This video is called Iraq cholera spreading.
From the New York Times in the USA:
Report Spotlights Iraq Rebuilding BlundersSome “sovereign Iraqi government”, with US guns pointed at their heads in the Baghdad green zone … and spied upon by the Bush administration.By JAMES GLANZ and T. CHRISTIAN MILLER
Published: December 13, 2008
BAGHDAD — An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.
The history, the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form here and in Washington among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials. It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag — particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army — the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures.
In one passage, for example, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is quoted as saying that in the months after the 2003 invasion, the Defense Department “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces — the number would jump 20,000 a week! ‘We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.’ ”
Mr. Powell’s assertion that the Pentagon inflated the number of competent Iraqi security forces is backed up by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former commander of ground troops in Iraq, and L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator until an Iraqi government took over in June 2004.
Among the overarching conclusions of the history is that five years after embarking on its largest foreign reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan in Europe after World War II, the United States government has in place neither the policies and technical capacity nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake such a program on anything approaching this scale.
The bitterest message of all for the reconstruction program may be the way the history ends. The hard figures on basic services and industrial production compiled for the report reveal that for all the money spent and promises made, the rebuilding effort never did much more than restore what was destroyed during the invasion and the convulsive looting that followed.
By mid-2008, the history says, $117 billion had been spent on the reconstruction of Iraq, including some $50 billion in United States taxpayer money.
The history contains a catalog of revelations that show the chaotic and often poisonous atmosphere prevailing in the reconstruction effort. …
The United States could soon have reason to consult this cautionary tale of deception, waste and poor planning, as troop levels and reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan are likely to be stepped up under the new administration. …
Titled “Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience,” the new history was compiled by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, led by Stuart W. Bowen Jr., a Republican lawyer who regularly travels to Iraq and has a staff of engineers and auditors based here. Copies of several drafts of the history were provided to reporters at The New York Times and ProPublica by two people outside the inspector general’s office who have read the draft, but are not authorized to comment publicly. …
On the eve of the invasion, as it began to dawn on a few officials that the price for rebuilding Iraq would be vastly greater than they had been told, the degree of miscalculation was illustrated in an encounter between Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, and Jay Garner, a retired lieutenant general who had hastily been named the chief of what would be a short-lived civilian authority called the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance.
The history records how Mr. Garner presented Mr. Rumsfeld with several rebuilding plans, including one that would include projects across Iraq.
“What do you think that’ll cost?” Mr. Rumsfeld asked of the more expansive plan.
“I think it’s going to cost billions of dollars,” Mr. Garner said.
“My friend,” Mr. Rumsfeld replied, “if you think we’re going to spend a billion dollars of our money over there, you are sadly mistaken.”
In a way he never anticipated, Mr. Rumsfeld turned out to be correct: before that year was out, the United States had appropriated more than $20 billion for the reconstruction, which would indeed involve projects across the entire country. …
The secondary effects of the invasion and its aftermath were among the most important factors that radically changed the outlook. Tables in the history show that measures of things like the national production of electricity and oil, public access to potable water, mobile and landline telephone service and the presence of Iraqi security forces all plummeted by at least 70 percent, and in some cases all the way to zero, in the weeks after the invasion. …
By the time a sovereign Iraqi government took over from the Americans in June 2004, none of those services — with a single exception, mobile phones — had returned to prewar levels.
As I wrote before: NO schools, hospitals, etc. were built in Iraq since Bush’s March 2003 invasion.
Bush’s Iraq war was officially about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
When that turned out to be lies, the Bush administration flip-flopped to talk about ‘rebuilding’ Iraq, about building houses, schools, hospitals.
Only talk, as the only things built in Iraq, as the US goverment says, are prisons (apparently, dictator Saddam Hussein had not built enough of those).
Oh yes, and the gigantic new US colonial governor’s building embassy in Baghdad (see also here; and here; including photos; and here).
And yes, I got to admit, walls to keep people apart who had been living together for centuries, but were set against each other in Bush’s and Blair’s ‘divide and rule strategy‘.
Iraq reconstruction ‘faces uncertainty’
Pauline Jelinek
January 30, 2009 - 5:39PM
The often chaotic and wasteful $US125 billion ($A191.75 billion) Iraq rebuilding effort will face new trouble and uncertainty this year despite the decline in violence there, a US military audit report says.
A separate report on Afghanistan said there is no coherent strategy for that country’s $US32 billion ($A49.09 billion) reconstruction campaign.
In Iraq, the nation’s shifting power base and finances will force fundamental changes in the now nearly six-year-old rebuilding effort, as will questions about security when the United States draws combat forces out of Iraqi cities in the northern summer, said the report released on Friday by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart Bowen.
A new agreement governing the American presence in Iraq means US contractors will no longer have immunity from Iraqi laws. That could entice some of them to quit the country when the government finishes writing new rules on contractor licensing, taxes, registration of their firearms and so on, the report said.
Also, the big drop in global oil prices over the past six months has forced Iraqis to trim their budget plans and could have “severe consequences for Iraq reconstruction, fundamentally altering government of Iraq plans to fund large-scale capital improvement projects” themselves, the report said.
The reconstruction effort in Iraq totals $US125 billion ($A191.75 billion), including US funding of $US51 billion ($A78.23 billion); Iraqi funding of about $US58 billion ($A88.97 billion) and international funding of $US17 billion ($A26.08 billion), not all of which has been spent.
For Afghanistan, the United States has appropriated but not fully spent $US32 billion ($A49.09 billion) for humanitarian aid and reconstruction while other nations have contributed $US25.3 billion ($A38.81 billion), said a separate report released late on Thursday by the office of Arnold Fields, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
Congress recently approved creation of the new SIGAR audit office, which mirrors the one set up to oversee Iraq reconstruction spending. That office has routinely found glaring examples of fraud and waste in a wide range of projects to provide police stations, schools, improve basic services such as electricity and water and programs to teach Iraqis skills needed for better governance.
Fields has been just getting his work underway in recent months.
“I fear there are major weaknesses in strategy,” he said in only his second quarterly report.
Although he said his agency has not yet done an in-depth review, he found in recent trips to Afghanistan “a broad consensus … that reconstruction efforts are fragmented and that existing strategies lack coherence”.
He said government officials there want a greater say in the building plan.
Retired Marine Major General Fields said he has finished setting up a permanent office in Kabul and has 30 employees at three Afghan locations.
2009 AP
Comment by Administrator — January 30, 2009 @ 1:57 pm
Feb 2, 5:04 AM EST
Commission gets grim report on wartime spending
By RICHARD LARDNER
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) — A new commission examining waste and corruption in wartime contracts is getting a grim report from government watchdogs who say poor planning, weak oversight and greed combined to soak U.S. taxpayers and undermine American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, says U.S. taxpayers have paid nearly $51 billion for a wide array of projects in Iraq - from training the Iraqi army and police to rebuilding the country’s oil, electric, justice, health and transportation sectors.
Some of these projects succeeded, Bowen informed the Wartime Contracting Commission at its first public hearing, according to his written testimony, but many did not. Violence in Iraq along with constant friction between U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad were also major factors that undercut progress.
The U.S. government “was neither prepared for nor able to respond quickly to the ever-changing demands” of stabilizing Iraq and then rebuilding it, Bowen said in his written testimony. “For the last six years we have been on a steep learning curve.”
A lengthy study by Bowen’s office, “Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience,” reviews the problems in an effort the Bush administration initially thought would cost $2.4 billion.
Overall, the Pentagon, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development have paid contractors more than $100 billion since 2003 for goods and services to support war operations and rebuilding projects in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Congress created the bipartisan panel a year ago over the objections of the Bush White House, which complained the Justice Department might be forced to disclose sensitive information about investigations.
There are 154 open criminal investigations into allegations of bribery, conflicts of interest, defective products, bid rigging and theft stemming from the wars, Thomas Gimble, the Pentagon’s principal deputy inspector general, said in his testimony.
Gimble noted that contracting scandals have gone on since the late 1700s when vendors swindled George Washington’s army.
“Today, instead of empty barrels of meat, contractors produced inadequate or unusable facilities that required extensive rework,” Gimble says. “Like the Continental Forces who encountered fraud, the (Defense Department) also encounters fraud.”
Gimble’s office found that a small number of inexperienced civilian or military personnel “were assigned far-reaching responsibilities for an unreasonably large number of contracts.”
He cites an account tapped frequently by U.S. military commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan to build schools, roads and hospitals. More than $3 billion was spent on these projects, which were not always properly managed.
“In some instances, there appeared to be scant, if any, oversight of the manner in which funds were expended,” Gimble says. “Complicating matters further is the fact that payment of bribes and gratuities to government officials is a common business practice in some Southwest Asia nations.”
In an advance copy of the “Hard Lessons” report, Bowen says his office found fraud to be less of a problem than persistent inefficiencies and hefty contractor fees that “all contributed to a significant waste of taxpayer dollars.”
Styled after the Truman Committee, which examined World War II spending six decades ago, the eight-member panel has broad authority to examine military support contracts, reconstruction projects and private security companies.
The leaders are Mike Thibault, a former deputy director at the Defense Contract Audit Agency, and Grant Green, a former official at both the State and Defense departments.
The panel has until August 2010 to produce a final report. Along the way, it can refer to the Justice Department any violations of the law it finds.
The inspectors general at the State Department and USAID were also testifying at Monday’s hearing.
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On the Net:
Commission on Wartime Contracting: http://www.wartimecontracting.gov
Comment by Administrator — February 2, 2009 @ 12:50 pm
This is really interesting, thanks for posting it!
Comment by Affiliate Promotion — March 27, 2009 @ 12:18 am