The NSC report assessed the Iraqi government’s success – or otherwise – in reaching 18 ‘benchmarks’ laid down this spring by Congress as conditions for continued appropriations for the war, which, according to the Congressional Research Service, now costs – the so-called ‘burn rate’ – $10 billion a month, up $2 billion a month from the end of last year. ‘Our strategy,’ Bush said, ‘is built on a premise that progress on security will pave the way for political progress . . . And so the strategy was, move in more troops to cause the violence to abate.’ But the violence hasn’t abated, and the other ‘successes’ Bush has been pointing to are equally illusory. Bush said in July that the Iraqi government had provided the three brigades it ‘promised for operations in and around Baghdad’ during the surge. He didn’t say, as the NSC admitted in its report, that these brigades, which were supposed to be new, were in fact cobbled together from other units. Nor did he mention the sectarianism that even the NSC accepts is crippling Iraqi forces. As the NSC puts it, ‘there remains a negative political influence at a variety of levels with evidence of sectarian behaviour.’ The Iraqi police are not ‘providing even-handed enforcement of the law . . . Senior officials responsible for abuse continue to hold positions of responsibility.’ And sectarian militias continue to hold sway in many neighbourhoods. The NSC concluded that there was no point in even discussing a general amnesty or general disarmament and, amazingly, admitted that al-Qaida ‘may not account for most of the violence in Iraq’.
The much trumpeted economic ‘reconstruction’ of Iraq is no more of a success. The most recent quarterly report to Congress of the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (Sigir), released in late July, found that almost all the American money set aside to rebuild Iraq – more than $21 billion appropriated by Congress four years ago – has been spent. So too has some $20 billion of the Iraqis’ own money handed out by Paul Bremer, Bush’s proconsul in Baghdad during the first year of the occupation. Much of the money was used to pay for American goods and services and never reached Iraq. Much of the rest disappeared and has never been properly accounted for.<*> Despite the vast amount of money spent, Sigir found that Baghdad still only receives ‘an average of 8.1 hours of power per day’ and that fewer than one in three homes and businesses in the city are connected to the water mains. In Basra, which is nominally policed by the British, ‘potable water must still be purchased’ and ‘in Kirkuk and Samarra streets and alleyways are used for open drainage. In Fallujah raw sewage spills out onto the streets.’ Fewer than half of the homes in Najaf and about half of those in Basra are connected to municipal sewage pipes. Of the 142 primary health centres that were to be the centrepiece of the American ‘reconstruction’ of Iraq’s medical service, Sigir reports that ‘only eight are currently open.’ Sigir inspectors examined the new pipeline carrying oil under the Tigris in northern Iraq, and found evidence that the pipe is smaller than the one ordered, despite the $200 million paid to US firms to repair it. Iraq’s power stations are running below half capacity, largely because crude and heavy fuel oil is being used in the new gas turbine generators, which, as the Government Accountability Office (GAO) told Congress, clogs them up and ruins them. In June, Sigir discovered, two of the six steam turbines at Baghdad’s Doura power station were out of action: one because of poor maintenance; the other because it had been cannibalised for spare parts.
...
The money Congress approved last year for ‘Iraqi relief and reconstruction’ is divided in two. Of the $1.5 billion in the Economic Support Fund, nearly $1 billion has been funnelled through the State Department to the Corps of Engineers. Most of it has gone to what are called Provincial Reconstruction Teams. Ten of these ‘civilian-military’ teams, Sigir reports, are now ‘embedded within brigade combat teams’, with a ‘primary mission of supporting counterinsurgency operations’. As Sigir explains, ‘though referred to under the umbrella term, reconstruction, the PRT mission encompasses not only capacity development (of Iraqi local government) but also counterinsurgency and stability operations.’ The other new fund, some $700 million for this year alone, is for what is called the Commanders Emergency Response Program (CERP), which American officers are supposed to use to pay for local projects in their ‘battle space’. The money, as a report by the Congressional Research Service explains, is ‘available to pacify the local population where PRTs reside’. The US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual calls this ‘Money as a Weapons System’.<†> Yet few people, aside from David Petraeus, who is one of the authors of the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, know exactly where the money goes. Petraeus gets a monthly classified report on the programme’s ‘effects’. Congress has not asked for detailed accounts, and Sigir found that ‘there is no mechanism in place to specifically measure the outputs and outcomes of CERP-funded projects.’
What the Provincial Reconstruction Teams actually do is also something of a mystery. The White House issued a fact sheet in July describing some of their achievements: ‘a new business information centre’, ‘renovation of a market complex’, an ‘economic development office’ and identifying ‘eight “model communities” through which the PRTs will encourage local participation in government and increased security by establishing training and assistance programmes’. Yet Sigir’s July report states that ‘there is no linkage between the monthly reports generated by the PRTs and what the PRTs are expected to accomplish.’ It also finds that the US Embassy in Baghdad is ‘still not in a position to assess what the PRTs are individually or collectively accomplishing’. Both programmes are functionally very similar to the slush funds used to buy local support during the Vietnam War.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n17/harr04_.htmlMuch more in the article - how the Iraqi army is in chaos, the British have abandoned any attempt at getting the rule of law in Basra, which the International Crisis Group thinks will soon be a 'small failed state'.
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