Baghdad, Iraq – Faced with continuing insurgent resistance, the effort to rebuild the Iraqi economy is bogging down and running out of time and money.
After three years in which the U.S. government allocated more than $20 billion for Iraq reconstruction, a bill now making its way through Congress adds only $1.6 billion this year, just $100 million of it for construction – not for building schools or power stations, but for prisons.
Does the sharp cut in aid surprise and disappoint the planners here?
“Probably both,” said Michael Fallon, programs chief for the major U.S. reconstruction agency in Iraq.
But “the program in general has been very successful,” he said – “with the caveat that it hasn’t gone as far as we thought we’d be able to go.”
The ambitions of 2003, when President Bush spoke of making Iraq’s infrastructure “the best in the region,” have given way to the shortfalls of 2006, in electricity and water supply, sanitation, health facilities and oil production.
A University of Maryland poll in January found strong majorities of Iraqis hopeful about their country’s future in general, but only one in five thought the Americans had done a good job on reconstruction.
Even after billions were spent on power plants and substations, electricity generation still hasn’t regained the level it had before the U.S. invasion of March 2003.
When Fallon’s experts keep the lights burning late, they’re relying on emergency U.S. generators in their “Green Zone” enclave. The rest of Baghdad gets power only a few hours a day.
Clean water, sewer scarcer
Barely one-third of the water- treatment projects the Americans planned will be completed.
Only 32 percent of the Iraqi population has access to clean drinking water now, compared with 50 percent before the war, according to the U.S. special inspector- general for Iraq reconstruction.
About 19 percent of Iraqis today have working sewer connections, compared with 24 percent before 2003.
Of more than 150 planned health clinics, only 15 have been completed, under a contract ending this month.
Oil production, meanwhile, has stagnated, averaging 2.05 million barrels a day in mid-March, short of the 2.5 million-a-day U.S. goal, and far short of Iraq’s production peak of 3.7 million in the 1970s.
Fewer than one-quarter of the rehabilitation projects for the oil industry have been completed.
Iraq’s insurgency dealt a major blow to the rebuilding efforts, leading U.S. officials in 2004 to begin siphoning off reconstruction money to help train Iraqi police and military forces, build prisons and pay for private security for projects underway.
Insiders’ view sobering
An internal staff report by the U.S. Embassy and military command in Baghdad reported today in The New York Times gives a sobering province-by-province snapshot of Iraq’s current political, economic and security situation, rating the overall stability of six of the 18 provinces “serious” and one “critical.”
The report defines “serious” as having “a government that is not fully formed or cannot serve the needs of its residents; economic development that is stagnant with high unemployment; and a security situation marked by routine violence, assassinations, and extremism.”
British fatalities have been on the rise in Basra in recent months, with attacks attributed to Shiite insurgents.
The report is a counterpoint to some recent upbeat public statements by top American politicians and military officials.
A copy of the report was provided to the Times by a government official in Washington who opposes the way the war is being conducted and said the confidential assessment provided a more realistic gauge of stability in Iraq than recent portrayals by senior military officers.
Warnings of sectarian and ethnic frictions are raised in many regions, even in those provinces generally described as nonviolent by American officials.
The report also warns about the growing power of Iranian-backed religious Shiite parties, several of which the United States helped put into power, and rival militias in the south.
The authors point to the Arab-Kurdish fault line in the north as a major concern, with the two ethnicities vying for power in Mosul, where violence is rampant, and Kirkuk, whose oil fields are critical for jump-starting economic growth in Iraq.
Once regarded as stable, the oil-rich Basra province is now rated as “serious.”
The general tenor of the Bush administration’s comments on Iraq has been optimistic. On Thursday, Bush argued that his strategy was working despite rising violence in Iraq.
Vice President Dick Cheney, on the CBS News program “Face the Nation,” suggested last month that the administration’s positive views were a better reflection of the conditions in Iraq than news media reports.
“I think it has less to do with the statements we’ve made, which I think were basically accurate and reflect reality,” Cheney said, “than it does with the fact that there’s a constant sort of perception, if you will, that’s created because what’s newsworthy is the car bomb in Baghdad.”
The New York Times contributed to this report.
