The Great Iraqi Reconstruction Bust Out

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Brought to youse by dees guys (yeah, the pic is dated but still revoltingly accurate).

Over a year ago, this was the story of the Iraqi Reconstruction effort (now interred behind the Time’s Select Shield Wall, but here are excerpts from the post I did at the time):

First, this from the NYT detailing how this Administration has fucked up the Iraqi Rebuilding Program to the tune of $25 billion dollars (a figure which, in and of itself, is 25 times higher than Paul Wolfowitz told us would be the price tag for the entire war.)

January 24, 2006
Iraq Rebuilding Badly Hobbled, U.S. Report Finds
By JAMES GLANZ
The first official history of the $25 billion American reconstruction effort in Iraq depicts a program hobbled from the outset by gross understaffing, a lack of technical expertise, bureaucratic infighting, secrecy and constantly increasing security costs, according to a preliminary draft.

The document, which begins with the secret prewar planning for reconstruction and touches on nearly every phase of the program through 2005, was assembled by the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction and debated last month in a closed forum by roughly two dozen experts from outside the office.

…

In the document, the paralyzing effect of staffing shortfalls and contracting battles between the State Department and the Pentagon, creating delays of months at a stretch, are described for the first time from inside the program.

The document also recounts concerns about writing contracts for an entity with the "ambiguous legal status" of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the question of whether it was an American entity or a multinational one like NATO.

Seemingly odd decisions on dividing the responsibility for various sectors of the reconstruction crop up repeatedly in the document. At one point, a planning team made the decision to put all reconstruction activities in Iraq under the Army Corps of Engineers, except anything to do with water, which would go to the Navy. At the time, a retired admiral, David Nash, was in charge of the rebuilding.

"It almost looks like a spoils system between various agencies," said Steve Ellis, a vice president and an authority on the Army corps at Taxpayers for Common Sense, an organization in Washington, who read a copy of the document. "You had various fiefdoms established in the contracting process."

One authority on reconstruction who attended the session last month, John J. Hamre, said the report was an unblinking and unbiased look at the program.

"It's gutsy and it's honest," said Mr. Hamre, president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a public policy group based in Washington. He was not the source of the leaked document. Even in the early stages of writing the draft, Mr. Hamre said, one central message on the reconstruction program was already fairly clear, that "it didn't go particularly well."

…

It "almost" looks like a spoils system?

Jeez. No, this is nothing less that the after-action report of the sacking of the Iraqi Rebuilding fund. This is a snapshot of what happens when looting is Job One.
…

And now this. Today. By the same reporter.

April 29, 2007
Rebuilt Iraq Projects Found Crumbling

By JAMES GLANZ

In a troubling sign for the American-financed rebuilding program in Iraq, inspectors for a federal oversight agency have found that in a sampling of eight projects that the United States had declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting and expensive equipment that lay idle.

The United States has previously admitted, sometimes under pressure from federal inspectors, that some of its reconstruction projects have been abandoned, delayed or poorly constructed. But this is the first time inspectors have found that projects officially declared a success — in some cases, as little as six months before the latest inspections — were no longer working properly.

The inspections ranged geographically from northern to southern Iraq and covered projects as varied as a maternity hospital, barracks for an Iraqi special forces unit and a power station for Baghdad International Airport.

At the airport, crucially important for the functioning of the country, inspectors found that while $11.8 million had been spent on new electrical generators, $8.6 million worth were no longer functioning.

At the maternity hospital, a rehabilitation project in the northern city of Erbil, an expensive incinerator for medical waste was padlocked — Iraqis at the hospital could not find the key when inspectors asked to see the equipment — and partly as a result, medical waste including syringes, used bandages and empty drug vials were clogging the sewage system and probably contaminating the water system.
The newly built water purification system was not functioning either.

…
Exactly who is to blame for the poor record on sustainment for the first sample of eight projects was not laid out in the report, but the American reconstruction program has been repeatedly criticized for not including in its rebuilding budget enough of the costs for spare parts, training, stronger construction and other elements that would enable projects continue to function once they have been built.

...
The Iraqis themselves appear to share responsibility for the latest problems, which cropped up after the United States turned the projects over to the Iraqi government. Still, the new findings show that the enormous American investment in the reconstruction program is at risk, Mr. Bowen said.

...
The dates when the projects were completed and deemed successful ranged from six months to almost a year and a half before the latest inspections. But those inspections found numerous instances of power generators that no longer operated; sewage systems that had clogged and overflowed, damaging sections of buildings; electrical systems that had been jury-rigged or stripped of components; floors that had buckled; concrete that had crumbled; and expensive equipment that was simply not in use.

Curiously, most of the problems seemed unrelated to sabotage stemming from Iraq’s parlous security situation, but instead were the product of poor initial construction, petty looting, a lack of any maintenance and simple neglect.

...

So what do we know for sure?

1. The predicate for this war has been, from the start, a tissue of premeditated lies perpetrated on the public by George W. Bush.

2. Thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are now dead behind the war George W. Bush lied us into, and about which he has been lying for four years, declaring over and over again that we are “turning the corner” and “making good progress” when the facts on the ground proved otherwise over and over again.

3. The tens of billions of dollars that have been confiscated from the American taxpayer to rebuild the country the George W. Bush cavalierly destroyed has mostly been pissed away. Missing and presumed looted by Administration cronies and co-conspirators.

4. And of the very few reconstruction projects that actually got done and certified as successes? It turns out that was all bullshit too.

5. This treasonable behavior was carried out by the leaders of the Party that relentlessly investigated Bill Clinton for bad land deals and Christmas Car lists, and then impeached him for getting a blowjob and trying to weasel out of admitting it.

The logistical and fiscal excuses this Administration and their co-conspirators float every time they get caught lying to the public and picking our pockets while cowering behind our soldiers can get tangly and headache-inducing, so here’s a little video that explains it all really well:



The men who the GOP has put in charge of our country are criminals.

Yes, the scope and scale at which they steal and kill is so vast as to be dizzying, but at the end of the day these are nothing but gangsters, pure and simple. And the simpletons and brownshirts who continue to stand with them are nothing more that their wheel-men, and must be called out as such at every opportunity.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating:

In the Age of Duyba, you can either be a good American, or a good Republican, but you can no longer be both.