In its largest reconstruction effort since the Marshall Plan, the United States government has spent $53 billion for relief and reconstruction in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, building tens of thousands of hospitals, water treatment plants, electricity substations, schools and bridges.
But there are growing concerns among American officials that Iraq will not be able to adequately maintain the facilities once the Americans have left, potentially wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and jeopardizing Iraq’s ability to provide basic services to its people.
The projects run the gamut — from a cutting-edge, $270 million water treatment plant in Nasiriya that works at a fraction of its intended capacity because it is too sophisticated for Iraqi workers to operate, to a farmers’ market that farmers have not been able to decide how to divide up space for, to a large American hospital closed immediately after it was handed over to Iraq because the government was unable to supply it with equipment, a medical staff or electricity.
I sure could go for another lecture about fiscal conservatism from Republicans right about now.
slag
Why are we exporting our socialism?
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
It’s called misguided projection; if we give them what we have then they will be just like us! We don’t look, listen and think, we act and let the card fall where they may. We tell ourselves otherwise but the reality is that we are arrogant and in that arrogance is the root of our stupidity.
slag
Sorry, mods. I meant: “Why are we exporting our Soshulism?” Somebody needs to create a WP spellchecker.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
card = cards
Whare iz teh edit funktion? Blammo!
Rick Taylor
I’m a bit suspicious. The facility is “too sophisticated for Iraqi workers to operate”? Iraq did a good job of recovering after the first Iraq war. They’re not a backwards country; they have scientists and engineers; or at least they used to. Maybe they’ve lost too many engineers since Saddam fell, but there’s something missing here.
BongCrosby
Silly Republicans! Don’t they know you can solve problems by throwing money at them?
BongCrosby
Uh…”can’t solve problems by throwing money at them.”
mcc
@DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal): A more cynical view might be that reconstruction efforts were guided less with an eye toward “what does Iraq need, how can we help Iraq?” and “how can we funnel as many federal dollars as possible into the pockets of military contractors?”
slag
@DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal): But schools, hospitals, and water treatment plants? Shouldn’t undereducated, sick Iraqis be pulling themselves up from their own e. coli? That’s what Jesus taught me.
mcc
…The word “more” was missing from that last post. Insert it whereever you like
beltane
$53 billion spent here on schools and hospitals would be considered a prodigious waste of money by the very same people who spent it in Iraq. God forbid taxpayer money actually be spent on things which benefit taxpayers.
Jay B.
@Rick Taylor:
That’s a very good point. Also, I don’t think it’s a secret that anyone with any money at all left the country during the recent happyfuntime, so it’s safe to say there was a bit of a brain drain.
And since this is also the same organization which had something like $8 billion disappear and a few million in hard currency laying on palettes in a fucking office, I’m not going to give them any benefit of the doubt.
Finally, and this can’t be said enough, many of the fucking assholes who supported this are willing to let Americans die because to give them ACCESS to health care insurance (NOT giving them health care but access to insurance!) would lead down the road to facistsocicommieland.
Just fuck them.
beltane
@Rick Taylor: A couple of years ago there was an NPR story about the exodus of professionals from Iraq to Jordan and Syria. All the people interviewed said they were too traumatized to ever contemplate returning.
HRA
@Rick Taylor:
You are right. They are not a backwards country. I believe the more educated left the country for other less dangerous places. IOW they had the money to do it. That’s what I understood from the Iraqi bloggers back before the election and right after it, too.
What I would like to know is why isn’t this news about spending in Iraq front page news here? As well as why is New Orleans still struggling out of Katrina while we send our money overseas for what looks like a gross misappropriation of funds?
Comrade Dread
I think I’ve read somewhere that the Iraqi middle class left in droves post-‘liberation’ due to the violence.
It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that there is a shortage of the educated and qualified people to man these facilities.
El Cid
Wait — I thought THE SURGE (hallowed be its name) fixed everything?
Jay B.
Here’s the thing — I don’t mind that we’re giving billions to rebuild a shattered country. We were, allegedly, the richest country in the world AND we destroyed Iraq. It was the very least we could do after destroying their society. The billions are chump change compared to the trillions we’ve spent blowing the fucking place up and shacking up in the ruins.
But the thing that really gets my nads, is that the former Administration spent trillions on the war, gave tax cut to the wealthiest among us, ignored New Orleans before and after the flood AND THEN decides to whine about spending money on our own infrastructure and citizens is really just too much.
Republicans are stupid, vile and really soulless people who’d just assume let corporations run our lives than show any decency to human beings.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Maybe they were trying to prove that you can’t do nation building by um…nation building.
MikeJ
The real pity here is that before the invasion, Iraq had the highest percentage of college educated people in the middle east. Most women in college too. More bars per capita than NYC.
SpotWeld
I’m real tempted to say something about how Iraq is in need of some Community Organizers and “shovel-ready” projects.. but … it’s such a mess over there, there would be no joy in it.
valdivia
OT James Fallows on the manufactured meme that Obama’s trip to Asia was a failure. Great read.
Shawn in ShowMe
No one could have predicted that a war-torn country with nearly 3 million refugees — including many of their technical workers — can no longer handle technical issues.
Violet
I’m sure President McCain will get those things up and running any day now.
Seriously, what a giant sinkhole for our money. We just keep pouring it in and get no return. I bet there are quite a few communities in the good ol’ US of A that would appreciate a new water treatment plant or a state of the art hospital.
This really makes me sick.
jl
@Rick Taylor: @HRA:
I don’t think the story is suspicious, at least at first glance. I believe you are thinking of stories about Iraqi engineers who could keep electricity and water plants operating with the proverbial string and chewing gum under the previous regime after bombings, and during the sanctions. These were engineers who had great familiarity with the equipment, operating under a centralized regime that could provide fuel and some money and other bare, basic necessities for critical services.
The previous centralized regime is gone. The country has suffered much greater damage from the invasion, occupation, and quasi-civil war. The story talks about hospitals with new high tech medical equipment with which the Iraqis are unfamiliar.
It also talks about facilities for which the government is unwilling or unable to provide even the basic necessities for operation: any staff at all, any power or fuel, etc.
So, I do not agree with your opinions on the story. I do think this story is important. I am not of the ‘just **** them’ opinion. These are important investments that can do good and I do not want to see my tax dollars wasted, and I do not what to see what little good the US has done there to be wasted. So I hope there is some follow-up on this story.
stickler
I’m with Rick. This is just shitty journamalism:
The questions this moron reporter left unasked are almost endless. Who the hell was responsible for TRAINING the Iraqi workers? Is the treatment plant really “too sophisticated,” or is it “badly designed”? Was it put in the right place to do the job it should be doing, or did Bechtel kludge the setup?
Etcetera. I find it hard to believe that the Iraqis can’t run a fracking water treatment plant.
“Big white Bwana build big machine, native no can make work!” Come on.
jl
The most important thing about this post is that it shows Cole is not expending the necessary Force of Will, the Sheer Patriotic and Many Will Power and Right Thought needed to keep those facilities staffed and powered up and running.
For shame, John Cole, for shame!
Cole should make that iconic pic of the “TunchStare for Sheer Will” he posted on Wednesday as the B-J front page, with the running chyron “Iraqi infrastructure, I command you to thrive!”. That is the least Cole can do.
If Cole is going to sap our collective national willpower, he can least plug in the TunchForce to pick up the slack.
The Dangerman
@Rick Taylor:
What is missing is if they don’t have the engineers to run the operation, they’ll have to outsource the work to companies like Halliburton. They need the continuing flow of capital into their coffers.
Linkmeister
I’m inclined to agree that a state-of-the-art plant would be difficult to operate if you’ve been used to 1960s-era plants (possibly with Soviet equipment, too; remember that Iraq traded as much with the USSR as with the West pre-Gulf War).
jl
@stickler: Good point. How much of the infrastructure the US built is just junk. Our super embassy starting falling apart and injuring its occupants as soon as it was opened.
Remember those pics of the junky schools, hospitals and police stations we built? They started falling apart even before they were finished.
As I said, this story needs to be followed.
PeakVT
The opportunity costs of Dick and George’s Excellent Adventure are mind-bending.
inkadu
@jl: Contractors bought over-priced equipment from their buddies back in the States at a 30% markup with a cost-plus contract.
MikeJ
David Frum worked in the White House – John Frum, cargo cult god.
Coincidence?
Corner Stone
There is some who say that perhaps freedom is not universal. Maybe it’s only Western people that can self-govern. Maybe it’s only, you know, white-guy Methodists who are capable of self-government. I reject that notion.
gwangung
@inkadu: I thought it was also the case that the US employed local “contractors”, except that many “contractors” were more like profiteers who stepped in when a lot of the legitimate folks fled (and who could punish them if there was fraud? A court system that was destroyed in the invasion?)
jl
@inkadu: Thanks. Clearly the work must have been very excellently done, then. (/snark)
Put Luke Russert, Toddler and Matthews on this story, it is just that important. But maybe Mathews think looking into stuff like quality of construction material, foundations, ductwork, plumbing and wiring specs and quality is too ‘egghead’ and wimpy.
inkadu
@gwangung: Yeah. I’m not sure how we can put on a monetary value on the things we imported. I mean, how much of that stuff got blown up by insurgents in the first month?
Anyway, I’d like to have seen the CBO score any of it.
khead
$53 billion? FIFTY THREE FUCKING BILLION?
A fraction of that 53 billion could connect the people of McDowell Co, WV – or at least the prison being built in Welch, WV – to the four lane road that currently ends at Slab Fork, WV.
http://maps.google.com/maps?sourceid=navclient&rlz=1T4ACGW_enUS319US319&q=welch+wv&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hq=&hnear=Welch,+WV&gl=us&ei=VUIHS7m8OtDelAfIsemEBA&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CAoQ8gEwAA
The entire 53 billion could be used to build an actual yellow brick road.
What. The. Fuck.
Mike G
too sophisticated for Iraqi workers to operate
Translation: Specifically designed to be inoperable without lucrative long-term service contract from Repig crony corporation.
Anne Laurie
@HRA:
Because the leaking levees in NO killed poor mostly-not-white people that just weren’t important, while the leaking money pipelines to Iraq enriched worthy mostly-American neocons & military contractors, who are very important indeed, at least to the Media Village Idiots. Simone Ledeen was given the priceless professional resuming-building opportunity to “lose” NINE BILLION TAX DOLLARS while “supervising” the Iraqi Reconstruction Authority, and her daddy Michael Ledeen feels it is very, very important — nay, key to the success of the patriotic capitalist vision in the modern global community! — that other corporate parasites are given ongoing access to billions more of OUR tax dollars. Sunk opportunity costs, beeyotches!
Joshua Norton
Why not? The stuff the contractors are slapping together is sub-standard crap anyway. Like buildings with raw sewage pouring out of light circuits.
After all, how can they make obscene profits if they actually have to spend money on decent materials?
AhabTRuler
And they got away with it.
The money wasted on the war in total is such a
bigmassively-fucking-huge number that it generates its own SEP field. The human mind skitters off into the weeds; it just can’t get a handle on it in any meaningful sense.Grumpy Code Monkey
@DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal):
I just finally realized that neocons still believe in the geopolitical equivalent of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny: if they brush their teeth, say their prayers, and be good little boys and girls, then at the end of the year they’ll be rewarded with a pony (or a Western-style democracy in the Middle East that’s friendly to U.S. oil interests).
It’s literally that childish.
AhabTRuler
yadda-yadda-bill-of-attainder &c., but there needs to be a law that she have this tattooed on her forehead.
AhabTRuler
Everything they know about the world can be found in the textbooks for Poli-Sci 101 and Econ 101.
jl
@Joshua Norton: “buildings with raw sewage pouring out of light circuits.”
Some one should make a top ten hits of US aid successes in Iraq reconstruction.
My favorite was concrete support pillars falling apart before the building was finished. Those pictures of the pillars with big spalled off concrete chucks lying on the floor with the rusting rebar showing, were just things of beauty.
The Dangerman
@jl:
That’s a feature, not a bug. Some 2nd tier contractor builds shit while pocketing the 2nd tier money, then the top tier contractor comes in to clean up the mess on an expedited, emergency basis (because it’s embarassing shit, doncha know), pocketing top tier money. With a little advance planning, they get not only the initial cost of building the asset right, they get the annualized cost until the Iraqi’s can operate it themselves (and, if they are really lucky, that will never happen).
gwangung
@inkadu: None of the neo-cons and damn few of the progressives even realize that this sort of thing is INHERENT IN THE INVASION process. It was going to happen, no matter what we did afterwards, no matter who was running it. You smash a country’s institutions, you open the door for scammers.
The local scammers must have licked their chops when they saw W’s 24 year old, ideologically pure geniuses who came in to run things though. They must have been EASY to con.
HyperIon
@Rick Taylor: I’m a bit suspicious.
Me, too.
“those stupid ay-rabs” is not a convincing argument.
is running a water-treatment plant rocket science?
Kyle
Don’t worry, as we saw with health care, Repigs only pass bills that pay for themselves and don’t increase the deficit.
I’m dying to hear how much financial return we’ll get on Halliburton’s sewage-caked buildings in Baghdad.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
Exactly, it is that childish. They love a top-down organization and that is how it is. Just by saying ‘this is how it is’ makes them think that whatever they want will automatically happen for them. Rather than going in, evaluating the situation and coming up with a workable plan that takes local considerations into account, they just ‘make it happen’ by doing what they think will work. Of course when it doesn’t work then they blame everyone but themselves for the failure, it’s them ungrateful Iraqis who screwed everything up!
The Masters of the Universe never screw up, everyone else does it for them. Just ignore the fact that while everyone else was screwing things up they were stuffing their pockets (and their friends pockets) with lots of cash. Also.
Mike in NC
If we could just get the George W. Fucking Bush Library moved to Baghdad, I’d contribute a nickel to do it.
Citizen_X
I must remind everyone of the permanent Republican platform:
1) Sucker the rubes (at least enough to get 51% of the vote),
2) Loot the government,
3) Repeat.
Of course, Bible Spice, the Madonna of Alaska, has pretty clearly demonstrated early mastery of this game–she’s already at step 3.
Annie
As someone who works in the region, what I have heard is that billions went to US defense/building contractors, who took a lot off the top, and then subcontracted to local firms who did what they could with the money that was left. Absolutely no accountability or standards.
Buildings that were constructed would not pass even minimum inspection. In some cases, buildings were left abandoned and/or only half finished.
Couple that with Iraqi government Ministries that are corrupt, a central government that has little control over large parts of the country, huge political divisions, violence, and a real brain drain to Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, it is not surprising that most infrastructure projects will just be abandoned.
53 billion is obscene — first because “fiscal” conservatives pretend none of this happened, and second because no one followed the money and reported on it. The ultimate entitlement program…
Charity Starts @ Home?
Well – we just KNOW those welfare queens would just be buying themselves new cadillacs. At least we know that if we give Halliburton the money that it’ll be going to those most deserving. Eat $hit and die Dick – I am SO looking forward to pissing on your grave
kay
How much is the library slated to cost? He could skip it and pay the $115 million to finally finish this thing:
“Iraq’s most notorious reconstruction project might be the $165 million Basra Children’s Hospital in southern Iraq. Championed by Laura Bush when she was the first lady, its completion has been delayed by more than four years, and the project is $115 million over budget.
Once the hospital opens — perhaps next year — there will be too few doctors and other medical staff members to take advantage of much of its modern equipment.
“It was supposed to open in March, but I don’t think it will be ready,” said Ahmed Qassim, the hospital’s director. He added: “Maybe July, but we don’t know. Maybe not July.”
Silver Owl
So are they saying Iraqis are retards, we can not teach others to handle our own work or there are “money” concerns and someone or someones needs to leech money?
Here’s my take, Iraqis are not retarded. Americans are not by and large freaking idiots totally ignorant of all communication skills that we can not pass on knowledge so that leaves some fat arses leeching someones wanting more money.
Check the rich ones. We’re talking grifting.
BDeevDad
Forbes is outright calling the Republicans on their hypocrisy.
dSquib
Christ… reminds me of one of those Extreme Home Makeover shows, where a poor single mother of six working as a cleaner is given a house fitted out with a mini football pitch, swimming pools, richly customised kids rooms, a home cinema and so on, and is expected to pay utilities bills rivaling those of the Sultan of Brunei.
tootiredoftheright
Ah this story is a few years old. Cause I swear I have read this exact same story about the water treatment plant, hospital years ago.
Even the dollar figures seem to be the same.
Of Bugs and Books
@BDeevDad:
Forbes has his column at no. 1 in (some?) ‘Most Popular’ category and
4 1/2 stars.
Cassidy
As someone else who works in the region (Iraq, Diyalah Province), Annie’s not entirely accurate. Iraqi contractors do cheap, shoddy work. They themselves pocket as much of the money as possible and then buy crappy building materials to do the job, hire unskilled labor, and generally fleece as much as possible.
Iraqi contracting is a network of who you know and who owes you (wasta).
Secondly, US policy for the last couple of years has been to let the Iraqi’s “lead the way”. So if any US Defense Contractors were hired for jobs, it was hired by the Iraqi Government. Typically, we’ll provide the funds and more specialized skills such as surveying, urban planning, etc., but the work is almost always done by an Iraqi contractor (usually someone’s brother or cousin, or tribal affiliations) and the majority of the money is funneled into a couple of people’s pockets.
Jack
When you hear or read a Republican nattering on about “fiscal responsibility,” you’ve got yourself a special treat. You are in the intellectual presence of a bromide. A very special sort of bromide, too.
The triteness of the term is matchless; here, we have a near legendary combination of equal parts self-soothing anodyne, legerdemain and plain meanness rolled up in one, intended (really, truly intended) to function on multiple levels of deception whilst still remaining the most particular of patently false platitudes.
“Fiscal responsibility” is platitudinous self-congratulation taken orders of magnitudes beyond the usual fare, because it is nearly always used to describe a demonstrable, obvious, even crass theft from the commonweal, for the private emolument of powerful men.
When a Republican mouths “fiscal responsibility,” you can know with near perfect certainty that some rich bastard, somewhere, has taken shared wealth from the public, from the working and the working poor, with the help of officeholders and appointees, and turned it into his own private gain.
State of the art hospital in Iraq? Building it here, with the assets of the commons, would be “socialism.”
Building it there was purest piracy.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@Citizen_X:
That’s not fair; Madonna actually works for a living.
Snarla
Maybe some of those five million Iraqis we displaced could run the water treatmen plant competently. After all, the educated ones were the first ones to go/be killed.