Iraq reconstruction

The Special Inspector calls 2008 the year of transfer and that both Iraq and the US are on the same page about phasing out US assistance for the kind of projects he monitors. He says the challenge of Iraq now is the capacity of the Iraqi government to spend its money effectively across the country. he describes two projects, one successful and one not, in Iraq. The successful project is a new system of ditches and fences to thwart attacks on oil systems, and says its return on investment is tenfold and the pipeline has incurred zero attacks this year and the four years before this year it was non-functional. But the state also sent $40 million dollars down the drain building a new prison in Diyala Province. The project has been abandoned. The Americans tried to turn the site over to the Iraqis, but Iraqis refused to take it because it was in such bad condition. The Inspector takes a couple lessons from his work, and one is that without quality control, reconstruction in Iraq will fail. He estimates up to 20% of the billions of US dollars spent in Iraq so far have been wasted. His other lesson is that building in a warzone is stupid, or more politely-put, unwise. The problem is that the ambitious American plan to build a new Iraq was never modified even after attention had to be put on counterinsurgency operations. The US has appropriated about $50 billion dollars for Iraq reconstruction, but the annual amount has dropped each year, and next year it’ll probably be around $1 billion says this analyst. But he cautions that Iraq will still need a lot of US money that will not be labeled as reconstruction aid for at least several more years. He expects US training of Iraqi security forces to be a big expenditure for years to come. Meanwhile, Iraqis are still frustrated by the lack of some of the most basic services, and the report includes the fatc that two-thirds of Iraq’s sewage flows untreated into river and waterways.