[Dialogue] Rebuilt Iraq Projects Found Crumbling

[Harry Wainwright]

 <http://www.nytimes.com/>  <http://www.nytimes.com/> The New York Times
<http://www.nytimes.com/> 

 




  _____  

April 29, 2007

Rebuilt Iraq Projects Found Crumbling 

By JAMES GLANZ
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/james_glanz/in
dex.html?inline=nyt-per> 

In a troubling sign for the American-financed rebuilding program in Iraq
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/ir
aq/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> , inspectors for a federal oversight agency
have found that in a sampling of eight projects that the United States had
declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed because of
plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent
looting and expensive equipment that lay idle.

The United States has previously admitted, sometimes under pressure from
federal inspectors, that some of its reconstruction projects have been
abandoned, delayed or poorly constructed. But this is the first time
inspectors have found that projects officially declared a success - in some
cases, as little as six months before the latest inspections - were no
longer working properly.

The inspections ranged geographically from northern to southern Iraq and
covered projects as varied as a maternity hospital, barracks for an Iraqi
special forces unit and a power station for Baghdad International Airport. 

At the airport, crucially important for the functioning of the country,
inspectors found that while $11.8 million had been spent on new electrical
generators, $8.6 million worth were no longer functioning.

At the maternity hospital, a rehabilitation project in the northern city of
Erbil, an expensive incinerator for medical waste was padlocked - Iraqis at
the hospital could not find the key when inspectors asked to see the
equipment - and partly as a result, medical waste including syringes, used
bandages and empty drug vials were clogging the sewage system and probably
contaminating the water system. 

The newly built water purification system was not functioning either. 

Officials at the oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector
General for Iraq Reconstruction, said they had made an effort to sample
different regions and various types of projects, but that they were
constrained from taking a true random sample in part because many projects
were in areas too unsafe to visit. So, they said, the initial set of eight
projects - which cost a total of about $150 million - cannot be seen as a
true statistical measure of the thousands of projects in the roughly $30
billion American rebuilding program. 

But the officials said the initial findings raised serious new concerns
about the effort. 

The reconstruction effort was originally designed as nearly equal to the
military push to stabilize Iraq, allow the government to function and
business to flourish, and promote good will toward the United States.

"These first inspections indicate that the concerns that we and others have
had about the Iraqis sustaining our investments in these projects are
valid," Stuart W. Bowen Jr., who leads the office of the special inspector
general, said in an interview on Friday.

The conclusions will be summarized in the latest quarterly report by Mr.
Bowen's office on Monday. Individual reports on each of the projects were
released on Thursday and Friday.

Mr. Bowen said that because he suspected that completed projects were not
being maintained, he had ordered his inspectors to undertake a wider program
of returning to examine projects that had been completed for at least six
months, a phase known as sustainment.

Exactly who is to blame for the poor record on sustainment for the first
sample of eight projects was not laid out in the report, but the American
reconstruction program has been repeatedly criticized for not including in
its rebuilding budget enough of the costs for spare parts, training,
stronger construction and other elements that would enable projects continue
to function once they have been built.

The new reports provide some support for that position: a sophisticated
system for distributing oxygen throughout the Erbil hospital had been
ignored by medical staff members, who told inspectors that they distrusted
the new equipment and had gone back to using tried-and-true oxygen tanks -
which were stored unsafely throughout the building.

The Iraqis themselves appear to share responsibility for the latest
problems, which cropped up after the United States turned the projects over
to the Iraqi government. Still, the new findings show that the enormous
American investment in the reconstruction program is at risk, Mr. Bowen
said.

Besides the airport, hospital and special forces barracks, places where
inspectors found serious problems included two projects at a military base
near Nasiriya and one at a military recruiting center in Hilla - both cities
in the south - and a police station in Mosul, a northern city. A second
police station in Mosul was found to be in good condition. 

The dates when the projects were completed and deemed successful ranged from
six months to almost a year and a half before the latest inspections. But
those inspections found numerous instances of power generators that no
longer operated; sewage systems that had clogged and overflowed, damaging
sections of buildings; electrical systems that had been jury-rigged or
stripped of components; floors that had buckled; concrete that had crumbled;
and expensive equipment that was simply not in use.

Curiously, most of the problems seemed unrelated to sabotage stemming from
Iraq's parlous security situation, but instead were the product of poor
initial construction, petty looting, a lack of any maintenance and simple
neglect.

A case in point was the $5.2 million project undertaken by the United States
Army Corps of Engineers to build the special forces barracks in Baghdad. The
project was completed in September 2005, but by the time inspectors visited
last month, there were numerous problems caused by faulty plumbing
throughout the buildings, and four large electrical generators, each costing
$50,000, were no longer operating.

The problems with the generators were seemingly minor: missing batteries, a
failure to maintain adequate oil levels in the engines, fuel lines that had
been pilfered or broken. That kind of neglect is typical of rebuilding
programs in developing countries when local nationals are not closely
involved in planning efforts, said Rick Barton, co-director of the post
conflict reconstruction project at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, a research organization in Washington.

"What ultimately makes any project sustainable is local ownership from the
beginning in designing the project, establishing the priorities," Mr. Barton
said. "If you don't have those elements it's an extension of colonialism and
generally it's resented."

Mr. Barton, who has closely monitored reconstruction efforts in Iraq and
other countries, said the American rebuilding program had too often created
that resentment by imposing projects on Iraqis or relying solely on the
advice of a local tribal chief or some "self-appointed representative" of
local Iraqis. 

The new findings come after years of insistence by American officials in
Baghdad that too much attention has been paid to the failures in Iraq and
not enough to the successes.

Brig. Gen. Michael Walsh, commander of the Gulf Region Division of the Army
Corps, told a news conference in Baghdad late last month that with so much
coverage of violence in Iraq "what you don't see are the successes in the
reconstruction program, how reconstruction is making a difference in the
lives of everyday Iraqi people."

And those declared successes are heavily promoted by the United States
government. A 2006 news release by the Army Corps, titled "Erbil Maternity
and Pediatric Hospital - not just bricks and mortar!" praises both the new
water purification system and the incinerator. The incinerator, the release
said, would "keep medical waste from entering into the solid waste and water
systems." 

But when Mr. Bowen's office presented the Army Corps with the finding that
neither system was working at the struggling hospital and recommended a
training program so that Iraqis could properly operate the equipment,
General Walsh tersely disagreed with the recommendation in a letter appended
to the report, which also noted that the building had suffered damage
because workers used excess amounts of water to clean the floors.

The bureau within the United States Embassy in Baghdad that oversees
reconstruction in Iraq was even more dismissive, disagreeing with all four
of the inspector general's recommendations, including those suggesting that
the United States should lend advice on disposing of the waste and
maintaining the floors.

"Recommendations such as how much water to use in cleaning floors or
disposal of medical waste could be deemed as an intrusion on, or attempt to
micromanage operations of an Iraqi entity that we have no controlling
interest over," wrote William Lynch, acting director of the embassy bureau,
called the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office. 

 

Copyright <http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html>
2007 The New York Times Company <http://www.nytco.com/>  

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