US Blunders in Reconstructing Iraq are Staggering (Phil. Inquirer columnist)

[JPZenger]

http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/news/columnists/15873213.htm

The following is an excerpt from Phila. Inquirer columnist Trudy Rubin, who specializes in foreign affairs.

"...To understand what these Pentagon civilians wrought, read Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City about the Bush team's decision to send "the loyal and the willing instead of the best and the brightest" to rebuild Iraq. Chandrasekaran, former Baghdad bureau chief of the Washington Post, describes how Republican connections were the ticket to a job in Baghdad's Green Zone ...... James K. Haveman Jr., a 60-year-old Republican social worker and Christian antiabortion activist, who was picked to head the Health Ministry over a physician with degrees in public health and experience in third-world disaster relief. Haveman ... pushed for more maternity hospitals instead of refurbishing Baghdad's ill-equipped emergency rooms. He pressed for an anti-smoking campaign - and tried to limit the number of drugs distributed to hospitals, ensuring that essential medicines stayed out of stock...

To get the full flavor of the mismanagement of the postwar, however, you need to go to http://www.sigir.mil, and read the reports of the special inspector general in Iraq (SIGIR), Stuart W. Bowen Jr. ... Bowen's reports tell of huge cost overruns by American contractors - notably the Halliburton subsidiary known as KBR ... Bowen also reports that a huge number of projects awarded to large U.S. firms remain unfinished. A children's hospital project in Basra, backed by Laura Bush, was supposed to be completed by Bechtel in 2005, but will cost up to $169 million and may never be finished. Thirteen of 14 projects undertaken by the Parsons Corp. engineering firm were found shoddy. A $75 million Parsons project for the largest police academy in Iraq was so bungled it may have to be demolished.

..."We're leaving behind a trail of failure," Cruz says. "The power and oil situation isn't better than when we came."... The biggest lesson is that we should have avoided handing massive projects to big U.S. firms and focused instead on helping Iraqis to get their own systems up and running. "Instead," she says, "a few individuals in the CPA said, 'Let's go for the big solutions' and decided to build huge generators which run on natural gas in a country which doesn't have natural gas."