Rebuilt Iraq Projects Found Crumbling
For years the right wing press have condemned the media for failing to tell the good news stories that they insist have been emanating from Iraq. Now it transpires that many of those "good news stories" were simply mirages.
Nor were these abandoned projects limited to any single area of the country, but rather were found to be widespread and included projects as varied as a maternity hospital, barracks for an Iraqi special forces unit and a power station for Baghdad International Airport.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.
What's most crucial here is that the rebuilding programmes were supposed to work side by side with the pacification of the violence in order to build a new Iraq.
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.
The reasons these projects are failing is very simple.
The problems with the generators were seemingly minor: missing batteries, a failure to maintain adequate oil levels in the engines, fuel lines that had been pilfered or broken. That kind of neglect is typical of rebuilding programs in developing countries when local nationals are not closely involved in planning efforts, said Rick Barton, co-director of the postconflict reconstruction project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research organization in Washington.
“What ultimately makes any project sustainable is local ownership from the beginning in designing the project, establishing the priorities,” Mr. Barton said. “If you don’t have those elements it’s an extension of colonialism and generally it’s resented.”
Mr. Barton, who has closely monitored reconstruction efforts in Iraq and other countries, said the American rebuilding program had too often created that resentment by imposing projects on Iraqis or relying solely on the advice of a local tribal chief or some “self-appointed representative” of local Iraqis.
Only last month, Brig. Gen. Michael Walsh, commander of the Gulf Region Division of the Army Corps, chastised the press saying, “what you don’t see are the successes in the reconstruction program, how reconstruction is making a difference in the lives of everyday Iraqi people.”
And this has been a constant theme of the Bush administration, that there is - somewhere - a good news Iraq story that the press are failing to pass on to the rest of us. These findings render that claim hollow, like most of the good news claims the right wing insist are emanating from Iraq.
And when this miserable adventure fails, as it will, these same people will scurry about looking for others to blame. Four years into this misadventure, four years in which every possible way in which one could measure success - number of civilians killed, numbers of US soldiers killed and the violence in Iraq generally - have all pointed to miserable defeat, have been dismissed by Bush supporters as a sign of the desperation of the insurgency and a further indication that success actually lies just over the next hill.
And now we find that they are actually pouring money into a huge pit. Their projects are simply lying abandoned. Even the ones that they previously touted as great successes.
The whole project has been a miserable failure and the people who supported it should be filled with the deepest shame, were such an emotion even within their grasp.
They have destroyed Iraq, they have broken it into it's disparate pieces and now they simply don't know what to do next. So they continue to insist that they must do something - surge - anything, other than admit to the sheer catastrophic scale of their failure.
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