. Then they imported a bunch of incompetent cronies to run the reconstruction, squandered billions of dollars on harebrained or corrupt projects which Iraqi companies were not permitted to benefit from, allowed the security situation to disintegrate, and incensed the populace via Abu Ghraib and years of stupidly designed insurgency tactics. Having allowed Saddam's weapons dumps to be looted, mismanaged relations with the neighboring countries, and danced the headless chicken dance with the various factions in Iraq. Maybe the situation would have been bad under a very competent administration (my view), but it wouldn't have been jaw-droppingly awful.
Posted by: rilkefan | July 28, 2007 at 02:50 AM
I didn't mean to lay all of this at the feet of the Bush administration, as though no Iraqis had any responsibility whatsoever. That said, when you're spending tens of millions of dollars on a project, it does not seem to me unreasonable to spend a little extra, while the project is ongoing, figuring out what you're going to do with it afterwards, and if necessary training people, so that it doesn't end up as a multimillion dollar piece of crumbling statuary.
Posted by: hilzoy | July 28, 2007 at 09:24 AM
It would be nice if they believed in privitization. Instead it is golf-clib-ization. Dedication to single party rule. Unless you know someone or are owed something by those in power, you are ignored.
Everyone has a selling point. I think that's the key to peace period. It's just a matter of setting up incentives. Selling out to hedonism is far more peaceful than selling out to revenge. Basic Romeo and Juliet. Greater intertwining is the key.
Vietnam is now relatively peaceful towards us, despite all of the massacres and agent orange. Just ask the many half vietnamese families over here now.
I know one that had her citizenship approved by Kissinger himself. If we can't even live up to the standards of Kissinger, what have we become?
Posted by: bago | July 28, 2007 at 09:41 AM
Run a war as a GOP profit center and this is the most likely outcome.
Posted by: Tim | July 28, 2007 at 09:45 AM
"I really don't see how--aside from the creation of the power vacuum in Iraq to begin with--this one can be laid at the feet of the Bush Administration."
In addition the the responses above, there is one other factor.
Almost all the reconstruction projects utilized American contractors and ngineers. HAd to keep the money flowing back to us, you see.
Instead of using local talent, such as local engineers, which would have actually helped the Iraqi economy, all those billions of dollars eventually left Iraq (well, granted not all, but a lot.)
We had American engineers, American truck drivers, American painters, etc. If you think that this din't have anything to do with this situation, I humbly request you spend more time pondering it.
Add to that, of the 2 million Iraqis who have left the country, the majority of them are professionals, including doctors, teachers and engineers.
Posted by: john miller | July 28, 2007 at 10:09 AM
Instead of using local talent, such as local engineers, which would have actually helped the Iraqi economy, all those billions of dollars eventually left Iraq (well, granted not all, but a lot.)
If you'd used local engineering and contruction to build a project I can sort of guarantee they'd know how to run and maintain it afterwards.
Posted by: Tim | July 28, 2007 at 10:15 AM
Okay, the management of what reconstruction there was didn't leave much space for local talent. But the problems described in Hilzoy's post (especially the electricity) seem to spring more from the insurgency attempting to systematically degrade all services.
Posted by: Andrew R. | July 28, 2007 at 11:20 AM
No.
Not unless you're going to place laurels on their head for the success of the Kurds
What local talent? You said yourself, the majority of the professional class left Iraq -- those that weren't murdered by the death squads and suicide bombers that is.
Except for the Kurds, Iraq is broken. The only way to stabilize it now, is to soft partition it, as Biden rightly suggested months ago.
Posted by: Jay Jerome | July 28, 2007 at 11:36 AM
Andrew R: What you've described are challenges to be overcome by the occupation, not justification for its failure.
The Pottery Barn Rule is still in effect.
Posted by: Model 62 | July 28, 2007 at 11:42 AM
"What local talent?"
At the time of the invasion, there was plenty of it. The two million I referred to have left since we started the occupation.
And it is just a teensy weensy bit possible that if we had actually allowed the local talent at all levels to handle the reconstruction, like we did in Europe after WWII, there might have been less of an attraction to join the insurgencies.
Posted by: john miller | July 28, 2007 at 12:18 PM
John,
Since the insurgents of all stripes have a habit of taking those who work in any capacity with the U.S. and kill them in unpleasant and drawn out ways, I doubt that an added effort to employ locals would have resulted in much more than more dead local talent.
Which, Model 62, like the earlier stuff I've said, is not so much to excuse the Bush Administration as to note that the Ba'ath Al Douri et al were much, much cannier than they were originally given credit for.
Posted by: Andrew R. | July 28, 2007 at 01:25 PM
like we did in Europe after WWII, there might have been less of an attraction to join the insurgencies.
I think the world of American home improvement has much to offer the world of nation-building. We are all familiar with the Pottery Barn Rule and the influence it has had upon the United States' foreign policy.
john miller's comment reminds me of the slogan used by giant home improvement retailer Lowe's, intoned by Gene Hackman at the close of many of the company's television advertisements: "Let's Build Something Together."
The Home Depot's "You Can Do It. We can Help" is also instructive.
Imagine the good the United States might have wrought if just one of the President's advisers had thought to share this guidance with him in the early days of the occupation!
Unfortunately, it seems that instead of following the wisdom of the nation's most successful hardware retailers, the administration chose to follow the advice of the increasingly irrelevant True Value chain of stores. That firm's "Start Right. Start Here," in the context of home improvement, is at best muddied and oblique. The slogan might be appropriate for a chain of breakfast eateries or perhaps an auto parts retailer. For hardware, it's grossly inadequate.
However, the phrase does capture what went wrong with the Bush Occupation. The muddiness of the message mirrors the Bush Administration's muddy messages regarding goals and motivations prior to the invasion. With respect to the hard work of nation building and the state the occupation today, "Start Right. Start Here" speaks directly to the administration's incompetency. As any experienced DIYer will tell you, a successful home improvement project starts with a goal and a plan for achieving it, both decided upon long before one arrives at the hardware store to purchase materials. Starting right there in downtown Baghdad laid the foundation for the dismal end were currently facing.
Iraq may be too far gone for Lowe's or Home Depot Solutions (the True Value Plan has seen to that!). Now that the money has been spent and the goodwill squandered, what's required is a reevaluation of expectations. In other words, we're down to the Ikea Plan: "Affordable Solutions for Living."
Posted by: Model 62 | July 28, 2007 at 01:28 PM
Canny? What's so canny about running a goon squad? It's the oldest form of political organization out there.
But now goon sqauds are the overwhelming enemy that we just could not have anticipated and seem unable to overcome.
Posted by: Ara | July 28, 2007 at 02:30 PM
The canniest thing about the insurgents is that they figured out long ago that the American occupiers were even more sleazy and venal than the homegrown variety. To maximize American profits we went directly to imported forced labor and its like.
When everything goes bad even if random chance would seem to dictate otherwise, the obvious conclusion is that the only plan was to extract as much money as possible for the U.S., and actual operation was not even in the project objectives.
Posted by: Tim | July 28, 2007 at 03:10 PM
Goon squads don't take much thought, but targeting electricity, trash collection, etc. takes a bit more forethought than random terrorization.
Posted by: Andrew R. | July 28, 2007 at 03:21 PM
Andrew R: I doubt that an added effort to employ locals would have resulted in much more than more dead local talent.
You say that as if you think that the resistance to the US occupation began on day one, at full strength, and nothing that the Bush administration did could have changed that.
If the US occupation was to be seen as a benevolent force, it needed to provide benefits. Granted that there were other failures that led to the current civil war/resistance, but the plan to give US companies no-bid contracts with no requirement to employ Iraqis was undoubtedly one of the causes of failure.
The notion that the reconstruction money for Iraq should actually be spent in Iraq so as to directly benefit Iraqis may seem radical and dangerous to you, but it's actually a basic of NGOs working in developing countries. Of course, the Bush administration notoriously consulted no sources of expertise when "planning" how to occupy Iraq.
Posted by: Jesurgislac | July 28, 2007 at 04:23 PM
"The notion that the reconstruction money for Iraq should actually be spent in Iraq so as to directly benefit Iraqis may seem radical and dangerous to you, but it's actually a basic of NGOs working in developing countries."
I'm not a fan of bubble-headed Bush and his crew; but no matter what course the Bush-boobs took to reconstruct Iraq, the Iraqis would have screwed it up. Incorporate the Bathists, and let them continue to help run the bureaucracies? No way the formally oppressed Shiites would have allowed that to happen. Let Shiite Iraqi contractors rebuild complicated infrastructures like electrical generating plants and hospitals? If the US went that route even more money would have gone down the tubes (into foreign bank accounts) and all there would be to show for those billions would be excavation holes in the ground (with a lot of dead Sunnis in them).
Keep in mind that Iraq was a state-controlled system under Sadaam, and didn't operate under a market economy: that means there were few if any competent private organizations in Iraq to contract to re-build the country. Plus, they were ravaged by war (this one, and the last Gulf war), there wasn't any Iraqi central authority in place to trust with the kind of complicated projects that needed to be built, and as history has proved, Iraq is a corrupt nation, with a dog-eat-dog mentality, and a propensity for corrupt mismanagement.
There's obviously something dysfunctional in the Iraqi psyche (exempting the Kurds)-- why else do they keep blowing each other into little pieces? You want to blame it on years of repression under Sadaam, go ahead -- but Sadaam's dead now, and you'd think they'd get their heads out of their butts long enough to realize its not in their interests to keep murdering each other.
Posted by: Jay Jerome | July 28, 2007 at 05:26 PM
Jesu,
Fist of all, you might want to try again at the mind reading. More importantly, though, the Ba'ath insurgency was pretty much killing people working with the U.S. from the get-go. I'm really not seeing at how more civil/electrical engineers doesn't just give the insurgency more targets. It's not as though an organization that had spent years terrorizing a populace into submission was just going to up and say, "Oh, well, since they're giving our electrical engineers jobs, we should just call this whole insurgency business off."
Jay,
It's not an issue of a "they" who keep murdering each other. Rather, what you have is something like this...
Sadr: "Once the Americans are gone, I can so take down Hakim."
Hakim: "The American ground forces may leave, but I'll still be able to call in air strikes."
al Douri et al: "Once the Americans are gone, we'll take care of these Iranian losers and restore the Ba'ath party to it's proper place."
al Masri: "Once the Americans are gone, we'll defeat the Ba'ath infidels and Shi'ite heretics."
Now, all four may be wrong, but they've all got fairly rational reasons for believing what I've just mentioned. As such, of course they're not going to quit killing--right now they're trying to jockey for the best position once the serious slaughter starts.
Posted by: Andrew R. | July 28, 2007 at 10:04 PM
I like the direction Andrew R is going with this. The occupation, no matter how competently managed, was destined to fail. The local political scene, among other things, was just too complex. The Iraq project didn't collapse because of poor management. It failed because the invasion was a flawed idea from inception.
The incompetency dodge has always been a dodge, a way for war proponents to convince themselves they were right all along. Sometimes I forget that. Thanks, Andrew R, for the reminder!
Posted by: Model 62 | July 28, 2007 at 10:35 PM
I like the direction Andrew R is going with this. The occupation, no matter how competently managed, was destined to fail. The local political scene, among other things, was just too complex. The Iraq project didn't collapse because of poor management. It failed because the invasion was a flawed idea from inception.
The incompetency dodge has always been a dodge, a way for war proponents to convince themselves they were right all along. Sometimes I forget that. Thanks, Andrew R, for the reminder!
Posted by: Model 62 | July 28, 2007 at 10:35 PM
I like the direction Andrew R is going with this. The occupation, no matter how competently managed, was destined to fail. The local political scene, among other things, was just too complex. The Iraq project didn't collapse because of poor management. It failed because the invasion was a flawed idea from inception.
The incompetency dodge has always been a dodge, a way for war proponents to convince themselves they were right all along. Sometimes I forget that. Thanks, Andrew R, for the reminder!
Posted by: Model 62 | July 28, 2007 at 10:36 PM
Oops. Sorry.
I think I've reached my quota for the evening.
Posted by: Model 62 | July 28, 2007 at 10:37 PM
Model 62,
Not very good at reading for comprehension, are you?
Posted by: Andrew R. | July 28, 2007 at 11:14 PM
Okay, I'm going to climb down and apologize in advance for the remark in my last comment.
My point throughout this entire thread is not that the CPA being a goat-f**k isn't Bush & Co's fault. My point is not that everything the CPA did was just peachy. My point is merely that the problem of lack of services was a military one. You can have all of the power plants staffed by local talent that you want and it's still not going to do any good if there's an active insurgency that's blowing up the power lines just as fast as you can fix them.
So, like I said in my very first comment here, the fault of the Bush administration in this lies in that Saddam Hussein and his inner circle had been planning an insurgency for twelve years while the Pentagon and White House made no provision for the fact that Hussein just might have been planning for a U.S. invasion since 1991.
Posted by: Andrew R. | July 29, 2007 at 12:48 AM
Model 62's right.
Posted by: Jesurgislac | July 29, 2007 at 05:20 AM
you'd think they'd get their heads out of their butts long enough to realize its not in their interests to keep murdering each other
Yeah, but it's basically an 'I'll take my head out of my butt once the guy who wants to kill me takes his head out of his butt' situation. There's a name for the faction that first unlaterally disarms: Organ Donors.
Posted by: CharleyCarp | July 29, 2007 at 07:47 AM
It doesn't matter whether you say it was a concept doomed from the start or a botched execution of it; you still play into the lie. The real objective of this mission is to occupy Iraq forever, and it always was. Each "incompetent" thing that sows more chaos and breaks Iraq's every structural component to make it more dependent on U.S. presence is a success according to plan.
Why would Dick Cheney and his band of war profiteers want Iraqis to be able to run their own power plants, or even to appear capable of doing anything by themselves? "Oh shucks, I guess we'll have to give even more taxpayer billions to private contractors to fix this. Oops!"
Posted by: Cerulean | July 29, 2007 at 08:20 AM
Andrew R., the size of the insurgency wasn't a fixed, predetermined number. Do you really think that putting hundreds of thousands of people, many of them trained and armed, out of work by de-Baathification and the dissolution of the army had no effect on the number of insurgents?
Posted by: KCinDC | July 29, 2007 at 09:41 AM
Jay Jerome wrote: I'm not a fan of bubble-headed Bush and his crew; but no matter what course the Bush-boobs took to reconstruct Iraq, the Iraqis would have screwed it up.
So, Jay, what's your point?
By now, the situation has clarified to the point there are only a few stands to take.
1. Iraq is going well enough for US interests that we must resist the naysayers and make sure someone is elected in 2008 who will continue our successes rather than cravenly withdraw.
2A. The occupation is going badly and needs some sort of drastic change, and it's the GOP's fault. Oppose the GOP.
2B. The occupation is going badly and needs some sort of drastic change, but it doesn't matter whose fault it is. Vote Republican!
My stand here is 2A. If things had gone well the GOP would be taking 200% of the credit for it, wouldn't they? So they deserve 100% of the blame. Somebody ought to be photoshopping photos of Giuliani or whoever in a flight suit with a big MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! sign behind him. Publicise the GOP guys who opposed a pay increase for the troops. Publicise the GOP guys who opposed sufficient training for the troops heading to iraq. Etc. Every GOP incumbent who doesn't quickly break GOP ranks deserves to have a great bit IRAQ permanently tattood on his forehead in the reddest of reds and the blackest of blacks.
What's your stand?
Posted by: J Thomas | July 29, 2007 at 10:21 AM
Like a hand grenade, I'll toss this http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/28/AR2007072801407.html?hpid=topnews>story into the mix.
Posted by: CharleyCarp | July 29, 2007 at 10:50 AM
It's only for a moment, but I'd urge everyone to savor its sweetness (okay, maybe bittersweetness):
Iraq wins Asian Cup! They beat heavily favored Saudi Arabia 1-0 with a nifty header in OT by the captain.
It's not enough to cure the divisions, but it is bringing out national pride and joy for a day. Pointers to nice coverage here.
Posted by: Nell | July 29, 2007 at 01:27 PM
it is bringing out national pride and joy for a day
Indeed it is. Not to mention the occasional burst of celebratory gunfire. It was a great game, and there are a lot of happy Iraqis today.
Posted by: G'Kar | July 29, 2007 at 01:36 PM