By Abbas Kadhim. Some were no-bid, such as the $1.4 billion contract handed to Halliburton to rebuild Iraq's oil industry. "Basically, these were contracts that said to a contractor, 'I'm going to have hundreds of projects all over the country. 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. They whispered to the press that it was his execution and not their unrealistic expectations and inadequate preparations that were to blame. This was the failure to entice, cajole, or even coerce Iraqi soldiers back to their own barracks or to other facilities where they could be fed, clothed, watched, retrained, and prevented from joining the insurgency, organized crime, or the militias. Had the UN asked those people to help in Iraq, they probably would have come. However, with the militia leaders running the central government, they had absolutely no interest in having it acquire such capacity, because doing so would mean the loss of their own power bases. He also knew that the Iraqi people needed to be provided with basic security and basic services or they would begin to turn to warlords and militia leaders instead. [15], All of these bad ideasthe products of arrogance and ignorancebegan to bear tragic fruit during and immediately after the invasion of Iraq. However, the unhappiness of Iraqis, Americans, and others with the course of reconstruction after the fall of Saddam, coupled with the desire of Ahmed Chalabi and his allies to see him installed in power, led Washington to insist on a change. Thus for nearly all of 2004 and 2005, Coalition forces were inordinately concentrated in western Iraq, romping around the Sunni triangle trying to catch and kill insurgents. Many construction projects have been sabotaged. Yet Bremer knew even less about Iraq when he took charge than Garner had, having never handled operations there before and not even having had the benefit of Garners few months of pre-planning to get a sense of the country. Thus, to some extent, the decision merely reflected the reality of the situation. The agencies formally charged with dispensing foreign aid -- the State Department and the Agency for International Development -- played only a minor role in these accounting shortfalls, because they spent less than a fifth of the reconstruction funds. In all of these societies, it took years to allow new leaders to emerge from the people. Hutchins Roundup: Climate-induced losses, Russian oil price cap, and more, Addressing urgent challenges for the healthcare supply chain, Spurred by federal legislation, new industrial investments are reaching a wide swath of the country. [20] However, Bremer had another problem to deal with: Washingtons demands. Iraq A worker rebuilds a house destroyed during the fighting between Iraqi forces and Islamic state fighters, eastern Mosul, Iraq, April 21, 2017. In particular, throughout 2004-05, Administration officials believed that the problems besetting Iraq were almost entirely the fault of the Iraqi insurgency, which they maintained was largely driven by al-Qaida and by a small number of former regime figures. Likewise, they had no incentive to cut real deals with their adversaries, particularly the Sunni tribal leaders, because doing so would bring them into the government, giving them access to the same power and graft, and thereby creating a threat to their growing control of the country and its resources. It is clear that there were never going to be 450,000 troops available to adequately blanket the entire country,[32] at least not until many years into the future when much larger numbers of competent Iraqi troops would be available. The November 15 Agreement received a lot of undeserved bad press. The ability to tap into a much larger network of people with desperately needed skills, by itself, was a crucial virtue of the UN that was lost to the United States out of sheer hubris.[18]. With the U.S. military now gone from Iraq and the 10th anniversary of the invasion only days away, Bowen's retrospective summary of his audits offers useful insights into how well the U.S. government managed its occupation and the legacy it left behind. However, while numbers are always soft in warfare, historically it has required a rough ratio of twenty security personnel per thousand of the population to create such security in both counterinsurgency and stability operations. However, that is decidedly not the view of the experts, the journalists covering the story, or the practitioners who went to Iraq to put the country back together after the 2003 invasion. 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. In other words, it does not yet look like the point of no return has been crossed. On August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded the independent nation of Kuwait. Most of the Administrations chief Iraq hawks shared a deeply naive view that the fall of Saddam and his top henchmen would have relatively little impact on the overall Iraqi governmental structure. The purpose of such a program is to take the soldiers and officers of the old army and put them into a long-term program of transition so that they can eventually be reintegrated into the society with the skills needed to find themselves jobs as civilians. Even so, the expectations for reconstructing Iraq were enormous, as was the pressure from Congress and the administration to show tangible results. The persistence of these problems over time led to the emergence of low-level civil war in Iraq, and it now threatens to plunge the country into a Bosnia- or Lebanon-like maelstrom. Continuing US military operations against the Iraqi resistance have destroyed urban centers such as Fallujah, Ramadi and Najaf and Thus, on the political side the United States came to the right idea much sooner than was the case on the military side, but the initial mistakes of the wrong ideas created a set of circumstances that has so far made it impossible to actually achieve what they knew to be the right goals. This decision actually requires a bit of explanation in order to understand the problematic facets of it. The oil industry is not a big employer, however, and "Iraq is still far from having a vibrant, market-based private sector," Bowen reports. In the crisis atmosphere pervading the reconstruction effort for most of the decade, Pentagon contracts were often open-ended, with vague demands and no precise deadlines. What happened? The purpose of the ICDC was to provide local militia forceslike those used successfully in many other counterinsurgency and stability operations around the worldas adjuncts to the national military forces. $60.45 billion has been spent in Iraq, more than $100 billion in Afghanistan. The episode is, in short, emblematic of the contracting abuses and mismanagement that wasted at least $8 billion of the $60 billion spent by Washington on Iraq's post-war recovery, under the guidance of what Bowen describes in his report as "adhocracy" largely controlled by the U.S. military -- a structure that never "coalesced into a coherent whole" and often failed to achieve its aims. Instability in Iraq | Global Conflict Tracker - Council on Climate change, food insecurity, and migration in the Middle East, Migrants, Refugees & Internally Displaced Persons, Afghanistans twin human rights and humanitarian crises. US-led bid to rebuild Iraq riven by infighting and ignorance, US government report says. What Went Wrong in Iraq ", Only retired Army Gen. David Petraeus, who commanded U.S. forces in Iraq before shifting to Afghanistan and then briefly directing the CIA, was ebullient, claiming the effort had brought "colossal benefits to Iraq. Kellogg Brown and Root was among a handful of large contractors that kept winning U.S. funds, despite repeated claims by the Pentagon and others of overcharging by the firm and its subcontractors. Perhaps at some point in the future, revisionist historians will try to claim that the effort was doomed from the start, that it never was possible to build a stable, let alone pluralistic, new Iraq in the rubble of Saddam Husseins fall. However, neither the UN, the international NGOs, nor many other governments were interested in working under these conditions. They built up their militias and insinuated them into the various security services. There was so much potential in Iraq. Defense officials also could not produce documents supporting their expenditure of over $100 million in cash found in a vault at the Republican Palace, the gilded Saddam Hussein parlor that became a headquarters of the occupation. IRAQ A sort-of elected government was more or less in place, and in the press interviews I did in response to my book I was regularly required to defend its thesis that reconstruction in Iraq had failed almost totally, and that the same process was going down in Afghanistan as well. Although the contracts had provisions allowing their conversion to fixed-price awards after some of the work was completed, "the government failed to exercise these options," Bowen's report said. Not surprisingly, the ICDC turned out to be a total debacle: It had virtually no combat capability, was thoroughly penetrated by the insurgents, militias, and organized crime, and collapsed whenever it was committed to battle. As a result, Bowen calls the claims of success "suspect. The office nonetheless shoveled money out the door at such a high rate and with so little accountability that by 2005, the U.S. embassy there was incapable of matching "projects with the contracts that funded them," according to Bowen's report. A firm based in Dubai managed to keep around $4 billion in Pentagon construction contracts, for example, despite routinely marking up the price of switches and plumbing parts between 3,000 and 12,000 percent, according to an audit Bowen conducted in 2011. Meanwhile, the Shia militia leaders convinced Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistanithe Marja-e Taqlid al-Mutlaq, the most revered figure in Shia Islam and the spiritual leader of the Iraqi Shia communityto oppose the November 15 Agreement based on the spurious claim that because it did not include direct elections, it was therefore undemocratic and a plot to prevent the Shia from realizing their rightful place in Iraqi society. Much of $60B from U.S. to rebuild Iraq wasted, special 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). In nearly every previous instance of state failure and civil war, observers on the scene and experts elsewhere failed to recognize that they had passed the point of no returnwhen disaster became inevitableuntil long after they had done so. Bowen's report indirectly assigns blame for mismanaging the endeavor to the Bush White House, which had the authority to force U.S. government agencies to coordinate their work but failed to exercise it. The best way for the federal government to rid the country of the problem of the militias was to acquire the capacity to provide both the security and the services for the Iraqi people so that they would not have to rely on the militias. Thus one of the many Catch-22s of U.S. prewar planning for postwar Iraq is that while neither the military nor the civilian leadership of the Pentagon was interested in nation-building, they were absolutely determined to exclude those agencies that were both more willing and more able. The result was a series of mistaken decisions in the summer and fall of 2003 that further crippled the reconstruction effort.[21]. It never had to be this bad. However, the Bush Administrations stubborn insistence that the United Nations be denied overall authority for the reconstruction, and that the international community conform to American dictates in Iraq effectively denied the United States their assistance. Instead, the Defense Department put together a small team (about 200 people at the time of the invasion) led by retired Lieutenant General Jay Garner to handle postwar reconstructionat least temporarilyuntil a presidential envoy could be appointed. Although senior military commanders decided that the State Department would be responsible for reconstruction, thereby alleviating themselves of any responsibility for it, the Department of Defense prohibited Garners team from interacting with Franks staff, while also working to minimize its cooperation with the State Department. The rise and fall of the Islamic State group: The long and short Several investigations led by Stuart Bowen, the special inspector-general for Iraq reconstruction, have found that the reconstruction effort was riddled with waste, fraud, corruption and shoddy construction. Lesson 1: Lack of a clear strategy Right from the outset, the U.S. government never formed a coherent strategy to rebuild Afghanistan, SIGAR wrote. In 2004-05, the Bush Administration largely convinced itself that the problems besetting Iraq were not as great as their critics claimed. The U.S. couldn't even restore the country's electric system or give a majority of its people potable water. [19] The Administration did look briefly to Ahmed Chalabi and his INC to fill the void, flying Chalabi and 400 of his personnel into al-Nasiriyah early in the war. It was at that moment, in April 2003, that the United States created the most fundamental problems in Iraq. The buildings had been ransacked by looters. A US government report blames Iraq for failure in reconstruction works. In November 2003, Bremer and his team appear to have recognized the Frankensteins monster that had been created in the IGCsomething that Bremer reportedly opposed from the start. Russia-Ukraine war latest: People 'screaming under rubble' after Not surprisingly, many of the Sunni officers were humiliated by how they were treated and went home to their tribes in al-Anbar province and joinedalong with their sons, cousins, and nephewsthe burgeoning Sunni insurgency. Those members of the IGC who knew they could not get elected in a truly representative system began lobbying heavily with their allies in Washington and in the Green Zone in Baghdad. Those who did rise to the top were those steeped in the principles of conventional warfare, which Army ideology insisted was universally applicable, including in unconventional operations, even when centuries of history made it abundantly clear that this was not the case. By abruptly disbanding the military and security services without a DDR program, the United States turned as many as one million Iraqi men loose on the streets with no money, no way of supporting their families, and no skills other than how to use a shovel and a gun. More than $1.5 billion in oil revenues may have been lost as a result of the delays. However, soon after the program had started running, Eaton was suddenly ordered to accelerate his training program so that he could produce twenty-seven battalions in only nine months. The appointment of Zalmay Khalilzad as ambassador to Baghdad to succeed Bremer as the head of the civilian side of the U.S. reconstruction effort proved to be an inspired choice. Can the Saudi-Iranian rapprochement help address Lebanons governance crisis? "Because of the nature of the original contract, the government was unable to recover any of the money wasted on this project," Bowen said.

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