Pace of Iraq Reconstruction Defended

[maddezmom]

BAGHDAD - A top U.S. aid official acknowledged Monday that Iraqis have reasons to be impatient with the pace of reconstruction since the U.S.-led war to oust Saddam Hussein (news - web sites), but said $4.3 billion had been earmarked for projects and promised improvement despite the insurgency.

~snip~

But Natsios, fielding pointed questions from Arabic-speaking journalists about reconstruction, defended more visible U.S. work, which some Iraqis say is taking far too long. He said it takes months to build power plants, whose generators need to be built from scratch.


He spoke in the middle of a power outage that cut electricity to a large swath of the country. Baghdad went dark, though power in the Green Zone is supplied by generators and was not cut.



more: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=540&ncid=736&e=1&u=/ap/20041213/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_aid

[LynnTheDem]

1. Saddam Hussein had full electricity restored within 3 mths of 1991 war.

How come he could and we can't, the world's "greatest superpower"?

Interesting...

[byronm]

3. Because we can't energize

the base when we don't put them to work.

Iraq is about US money, not iraqi's having sovereignty..

[maddezmom]

4. and yet they are touting the 35,000 that have been put to work

not mentioning the 400,000 put out of work when they dismantled the security forces.

[KingChicken]

2. This could take 100 years and they would still defend it...

They defend it like this is the first time reconstruction has happened, if you benchmark the U.S. efforts against other wartime reconstruction tasks we would fall to the bottom.

20 months and the electricity & energy situation has only become worse...