Reconstruction of Iraq has been badly botched:
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.
A person at the forum provided a copy of the document, dated December 2005, to The New York Times. The inspector general’s office, whose agents and auditors have been examining and reporting on various aspects of the rebuilding since early 2004, declined to comment on the report other than to say it was highly preliminary.
“It’s incomplete,” said a spokesman for the inspector general’s office, Jim Mitchell. “It could change significantly before it is finally published.”
Fantastic. Nothing tastes sweeter in the morning than a big serving of incompetence. And, in a nod to my conservative friends (and to tweak my liberal ones), I will note the NY Times is not calling for an investigation into who leaked this document.
Ancient Purple
Hmmm.
This Administration botches the reconstruction effort?
Let me feign shock here a bit.
No! This can’t be! Our President led us into Iraq to topple Saddam because he had WMDs. Our service men and women are treated well and have everything they need, especially body armor. Also, all the profits from Iraq oil are paying for the war effort so it isn’t a drain on our economy.
That report is clearly mistaken. Iraq is the new Rodeo Drive.
fwiffo
Wait, I don’t think I follow – are you suggesting liberal bias because the Times is not calling for an investigation to out one of their own sources? Should the WaPo have called for an investigation to expose Deep Throat during Watergate? Should papers ask for investigations into the daily horseshit from “administration officials speaking on a condition of anonymity because the White House can’t speak in the subject officially because of political considerations, but they can speak on it on double-super-secret background”?
The Other Steve
Oh come now. I think claims of incompetence are grossly inappropriate and dangerous.
You have to judge based on what was their goal. If there goal was to improve Iraq, then yeah maybe they didn’t do a good job.
But if there goal was simply to funnel $25 billion of treasury money into the hands of campaign contributors, then they’ve done a wonderful job. That’s enough to keep Republicans voting for them, and that’s what counts in the end, right?
Paddy O'Shea
It is becoming very hard for me to figure why it is so-called conservatives support this endlessly inept president. His last big issue, seemingly the one Karl Rove thinks will carry the GOP to victory this fall, is the “War On Terror.” But why is it automatically assumed that this Bushie effort has been a success?
Look at it this way: We’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars, suffered 10s of thousands of military casualties, and yet Osama bin Laden is not only still at large, but his Al Qaeda organization still continues to kill Americans more than 4 years after 9-11. All this and we’re mired in an Asian land war that will continue to bleed us dry for another decade.
If this country really cared about the “War On Terror” we’d impeach this useless administration and get people in there who have a clue about what it is that has to be done.
yet another jeff
A Republican administration botch Reconstruction? As we’ve learned from our own country’s history…botched Reconstruction and corrupt, non-locals performing the “work” tends to cause residual anger for a century or so…
DougJ
John, I don’t say this to be a smart ass, but more and more I feel like I read on your blog the same things I read on Daily Kos six months ago. I’m not kidding.
Oh, well, better later than never, I guess.
Mr Furious
And I will note that the Republicans will ONLY call for an investigation of the leak with no investigation of the incompetent reconstruction effort. Just like everything else.
Mr Furious
DougJ-
Ouch.
Ben
In terms of missed opportunities… this is collossal… it’s nearly as big a mistake as starting the war. I’m not necessarily sure any reconstruction plan would have worked… but this one was laughable…. as there was none. “We’ll pay private contractors billions, and everything will work out.” Funny how this administration is so worried about accountability in schools, but fails at even the most basic level to hold businesses and itself accountable.. it’s a disgusting pattern from the reconstruction in Iraq, to FEMA, to the embarassing amount of pork passed, to mine safety… they are all symptoms of the same disease.
yet another jeff
DougJ — kinda like how Bush dropped in the polls 6 months after the election?
John Cole
The NY Times-
DougJ-
Yawn.
yet another jeff
Oh, they’re worried about accountability all right…they’re worried that they’ll actually be held accountable for something.
As Rush used to say circa 1992…smoke and mirrors, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Jim Allen
Gee, John, are you saying that since the government didn’t have a memo on this until December, 2005, that this problem didn’t exist before that? And that other people, who apparently weren’t yawning, have been posting on this before in error?
As DougJ says, better late than never, I suppose.
DougJ
John, again, I’m not trying to be a smart ass, but your reply illustrates that you don’t understand what I said at all.
Evidence of botched reconstruction has been coming out for at least a a year now. It’s not news. In fact, I would argue that the fact the NYT is covering it argues against it being news (the Times prefers to wait until everyone else has forgotten about a story before they start covering it — that’s what being the “paper of record” means, apparently).
Again, I’m not being a smart ass — it’s to your credit that you can accept the truth. Better a deathbed conversion than no conversion at all.
John Cole
DougJ- And I have been commenting on it as it comes out. This piece just came out TODAY, so I commented on it today.
You may have heard OTHER reports on DKOS 6 months ago, but you did not hear about this one, as it is dated Dec. 05.
I am not sure how that should be a dig at me, as YOU are the one who can not keep the reports straight.
Jill
None of this is news. Since the planning stage of the war and its aftermath (if you can call it planning) critics have been saying that the Bush plan is doomed to fail b/c the “planners” had ignored so many of the possible scenarios, choosing to only believe the rosy scenarios.
Pb
Sorry DougJ, credit where credit is due. Of course Daily Kos has (for obvious reasons) been more vocal about this; there are also a lot more stories on Daily Kos.
Pb
Jill is quite right–and one of those planners even wrote a book about how *his* plans were ignored by the administration. Apparently they ignore just about everyone.
DougJ
Fair enough, John and PB. But none of what I say is meant as a “dig”, as I said earlier. Maybe it’s better described as a convergence of rational opinions from people of different political persuasions.
The Other Steve
Again, because… conservatives aren’t interested in that kind of stuff. It’s boring.
It’s much more fun to build a system of government where the money is funneled out of the treasury and into the hands of the campaign contributors. Legalized Graft, Legalized Patronage.
So the point is, it doesn’t matter that a hospital wasn’t built in some village. What matters is that XYZ Corp was paid to build a hospital.
Yeah, it’s fucked up. But seriously, nobody cares any more. I think that this was perhaps the ultimate goal behind all the Clinton outrage… to deaden the nerves of the society.
Ancient Purple
I don’t think that is much of a surprise. This Administration has no oversight or check and balance. Certainly Congress is not going to get involved because the Republicans are all just one big happy family and if the Crazy Uncle is acting up, they all laugh and simply ignore it.
That being said, don’t hold your breath to see John Cole endorse divided government.
srv
As I’m sure it will.
Unless there’s an external audit, as far as I’m concerned, there was no reconstruction. People I knew who went over in late 2003 and early 2004 laughed to a person when I asked them about the reconstruction. I’ve talked to two people who were in the CPA, and they admitted that they never, ever, left the green zone. This apparently was the norm.
I loved how the “coalition” claimed they re-opened all these schools and hospitals after the war. What, Iraqis are incapable of this, they need the CPA to hold their hand? Did we take credit for closing them in the first place?
Tim F.
John Cole, long, long before becoming disillusioned with the GOP:
Ancient Purple
Fair enough. I stand correct.
Now, will he help bring about divided government?
Ancient Purple
*corrected
yet another jeff
Gridlock is good…efficient govt. just means that bad laws are created faster.
Bob In Pacifica
There was an article by Naomi Klein, I think, in HARPERS that not only laid out the incompetence but the failed ideology behind it. Should be required reading. I believe the article had “the year zero” in the title.
There is nothing new about the incompetence and graft of the Iraq occupation. How can anyone forget the 8 or 9 billion dollars that walked away? Then there was the one billion that was supposed to arm the Iraqi forces that disappeared. On and on and on.
Krista
There’s the catch-22. Nothing good gets done, but by the same token, nothing bad gets done either.
yet another jeff
We’ve got plenty of laws already…no one ever seems to ask “do we really need this law or is it just useless bloat”.
Any laws that gets railroaded through in a hurry are by definition bad. Especially laws that contain the name of a crime victim or are titled with clever acronyms.
yet another jeff
I’ll accept the lack of new good in trade for no new bad. Plenty of good laws already on the books, we can work with that for a while.
Ancient Purple
My main concern is not necessarily the gridlock that will occur with divided government, but the fact that no divided government gives the party in charge pretty much carte blanche to do what it wants with no oversight.
Davebo
You keep using that word “disillusioned”
I do not think it means what you think it means…
:0)
yet another jeff
Ancient Purple…I’m not seeing the difference…the concern is always about a lack of gridlock. We’ve seen what a lack of divided govt. can do…that should be a lesson for the population.
Pooh
I have heard believable rumors of a Confederate flag flying over Baghdad.
DougJ
Why is that a few set backs in Iraqi reconstruction is a big deal, but the fiasco in New Orleans caused by Nagin and Broussard is swept under the rug? Seems like a double standard to me.
demimondian
Sheesh, DougJ, don’t you know anything about zoning laws? If you screw up the set backs, then the utility easements get trashed, and that makes it impossible to install fibre to the premises. When you practice large-scale urban renewal (like in New Orleans), you can make sure that everything’s set up right from the get go.
Don’t you see the difference?
Mac Buckets
Hold on a sec.
John, are you suggesting that conservatives would be shocked and surprised that government can’t do an incredibly complex task efficiently and speedily?
I was never under any such illusion that because our cause was just, government would all of a sudden reverse decades of history with regards to bureaucracy and waste.
demimondian
Well, of course not. But what does any of that have to do with Iraq? I had hoped that if our cause was utterly perverse, at least the crooks could execute well.
DougJ
Demi, freedom is messy. And the people in Iraq today are much freer than those in Louisiana living under the iron hand of Nagin, Broussard, and Blanco.
Pooh
Stuff Happens. You go to reconstruction with the government you have. Of course, the worse you break it, the more everyone gets to play with their life-sized Tonka Trucks.
DougJ
What about Travelgate? That was a much worse fiasco than anything that has happened in Iraq. But we never hear about that.
yet another jeff
Republicans don’t have a great record of success regarding Reconstruction in the southern states. All the imported contracters might as well be carrying bags made of carpet.
They do a great job protecting the reconstructed areas from eptitude, though.
tb
I wish you people would scale back your ambitions if you’re going to be so accepting of incompetence.
Nikki
Yeah. I mean, if you ain’t gonna do it right, why do it at all?
yet another jeff
I was never under any such illusion that the GOP would even try to be competent. Bush has never been a good manager, I didn’t think he’d suddenly reverse decades of history of spending and mismanagement and come through for us. Sure would have been nice if McCain won the GOP nomination in 2000.
demimondian
What are you complaining about? I would say that the reconstruction of Iraq has been doing incompetence absolutely right.
yet another jeff
What a platform…”vote for us and we’ll prove to you all those things we said about govt incompentence when the Democrats were in charge.”
Pb
Bob In Pacifica,
What really amazed me was how we shipped tons of cash to Iraq. I mean, literally, from May 2003 to June 2004, 363 tons of hundred dollar bills from the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Billions of dollars of cold hard American currency shipped by plane. Only to vanish into corrupt mismanagement, bribes, and fraud.
srv
And better yet, “we’ll do it to other countries”. Now that is genius.
What better way to hide a crime than a war?
Mac Buckets
Yeah, as if the Democrats would love for the rebuilding of Iraq to succeed. Right. Come on, you guys love that you have something to whine about, and as a kicker, you can pretend that the waste and bureaucracy has something to do with Republicans specifically, rather than government in general.
So you guys get to whine and be blindly partisan at the same time. Your two favorite hobbies combined into one issue! It’s the next best thing to governing — if you can’t win elections, you can at least whine that if you had, we’d all be bathing in Moet and using $100 bills for charcoal starter.
Pooh
So let me get this straight Mac, it’s our fault that something we didn’t want to happen went badly because of the way you executed. And, we don’t have the right to complain about it either. Nice.
Kimmitt
Mac, you’re projecting again.
Mike S
Maximus uses every talking point he can. It’s the same talking point they used for the Abramhof scandal. “It’s not that we have a bucnh of corrupt people running the show, it’s because of government.”
Katrina “It’s not because we appointed inept cronies, it’s because Govt can’t do these things.”
Sorry Maximus, your party long ago gave up any right to try to sound like Reagan. It’s just laughable now.
Mike S
Right on Maximus. Everyone knows it was the Democrats that put Herritage Foundation people in charge of many aspects of reconstruction. Keep pushing that Reagan talking point.
demimondian
Hey, Mac, I don’t recall saying anything about what I wanted or didn’t want. I merely pointed out that given the outright fraud which was perpetrated during the sale of the Iraq war, the American people could at least have hoped that the crooks could reconstruct a country as well as they proved they could construct a lie.
Mac Buckets
Wow. You could not have read that any worse. Wrong on all counts.
Mac Buckets
Hate to ruin your script, but the fact that government is inefficient and slow is a little beyond a “talking point,” since it’s been one of the prime tenets of conservative ideology for sixty years. I know you guys love to whine about “talking points,” so you don’t have to answer substantively, but come on now…
Mac Buckets
Oooookay:
My…bad?
Good try at a line, but the “pants-on-fire” chanting still doesn’t fly.
demimondian
Sweetling, it hooked you twice into making an ever greater fool of yourself (or, at least, demonstrating your folly with ever greater efficacy) — so, in my terms, it worked just fine.
Davebo
Well in fairness Mac, you guys never mentioned that the Iraq reconstruction was really just a job fair for the Leeden family.
Mac Buckets
Yeah, you sure got me! We’ll just start callling you DougJ, Jr! Put another notch in your keyboard, you genius, you!
(Coo-koo! Coo-koo!)
demimondian
I’m sorry that it’s painful for you realize that you’re just not as rhetorically effective as you’d like to think, but, hey, the truth often hurts the hearer.
Of course, lies often hurt other people more, of course — which brings us back to Iraq and mendacious presidents.
Mac Buckets
That’s a much better line that the lying stuff. Well done, DaveBo!
Pooh
No, I think I read you pretty accurately.
Well…the Dow went from what 2.5k-3k to 10k under Clinton and has gone from 10k to…10k under Mac Buckets’ Daddy. Heckuva job.
Pb
Mac Buckets,
I’m going to try an experiment and give you a little constructive feedback, let’s see if you can take it to heart.
That’s probably as good a description of how the reconstruction efforts have gone as any, although using them for charcoal starter might have been more benign, if just as wasteful. See my post above, as to the sheer quantity of $100 bills shipped to Iraq, and what happened to them. Your tax dollars at work, Mac.
Mike S
Who’s whining Maximus? I’m simply pointing out that your usual talking points are no longer operative. You can act as if there are “conservative tennants” but we all know that that is a crock along the lines of the party of personal responsibility. It sounds real purty but it something you haven’t put into practice.
Slide
George Bush: The Worst President EVER.
The Bush Team: The most incompetent adminstration in history.
The Iraq War:The biggest foreign affairs blunder in decades.
Katrina: The most incompetent response to a disaster in human history.
MacBuckets: The most shameless apologist in creation.
The Bush Legacy
Pb
Pooh,
And where does all that money go. It’s a mystery.
Com Con
The irony here is that with all the Democrats’ complaining about Katria, Brownie was doing a heck of a job. FEMA performed remarkably well, under the circumstances, and a lot of that was Michael Brown’s doing.
Mac Buckets
It would not be the first time you were completely wrong. But let’s analyze your original response:
Let’s see: I never said anything was “your fault” (whoever “you” are) anywhere. I never said that Iraq “went badly.” I assume when you say “the way you executed,” you mean Republicans, which is the exact notion that I’m disputing as silly and uninformed in the first place. Lastly, I never said you had no “right to complain” — in fact, I said quite the reverse. I effectively said that whining was really your only recourse.
Besides that, yeah, you read it perfectly.
LOL — thanks for making my point. Post hoc ergo proptor hoc, anyone? And I’ve still never voted for my “Daddy” — what kind of son am I?
Mac Buckets
If your attempt at constructive feedback was to tell me that government is wasteful and inefficient, ummmm, that’s only what I’ve been posting all freaking thread.
Angry Engineer
This is part of “exporting democracy”, right?
Mac Buckets
No matter how much you assert otherwise, there are, of course, real conservative tenets (and probably “conservative tennants,” too, although we prefer to be landlords, I suppose), and one of the most famous ones is that government bureaucracy is by nature inefficient and wasteful, whether it’s a Republican government, a Democrat government, or a split government.
srv
Actually, when I was at home for the holidays (must keep the war-on-Xmas meme going), I got to see alot of MSNBC, CNN and whatnot. I kept hearing the pundits chattering about “creating a liberal democracy” re Iraq.
Now I think I get it. It’s a Rovian escape hatch post-withdrawal. They’ll just say that “exporting liberal democracy” failed because of the liberal part.
Pooh
Mac,
I’m simply making the point that during the Clinton years, we were “bathing in Moet and using $100 bills for charcoal starter”. Or haven’t you ever seen an R. Kelly video?
What do you mean, that wasn’t Moet?
Sojourner
So you’re admitting that you knowingly vote for incompetent politicians.
Hmmm. I’m not sure I’d be bragging about that but each to his/her own.
rachel
The Marshall Plan worked in Europe, rebuilding Japan after WWII worked, and South Korea is a wealthy nation now. Our government wasn’t so “inefficient and wasteful” that we couldn’t achieve those goals then.
So what’s different now?
The Other Steve
Republicans.
GTinMN
Well, it’s probably a rhetorical question, but what’s different now is that modern Republicans are in charge. Their intention in governing is to utterly undermine our trust in government, making it easier to loot it now and shrink it longer term. This is not a well-kept secret. Once viewed from this perspective, a lot of things that seem confusing about the rampant cronyism, incompetence and criminality all come into focus as part of the plan.
I only hope that King George the Turd has fucked things up enough that the number of people cluing in to the shenanigans reaches critical mass for the mid-terms.
Mac Buckets
No, I’m saying that the politicians we choose are almost entirely irrelevant to the problems of government red tape, waste, and inefficiency. Pick an all-star lineup of your favorite politicians of all time, and the government still wouldn’t do away with waste, delays, and (to bring it closer to my home) Big Digs. When it comes to tackling big projects, government is bloated and wasteful under Democrats, it is bloated and wasteful with a split government, and it’s bloated and wasteful under Republicans. I can’t believe this is news to any American adult.
Mac Buckets
Slow down, rach. The present government isn’t so wasteful that we won’t achieve the reconstruction of Iraq, either. Even the Times doesn’t stoop to saying that the work isn’t getting completed.
John’s just giving some Tender Vittles to the leftians here with this Oolong typhoon.
Pb
Mac Buckets,
My point is about how inefficient *this* government is. Now, if you have any remotely equivalent examples, I’d love to hear them, but keep in mind that even that doesn’t excuse this government of responsibility for their actions.
Mac Buckets
Two things: First….did my eyes deceive me, or are you now requesting a Clinton Did It, Too (Bill at least paid lip service to reducing waste, even though that chin music didn’t seem to extend to military efficiency — witness the “one-year” commitment in Bosnia which is still ongoing)? Or is this just a trap question so you guys can enlighten me as to how Democrats aren’t in power anymore, and it’s been five years since Clinton was president, and why am I obsessed with the Clenis, anyway?
Second, anyone who approaches the problem of inefficiency in government from the “that would never happen under the Democrats/Republicans” perspective is either fully drowned in the Kool-Aid or is twelve years old and not particularly well-read.