why did rebuilding iraq fail

Across the board, planning was disjointed, inadequate, and unrealistic. The violence has also sparked a "brain drain" as professionals flee Iraq, leaving unskilled workers to try to carry on. "Because of the nature of the original contract, the government was unable to recover any of the money wasted on this project," Bowen said. Some military officers and civilian defense officials participated in the looting. As it was assumed that the Iraqis would be delighted to be liberatedwith no allowance either for those who opposed the invasion, those glad but wary of U.S. intentions, or those simply looking to take advantage of the dictators fall to grab as much loot as they couldlittle thought was given to security requirements after Saddams fall. Between 626 and 539 BCE, the city was the capital of the Neo-Babylonian empire and the largest metropolis in the world. "We'll show you factories, and if there's a good being manufactured, all I'm asking you to do is consider purchasing some of it from an Iraqi company.". What this suggested was the requirement for a period of three to six years of political transition during which sovereignty and ultimate stewardship of the decision-making process resided in an external forceideally a UN-authorized high commissioner or the like, backed by international security forces and NGOs skilled in political and economic reconstruction. The biggest footprint Americans left behind, most of these Iraqi officials said, was more corruption and widespread money-laundering. To make matters worse, not until 2006 did the U.S. military even acknowledge that their strategic conceptand tacticsin Iraq were not working. It was the Pentagon that opened a contracting office in Baghdad that Bowen said was chronically understaffed -- despite Defense's peak presence in Iraq of more than 170,000 personnel. It was supposed to become a thriving, Western-style economy. In contrast, they proved mostly unwilling to answer the same call from the Bush Administration, especially when Washington rudely and repeatedly emphasized that reconstruction in Iraq would be done their way and no other. What ultimately happened there tells the story -- in a microcosm -- of a substantial chunk of the massive nine-year U.S. effort to reconstruct Iraq, the second-largest such endeavor in history (only the U.S. investment in Afghanistan has been larger). [2] Indeed, perhaps the most tragic evidence of this unrealized potential is that even three-and-a-half years after Saddams fall, with Iraq mired in a deepening civil war and no sign of real progress on the horizon, over 40 percent of Iraqis still clung to the belief that Iraq was headed in the right directionwith only 35 percent saying it was headed in the wrong direction.[3]. It was merely the beginning of the war. Most UN bureaucrats disliked the Bush Administration (if not the United States altogether) and the invasion of Iraq to begin with. Nevertheless, the invasion itself was, overall, a remarkably successful operation, resulting in the capture of Baghdad and the fall of the regime in a little less than four weeks.[16]. As a result, Bowen calls the claims of success "suspect. The Bush administration was never willing to commit the resources necessary to secure the country and did not make the most of the resources it had. More than anything else, this conviction fed the Sunni-based insurgency. At that point, they faced a choice: They could either concentrate the troops they had available on the areas of insurgent activity to try snuff them out, or they could concentrate those forces in and around Iraqi population centers to try to protect them against insurgents and criminals. As former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz noted in an interview with Vanity Fair, the threat of Saddam with weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) was simply the one threat upon which all of the senior members of the Bush Administration agreedand believed that it could be used to justify the war to the public. In this authors conversations with Iraqis both inside and outside Iraq since the end of the war, there certainly have been those who suggested that since most of the conscripts were Shia and merely following orders, the people would have accepted them as enforcers of law and order after Saddams fall. The summary above barely scratches the surface of the many tragic mistakes made in the American reconstruction of Iraq. Two major theories have emerged regarding the American endeavor in Iraq. (Atef Hassan/Reuters), ultimately happened there tells the story. As no orders were issued to the troops to prevent looting and other criminal activitysince it was mistakenly assumed that there would not be such problemsno one did so. It never had to be this bad. Investigations into why Western forces primarily the US and British Armies failed to build effective and accountable Afghan and Iraqi armies have not focused enough on This was the basis of the neo-conservative refrain that the road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad. Likewise, this mistaken conviction was part of the reason that Washington quickly shifted its attention from Afghanistan to Iraq, in the belief that Saddam somehow stood behind both the Taliban and al-Qaida. The Iraqi Army was Saddams Armyand his security services even more soand it is very unclear how the population would have reacted to an American decision to use them to clamp down on civilians after the regimes fall. Many construction projects have been sabotaged. (And Volkswagen began exporting Beetles to American in It was a free-for-all climate best demonstrated when Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, successfully requested that $12 billion in cash be shipped to Iraq. This last point raises another problem that resulted from the creation of the IGC: the marginalization of a number of important Iraqi communities, most notably the Sunni tribal segment of the population. As of this writing, the Baghdad security plan appeared to be enjoying some real success in those pockets of Baghdad where mixed formations of Iraqi and American units were present, but accomplishing little everywhere else. Many factories that were rebuilt around Iraq are now shuttered. Clearly a number of lawmakers "have signed on to this solution," said Bowen's deputy Glenn D. Furbish, a top auditor in SIGIR for the past eight years. Picture Credit: Foreign Policy Reconstruction has made scant progress in war-torn Iraq since the March 2003 US invasion. The result was a massive boost to the forces of instability in the country.[22]. Many of them used their positions on the IGC to engineer their own further political and military (and financial) aggrandizement, so that membership on the IGC became a ticket to political power for those who might otherwise have had none. He was relieved of his charge in June 2003, and replaced by the more senior and more politically savvy L. Paul Bremer. It cannot defend its airspace or its coastline, and is weak in counterterrorism. Indeed, it failed badly in planning for the aftermath of Saddams fall from power. One such project was a $50 million hospital in Basra awarded to Bechtel Corp. "At that time, total, there were 24 people who had died trying to do that children's hospital. Although the decision to disband the Army without a DDR program is the best known of the rushed decisions made during the summer and fall of 2003, it was hardly the only one, and two other important ones bear mentioning. The Defense Department "held decisive sway over $45 billion (87 percent) of the roughly $52 billion allocated to the major rebuilding funds that supported Iraq's reconstruction.". Thousands of reconstruction contracts were awarded. Bowen's interviews with influential Iraqis reveal, however, that they don't seem to have noticed all this investment or don't seem grateful. Reconstruction in Iraq has failed, "dismally", and the US "could not even restore" the countrys electric system or give a majority of its people potable water [EPA] Moreover, they and members of the Security Council were loathe to make the UN subordinate to the United States given both the greater resources and success of the UN in nation-building operations in the past. This was a realistic goal, and Eatons plan was fully capable of achieving it. They then built public support by providing the security and basic services that the government could not, explicitly following the model employed so successfully by Hizballah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories. At bottom, many in the Administrationand virtually all of those leading the march to warsimply did not believe that a major effort at reconstruction was necessary. The first of these was the decision to accelerate massively the training of the new Iraqi Army. American technology at times fell victim to simple Iraqi countermeasuressuch as barrages of small arms fire that effectively neutralized the fearsome Apache attack helicopters that the United States had hoped would pulverize Iraqi mechanized formations. [28], Not everything that Bremers CPA did was a mistake, however. As Bremer and his senior staff have repeatedly argued, and not incorrectly, the Iraqi Army disbanded itself. As noted above, and as should have been expected, during and after the war, most Iraqi soldiers simply went home. It is unclear just how well it might have worked, but it was a clever effort to repair the damage done by the creation of the IGC. In other words, it does not yet look like the point of no return has been crossed. The United States is trying to pressure Iraqis to do more for themselves, including spending their own money. Even by 2006, the actual number of Iraqi troops capable of contributing meaningfully to this operation was probably around 60-80,000. Bremer defended his action, suggesting it was nave to try to impose Western-style accounting practices in Iraq during a war. The last key mistake made in that summer of panic was the decision to create an Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), which laid the foundation for many of Iraqs current political woes. In the name of security and national interests, the West has done a tremendous disservice to its own people as well. Federal investigations have found that the money was quickly spent, with little planning or accounting. Bremers team heard the same thing, and an important element in their decision to disband it was to try to send a signal to the people that the old regime was gone, and the Coalition would be starting again from a clean slate to create new institutions without the taint of Saddam. As a result, "tens of millions of dollars [were] wasted on churning sand" without making any headway, as Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart W. Bowen Jr., described it in his recently published final report on the U.S. occupation. "They actually issued us a site to build a facility that, when we went to the GPS coordinates provided or when we tried to it was discovered that that site was actually not in Iraq; it was in Iran," said Robbins. As it was in the beginning, the end of this story is entirely in the hands of the United States. Studies conducted before the digging of the new pipelines started showed that the soil was too sandy, but neither the Army Corps of Engineers overseeing the effort nor the main contractor at the site, Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), heeded the warning. The November 15 Agreement received a lot of undeserved bad press. US-led bid to rebuild Iraq riven by infighting and ignorance, US government report says. The Consequences of Forced State Failure in Iraq ANDREW FLIBBERT THE WAR IS OVER, but a broad understanding of the American experience in Iraq remains elusive. One reason might be that households -- as recently as 2011 -- still got an average of only 7.6 hours of electricity a day, and a sixth of Iraq's citizens lacked access to potable drinking water for more than two hours a day. Rather than allowing the bottom-up process the time it needed to succeed, they short-circuited the process and instead opted for a top-down approach, in which a new council of Iraqis (what became the IGC) would work with a fully-empowered American viceroyBremerto run the country. [20] However, Bremer had another problem to deal with: Washingtons demands. Last, because too many Coalition forces were off playing whack-a-mole with insurgents in the sparsely populated areas of western Iraq, the rest of the country was relatively denuded of troopsindeed, there were vast swathes of southern Iraq where one might not see Coalition or Iraqi Army forces for hours if not dayswhich allowed the militias and organized crime rings to gradually take control over neighborhoods and villages all across the rest of Iraq. The UN, in contrast, had worked with thousands of people with such skills in Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. They assumed that Iraqs bureaucracy would remain intact and would therefore be capable of running the country and providing Iraqis with basic services. Tragically, Sistanis opposition and Washingtons machinations doomed the November 15 Agreement, Americas best chance to derail the pernicious political system inaugurated by the creation of the IGC in the summer of 2003. What happened? Most did not, but enough did to create some serious headaches for commanders throughout the chain of command. As a result, they fashioned a new approach to Iraqi participation in the reconstruction and the development of the Iraqi political sector, called the November 15 Agreement for the date that it was finally accepted. No single government office has responsibility for such operations, he notes, and no tracking system has been established to help oversee related contracting. An Iraqi government watchdog agency, the Board of Supreme Audit, noted last year that $800 million in profits from illicit activities was being transferred out of Iraq each week, effectively stripping $40 billion annually from the economy, according to Bowen's report. The result was a sort of panic in both Washington and Baghdad, as it became apparent that postwar realities were radically different from the Administrations prewar expectations.
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