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<DIV><FONT size=2><FONT size=6><STRONG><EM>New York
Times</EM></STRONG></FONT><BR clear=all>
<HR align=left SIZE=1>
<DIV class=timestamp>December 14, 2008</DIV>
<DIV class=kicker></DIV>
<H1><NYT_HEADLINE type=" " version="1.0">Official History Spotlights Iraq
Rebuilding Blunders </NYT_HEADLINE></H1><NYT_BYLINE type=" " version="1.0">
<DIV class=byline>By <A title="More Articles by James Glanz"
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/james_glanz/index.html?inline=nyt-per">JAMES
GLANZ</A> and T. CHRISTIAN MILLER</DIV></NYT_BYLINE><NYT_TEXT>
<DIV id=articleBody>
<P>BAGHDAD — An <A href="http://projects.nytimes.com/reconstruction">unpublished
513-page federal history</A> of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts
an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to
the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a <STRONG><FONT
color=#ff0000>$100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence
and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and
infrastructure.</FONT></STRONG></P>
<P>The history, the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft
form here and in Washington among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy
experts and senior officials. It also concludes that when the reconstruction
began to lag — particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police
and army — the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up
the failures.</P>
<P>In one passage, for example, former Secretary of State <A
title="More articles about Colin L. Powell."
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/colin_l_powell/index.html?inline=nyt-per">Colin
L. Powell</A> is quoted as saying that in the months after the 2003 invasion,
the Defense Department “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces — the
number would jump 20,000 a week! ‘We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we
now have 120,000.’ ”</P>
<P>Mr. Powell’s assertion that the Pentagon inflated the number of competent
Iraqi security forces is backed up by Lt. Gen. <A
title="More articles about Ricardo S. Sanchez."
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/ricardo_sanchez/index.html?inline=nyt-per">Ricardo
S. Sanchez</A>, the former commander of ground troops in Iraq, and <A
title="More articles about L. Paul Bremer III."
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/l_paul_iii_bremer/index.html?inline=nyt-per">L.
Paul Bremer III</A>, the top civilian administrator until an Iraqi government
took over in June 2004.</P>
<P>Among the overarching conclusions of the history is that five years after
embarking on its largest foreign reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan
in Europe after World War II, the United States government has in place neither
the policies and technical capacity nor the organizational structure that would
be needed to undertake such a program on anything approaching this scale.</P>
<P>The bitterest message of all for the reconstruction program may be the way
the history ends. The hard figures on basic services and industrial production
compiled for the report reveal that for all the money spent and promises made,
the rebuilding effort never did much more than restore what was destroyed during
the invasion and the convulsive looting that followed.</P>
<P>By mid-2008, the history says, $117 billion had been spent on the
reconstruction of Iraq, including some $50 billion in United States taxpayer
money.</P>
<P>The history contains a catalog of revelations that show the chaotic and often
poisonous atmosphere prevailing in the reconstruction effort.</P>
<P>¶When the <A
title="More articles about Office of Management and Budget, U.S."
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/o/office_of_management_and_budget/index.html?inline=nyt-org">Office
of Management and Budget</A> balked at the American occupation authority’s
abrupt request for about $20 billion in new reconstruction money in August 2003,
a veteran Republican lobbyist working for the authority made a bluntly partisan
appeal to <A title="More articles about Joshua B. Bolten."
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/joshua_b_bolten/index.html?inline=nyt-per">Joshua
B. Bolten</A>, then the O.M.B. director and now the White House chief of staff.
“To delay getting our funds would be a political disaster for the President,”
wrote the lobbyist, Tom C. Korologos. “His election will hang for a large part
on show of progress in Iraq and without the funding this year, progress will
grind to a halt.” With administration backing, Congress allocated the money
later that year.</P>
<P>¶In an illustration of the hasty and haphazard planning, a civilian official
at the United States Agency for International Development was at one point given
four hours to determine how many miles of Iraqi roads would need to be reopened
and repaired. The official searched through the agency’s reference library, and
his estimate went directly into a master plan. Whatever the quality of the
agency’s plan, it eventually began running what amounted to a parallel
reconstruction effort in the provinces that had little relation with the rest of
the American effort.</P>
<P>¶Money for many of the local construction projects still under way is divided
up by a spoils system controlled by neighborhood politicians and tribal chiefs.
“Our district council chairman has become the Tony Soprano of Rasheed, in terms
of controlling resources,” said an American Embassy official working in a
dangerous Baghdad neighborhood. “ ‘You will use my contractor or the work
will not get done.’ ”</P>
<P><SPAN class=bold>A Cautionary Tale</SPAN></P>
<P>The United States could soon have reason to consult this cautionary tale of
deception, waste and poor planning, as troop levels and reconstruction efforts
in Afghanistan are likely to be stepped up under the new administration. </P>
<P>The incoming Obama administration’s rebuilding experts are expected to focus
on smaller-scale projects and emphasize political and economic reform. Still,
such programs do not address one of the history’s main contentions: that the
reconstruction effort has failed because no single agency in the United States
government has responsibility for the job. </P>
<P>Five years after the invasion of Iraq, the history concludes, “the government
as a whole has never developed a legislatively sanctioned doctrine or framework
for planning, preparing and executing contingency operations in which diplomacy,
development and military action all figure.”</P>
<P>Titled “Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience,” the new history
was compiled by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq
Reconstruction, led by Stuart W. Bowen Jr., a Republican lawyer who regularly
travels to Iraq and has a staff of engineers and auditors based here. Copies of
several drafts of the history were provided to reporters at The New York Times
and ProPublica by two people outside the inspector general’s office who have
read the draft, but are not authorized to comment publicly. </P>
<P>Mr. Bowen’s deputy, Ginger Cruz, declined to comment for publication on the
substance of the history. But she said it would be presented on Feb. 2 at the
first hearing of the Commission on Wartime Contracting, which was created this
year as a result of legislation sponsored by Senators <A
title="More articles about Jim Webb."
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/james_h_webb_jr/index.html?inline=nyt-per">Jim
Webb</A> of Virginia and Claire McCaskill of Missouri, both Democrats.</P>
<P>The manuscript is based on approximately 500 new interviews, as well as more
than 600 audits, inspections and investigations on which Mr. Bowen’s office has
reported over the years. Laid out for the first time in a connected history, the
material forms the basis for broad judgments on the rebuilding program.</P>
<P>In the preface, Mr. Bowen gives a searing critique of what he calls the
“blinkered and disjointed prewar planning for Iraq’s reconstruction” and the
botched expansion of the program from a modest initiative to improve Iraqi
services to a multibillion-dollar enterprise.</P>
<P>Mr. Bowen also swipes at the endless revisions and reversals of the program,
which at various times gyrated from a focus on giant construction projects led
by large Western contractors to modest community-based initiatives carried out
by local Iraqis. While Mr. Bowen concedes that deteriorating security had a hand
in spoiling the program’s hopes, he suggests, as he has in the past, that the
program did not need much outside help to do itself in.</P>
<P>Despite years of studying the program, Mr. Bowen writes that he still has not
found a good answer to the question of why the program was even pursued as
soaring violence made it untenable. “Others will have to provide that answer,”
Mr. Bowen writes.</P>
<P>“But beyond the security issue stands another compelling and unavoidable
answer: the U.S. government was not adequately prepared to carry out the
reconstruction mission it took on in mid-2003,” he concludes.</P>
<P>The history cites some projects as successes. The review praises community
outreach efforts by the <A
title="More articles about Agency for International Development"
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/a/agency_for_international_development/index.html?inline=nyt-org">Agency
for International Development</A>, the Treasury Department’s plan to stabilize
the Iraqi dinar after the invasion and a joint effort by the Departments of
State and Defense to create local rebuilding teams.</P>
<P>But the portrait that emerges over all is one of a program’s officials
operating by the seat of their pants in the middle of a critical enterprise
abroad, where the reconstruction was supposed to convince the Iraqi citizenry of
American good will and support the new democracy with lights that turned on and
taps that flowed with clean water. Mostly, it is a portrait of a program that
seemed to grow exponentially as even those involved from the inception of the
effort watched in surprise.</P>
<P><SPAN class=bold>Early Miscalculations</SPAN></P>
<P>On the eve of the invasion, as it began to dawn on a few officials that the
price for rebuilding Iraq would be vastly greater than they had been told, the
degree of miscalculation was illustrated in an encounter between <A
title="More articles about Donald H. Rumsfeld."
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/donald_h_rumsfeld/index.html?inline=nyt-per">Donald
H. Rumsfeld</A>, then the defense secretary, and <A
title="More articles about Jay Garner"
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/jay_garner/index.html?inline=nyt-per">Jay
Garner</A>, a retired lieutenant general who had hastily been named the chief of
what would be a short-lived civilian authority called the Office of
Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance.</P>
<P>The history records how Mr. Garner presented Mr. Rumsfeld with several
rebuilding plans, including one that would include projects across Iraq.</P>
<P>“What do you think that’ll cost?” Mr. Rumsfeld asked of the more expansive
plan.</P>
<P>“I think it’s going to cost billions of dollars,” Mr. Garner said.</P>
<P>“My friend,” Mr. Rumsfeld replied, “if you think we’re going to spend a
billion dollars of our money over there, you are sadly mistaken.”</P>
<P>In a way he never anticipated, Mr. Rumsfeld turned out to be correct: before
that year was out, the United States had appropriated more than $20 billion for
the reconstruction, which would indeed involve projects across the entire
country.</P>
<P>Mr. Rumsfeld declined to comment on the history, but a spokesman, Keith
Urbahn, said that quotes attributed to Mr. Rumsfeld in the document “appear to
be accurate.” Mr. Powell also declined to comment.</P>
<P>The secondary effects of the invasion and its aftermath were among the most
important factors that radically changed the outlook. Tables in the history show
that measures of things like the national production of electricity and oil,
public access to potable water, mobile and landline telephone service and the
presence of Iraqi security forces all plummeted by at least 70 percent, and in
some cases all the way to zero, in the weeks after the invasion.</P>
<P>Subsequent tables in the history give a fast-forward view of what happened as
the avalanche of money tumbled into Iraq over the next five years.</P>
<P><SPAN class=bold>Dashed Expectations</SPAN></P>
<P>By the time a sovereign Iraqi government took over from the Americans in June
2004, none of those services — with a single exception, mobile phones — had
returned to prewar levels.</P>
<P>And by the time of the security improvements in 2007 and 2008, electricity
output had, at best, a precarious 10 percent lead on its levels under <A
title="More articles about Saddam Hussein."
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/saddam_hussein/index.html?inline=nyt-per">Saddam
Hussein</A>; oil production was still below prewar levels; and access to potable
water had increased by about 30 percent, although with Iraq’s ruined piping
system it was unclear how much reached people’s homes uncontaminated.</P>
<P>Whether the rebuilding effort could have succeeded in a less violent setting
will never be known. In April 2004, thousands of the Iraqi security forces that
had been oversold by the Pentagon were overrun, abruptly mutinied or simply
abandoned their posts as the insurgency broke out, sending Iraq down a violent
path from which it has never completely recovered.</P>
<P>At the end of his narrative, Mr. Bowen chooses a line from “Great
Expectations” by Dickens as the epitaph of the American-led attempt to rebuild
Iraq: “We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people
could make up their minds to give us.”</P><NYT_AUTHOR_ID>
<DIV id=authorId>
<P>James Glanz reported from Baghdad, and T. Christian Miller, of the nonprofit
investigative Web site ProPublica, reported from
Washington.</P></DIV></NYT_AUTHOR_ID></DIV></NYT_TEXT></FONT></DIV></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>