U.S. winding down Iraq reconstruction

[Judi Lynn]

Jan. 1, 2006, 11:52PM
U.S. winding down Iraq reconstruction
Half of the $18 billion is used for unexpected security costs


By ELLEN KNICKMEYER
Washington Post

BAGHDAD, IRAQ - The Bush administration does not intend to seek any new money for Iraq reconstruction in the budget request going before Congress in February, officials say. The decision signals the winding down of an $18.4 billion U.S. rebuilding effort in which roughly half of the money was eaten away by the insurgency, a buildup of Iraq's criminal justice system and the trial of Saddam Hussein.

About 20 percent of the reconstruction package remains unallocated. When the last of the money is spent, U.S. officials in Baghdad have made clear, other foreign donors and the fledgling Iraqi government will have to take up what authorities say is tens of billions of dollars of work yet to be done merely to bring reliable electricity, water and other services to Iraq's 26 million people.

"The U.S. never intended to completely rebuild Iraq," Brig. Gen. William McCoy, the Army Corps of Engineers commander overseeing the work, told reporters in a recent news conference. In an interview this past week, McCoy said: "This was just supposed to be a jump-start."

Since the reconstruction effort began in 2003, midcourse changes by U.S. officials have shifted at least $2.5 billion from the rebuilding of Iraq's decrepit electrical, education, water, sewage, sanitation and oil networks to build new security forces for Iraq and to construct a nationwide system of medium- and maximum-security prisons and detention centers that meet international standards, according to reconstruction officials and documents. Many of the changes were forced by an insurgency fiercer than the United States had expected when its troops entered Iraq.
(snip/...)

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/world/3559530.html
(Free registration required)

[ixion]

1. *sigh*

so we've gone in and destroyed their country, spent some cash to train some death squads and build some prisons, and now we'll leave them like we left Afghanistan -- in ruins.

The schmucks at BushCo really can't do anything right, except fail.

[cornermouse]

2. Reconstruction? What reconstruction?

Must be nice living in a bubble.

[saigon68]

23. Half of whats left going to BRIBES, GRAFT AND CORRUPTION

Seen it before in Saigon. Mercedes cars whisking local war profiteers to the air port to catch Air France flights to Monaco, the Riviera, Zurich etc.

[cornermouse]

24. Speaking of Graft and corruption.

Going down the road, I saw an army license plate a few weeks ago on a Lincoln Navigator. Of course, I guess a Navigator is cheaper than a Humvee.

[saigon68]

26. Probably some soon to be retired officer

who has connections to a defense "Contractor"

[realFedUp]

33. I think some Internet cafes were built....

before it got dangerous to be out in the open...

[zann725]

38. Exactly. "They never intended..."

n/t

[rawstory]

3. Post Monday: Bush won't seek additional Iraq reconstruction funds

http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Bush_wont_seek_additional_funds_for_0101.html

RAW STORY

The Bush administration does not intend to seek any new funds for Iraq reconstruction in the budget request going before Congress in February, officials tell the WASHINGTON POST in Monday's editions, RAW STORY has learned... Excerpts...

#

The decision signals the winding down of an $18.4 billion U.S. rebuilding effort in which roughly half of the money was eaten away by the insurgency, a buildup of Iraq's criminal justice system and the investigation and trial of Saddam Hussein.Just under 20 percent of the reconstruction package remains unallocated.

When the last of the $18.4 billion is spent, U.S. officials in Baghdad have made clear, other foreign donors and the fledgling Iraqi government will have to take up what authorities say is tens of billions of dollars of work yet to be done merely to bring reliable electricity, water and other services to Iraq's 26 million people.

http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Bush_wont_seek_additional_funds_for_0101.html

[Cocoa]

4. so we can spend the money on New Orleans

or else on tax cuts.

[Donkeykick]

6. Probably...

be the tax cuts!:eyes:

[jimshoes]

5. I think the pricks that started this

should have to spend their own personal fortunes on fixing the damage they've caused in Iraq. They could use a taste of what it is to be poor in America.

[stepnw1f]

7. Now That Would Be Justice

They should all be sued.

[az chela]

14. I agree 1000 per cent

[ninkasi]

31. Sounds right to me...

It would be justice, because much of their fortune has been made by damaging others. Let the ones who wanted this immoral war, who lied to get their war, and let others be killed and maimed in their war, be the ones to pay for it.

[LynnTheDem]

8. We destroy....and let others pay. And they wonder why we're so hated.

It ain't our (#14 in the world rankings) "freedoms".

[TankLV]

32. Kinda puts a chink in the "we broke it we have to fix it" krap too many

have been spewing here lately making excuses why we can't get the fuck out IMMEDIATELY crowd like that asswip bidden, etc.

So we are no longer going to even TRY to say we're there to fix the country and restore it, huh?

THEN WHY THE FUCK ARE WE STILL THERE AND THESE WAR CRIMINALS REFUSING TO CONSIDER AN IMMEDIATE PULLOUT?

[LynnTheDem]

35. Exactly.

WHY THE FUCK ARE WE STILL THERE.

[hang a left]

9. That is because they spent it all...

America is broke.

[Barrett808]

10. "This was just supposed to be a jump-start."

Umm, right.

[DainBramaged]

11. Just think back, who runs the World Bank now?

And where will Iraq "borrow" money from to reconstruct? And who will Iraq hire then?

[saigon68]

27. This sorry Piece of Shit runs the World Bank

[antonialee839]

12. He's saving up for his war with Iran.

[madmark]

13. Are we finally done pissing our money away down that rat hole?

[cliss]

15. This is weird.....

Bush turning down funds. When has he ever done that?

[countmyvote4real]

16. Nevermind the 8-9 billion missing,..

* will not let anymore dollars disappear the way he disappears people. After all, dollars remain currency, but people (and especially dissident people) are only political capital because their votes don’t count. * is laughing all the way to the SCUOTUS and back again.

How much do we hate this BS? The V-word is long overdue. V is for verifiable votes. How many third party electronic voting systems can vouch for the same?

None.

Any future votes must be by absentee ballot. It does not provide a quicksilver defense for any corruption, but it does provide a paper trail.

[pinniped]

17. Nothing about the missing billions that POS-bummer and his cronies...

helped themselves to. Nothing about overbilling by presidunce POS's cronies either. What a F'n surprise.

--roughly half of the money was eaten away by the insurgency, a buildup of Iraq's criminal justice system and the trial of Saddam Hussein.--

Insurgency, we didn't know there would be no stinking insurgency.

For a so-called history buff, presidunce POS sure doesn't know much. Maybe this so-called history buff excels in the area of illicit drugs. He wanted some of Afghanistan's poppy plant products for himself.

[WePurrsevere]

21. Rumsfield admits 2+ TRILLION dollars is "missing".

There was a very interesting thread here on Dec 31st about it, I even posted in it, but with the massive archiving ofGD I can no longer get to it with "My Posts" link nor can I find it with Search (although that may be something I'm not doing right).

[Judi Lynn]

22. Here's that thread!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=364&topic_id=4682

I did a search on your DU'er name in the "author" field! It ran Saturday.

[WePurrsevere]

25. Thank you so much! :-)

n/t

[DoYouEverWonder]

18. Well at least we won't have to pretend

we are trying to rebuild Iraq anymore.

[Warren Stupidity]

19. Wow. Just wow.

So basically we destroyed their country supposedly looking for wmd that didn't exist, or because Saddam was the evilist man on the planet or some other bullshit, and now two years later, country in ruins we are saying 'not our problem'.

They got brand spanking new prison/torture centers to replace the ones that Saddam was using. Quite a deal. Too bad about the electricity and the water systems.

Note that while we are going to pay for rebuilding the nation we wrecked, we are going to keep our occupation forces there. So this 'pottery barn' bullshit works like this: you break it, you hang out in the store breaking more shit, and when the owner's of the store try to get you to leave, you kill them and continue breaking stuff.

[Earth_First]

20. Follow the money...

If it isn't to be spent in Iraq, I wonder how/where the funds WILL be reappropriated...? Iran?

[HuffleClaw]

28. reconstruction ?

there was NO reconstruction, other than wee bit of tokenism for the western media. what a joke.

"roughly half of the money was eaten away by the insurgency, a buildup of Iraq's criminal justice system and the trial of Saddam Hussein."

hmmm, i'm sure congress meant that money to be misused like that. suuuuure. and still there's no accountability. none.

[VegasWolf]

29. Bush is just pissed off because his "elections" resulted in an Iranian

styled theocracy in Iraq and Bush will probably lose "his" oil rights in Iraq.

:bounce:

[UCSBLiberalCat53]

30. Notice this line? Sounds familiar

But the insurgency changed everything.

[IndianaGreen]

34. We need the money for more important things such as...

the upcoming liberation of Iran and the pacification of Latin America.

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.'

It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

Harold Pinter – Nobel Lecture
Art, Truth & Politics

http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture-e.html

[Judi Lynn]

40. Sure glad to read Pinter's comments. It's good to stress the most

grotesque, fiendish, contemptible bloodthirsty events the U.S. engineered were done by Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bushes. Period.

From the Pinter article:

Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America's favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as 'low intensity conflict'. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued – or beaten to death – the same thing – and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer.

[Up2Late]

36. Correction:Earlier ver...gave an incorrect figure for Iraqi oil production

Correction to This Article
Earlier versions of this story gave an incorrect figure for Iraqi oil production. Oil production stands at roughly 2 million barrels a day, compared with 2.6 million before U.S. troops entered Iraq in March 2003, according to U.S. government statistics. This story has been updated to reflect that corrected information.

U.S. Has End in Sight on Iraq Rebuilding

Documents Show Much of the Funding Diverted to Security, Justice System and Hussein Inquiry

By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, January 2, 2006; Page A01

BAGHDAD -- The Bush administration does not intend to seek any new funds for Iraq reconstruction in the budget request going before Congress in February, officials say. The decision signals the winding down of an $18.4 billion U.S. rebuilding effort in which roughly half of the money was eaten away by the insurgency, a buildup of Iraq's criminal justice system and the investigation and trial of Saddam Hussein.

Just under 20 percent of the reconstruction package remains unallocated. When the last of the $18.4 billion is spent, U.S. officials in Baghdad have made clear, other foreign donors and the fledgling Iraqi government will have to take up what authorities say is tens of billions of dollars of work yet to be done merely to bring reliable electricity, water and other services to Iraq's 26 million people.

"The U.S. never intended to completely rebuild Iraq," Brig. Gen. William McCoy, the Army Corps of Engineers commander overseeing the work, told reporters at a recent news conference. In an interview this past week, McCoy said: "This was just supposed to be a jump-start."

Since the reconstruction effort began in 2003, midcourse changes by U.S. officials have shifted at least $2.5 billion from the rebuilding of Iraq's decrepit electrical, education, water, sewage, sanitation and oil networks to build new security forces for Iraq and to construct a nationwide system of medium- and maximum-security prisons and detention centers that meet international standards, according to reconstruction officials and documents. Many of the changes were forced by an insurgency more fierce than the United States had expected when its troops entered Iraq.

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/02/AR2006010200370.html?nav=hcmodule>
(more at link above)

[Vidar]

37. Bush's America can only destroy, not rebuild. Remember the Marshal Plan.

[Stockholm]

39. Bush pulls the plug on Iraq reconstruction

The Bush administration has scaled back its ambitions to rebuild Iraq from the devastation wrought by war and dictatorship and does not intend to seek new funds for reconstruction, it emerged yesterday.

In a decision that will be seen as a retreat from a promise by President George Bush to give Iraq the best infrastructure in the region, administration officials say they will not seek reconstruction funds when the budget request is presented to Congress next month, the Washington Post reported yesterday.

The $18.4bn (£10.6bn) allocation is scheduled to run out in June 2007. The move will be seen by critics as further evidence of the administration's failure to plan for the aftermath of the war.

A decision not to renew the reconstruction programme would leave Iraq with the burden of tens of billions of dollars in unfinished projects, and an oil industry and electrical grid that have yet to return to pre-war production levels.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1676911,00.html

[JawJaw]

41. 3..2...1....

"is the jump start over yet?"

[HuffleClaw]

42. the phrase 'misappropriation of government funds' comes to mind

congress approved that money for reconstruction, NOT for hiring mercenaries.