Studies describe situation in Iraq

By CHARLES J. HANLEY | Associated Press
October 17, 2004

The blood of Fallujah, the thunder of Baghdad and the daily struggles of life have been distilled in columns of numbers and pages of dry prose. The experts have taken a hard look at Iraq, and they don't like what they see.

Recent in-depth studies -- by official auditors and unofficial watchdogs, by economists and lawyers, by pollsters, political scientists and ex-Pentagon aides -- find a few good economic signs and some cause for hope in January's planned elections. Even more, however, they find dashed expectations and rising fears, missed deadlines, mismanaged money and grand schemes lost in the smoke of car bombs and air strikes.

With Iraq so unstable, "there are questions about what options and contingency plans are being developed to address these ongoing and future challenges," the U.S. Government Accountability Office observes in a report to Congress.

Anthony H. Cordesman is more blunt. In many ways, the U.S. occupation has been "a dismal failure," this veteran national-security analyst says.

His colleagues at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies -- in a separate 102-page analysis -- note that "failure" and "success" are sensitive words as the U.S. presidential election nears. Nonetheless, they conclude, Iraq "will not be a 'success' for a long time."

The Associated Press reviewed a dozen such status reports against the backdrop of nonstop violence in Baghdad and sharpening rhetoric in Washington. The studies were conducted by U.S. government agencies and private international and U.S. research organizations, in some cases drawn from months of work and hundreds of interviews inside Iraq.

Again and again, their focus falls on what the authoritative International Crisis Group calls Iraq's "vicious circle."

"Lack of security leads to lack of reconstruction, which leads to lack of jobs, which leads back to lack of security," the European-based ICG finds.

Perhaps 60 percent of Iraq doesn't have work. With no jobs, more Iraqis turn to armed resistance out of resentment of the occupiers and sometimes for money. Insurgents will pay a man up to $100 to attack a U.S. patrol, the CSIS says.

Security has spiraled downward since the U.S.-British invasion of March 2003. Iraqis see and hear it around them -- in the car bombings, kidnappings, highway banditry and in the unrelenting mortar, rocket and roadside-bomb attacks on the U.S. military. From a handful a day in mid-2003, those anti-U.S. assaults have exploded to more than 70 on average every day last month.

The GAO report, Rebuilding Iraq, describes what happened: "The insurgents' targets expanded. ... The group of insurgents grew. ... The areas of instability expanded" -- from Fallujah and the Iraqi heartland to Mosul in the north, to Najaf and Basra in the south.

Along the way, the total of U.S. military dead rose to above 1,060, with more than 7,100 wounded. Last month, American deaths averaged three a day. More and more, Iraq's U.S.-supported interim government is also a target. An estimated 750 Iraqi policemen have been killed.

Iraqi civilians have suffered the most. Washington's Brookings Institution notes that unofficial estimates range from 13,000 to 30,000 civilians killed by acts of war since the invasion, by both U.S. coalition forces and anti-U.S. fighters and terrorists. No reliable count exists for insurgents killed.

The studies, issued between June and September, repeatedly suggest that two steps taken by the Bush administration last year fed the uprising: the disbanding of Iraq's 400,000-man military, and the stripping of government and other jobs from 30,000 members of the old regime's Baath Party.

"Abruptly terminating the livelihoods of these men created a vast pool of humiliated, antagonized and politicized men," says Faleh A. Jabar of the U.S. Institute of Peace. "Serious policy blunders," concludes Carl Conetta of Boston's Project on Defense Alternatives.

As the guerrilla war intensified, the U.S. leadership reached a turning point last April, canceling the planned pullout of some U.S. troops, deciding to keep a force of 138,000 in Iraq until at least 2006. "How many more U.S. or other multinational force troops would be needed if the security situation were to deteriorate further?" the GAO asks.

That deterioration did more than kill people. It also paralyzed much of the U.S. effort to rebuild a society crippled by wars and U.N. sanctions.

"We can't even get out of the Green Zone," one reconstruction official lamented to ICG interviewers, referring to the bunkered Baghdad enclave where the Americans are headquartered.

Even in its makeshift Green Zone offices, the U.S. occupation had problems, Washington auditors found.

The occupation administration, which evolved into a U.S. Embassy this June, usually had only two-thirds of the staff it needed, the GAO reports. And many of those were unqualified.

Outside auditors eventually found, for example, that the Americans operated one $600 million fund, of Iraq's own money, with poor controls and accountability. The occupation's inspector general determined that 67 percent of one group of purchase contracts had incomplete or missing documentation.

It was "a picture of disorder and negligence," says Iraq Revenue Watch, an unofficial U.S. monitoring group. The inspector general says the mismanagement was "not surprising," in view of the "daunting challenges."

From the start, amid postwar looting and arson, some of the most daunting were restoring power, water and sanitation. The Americans' failure to deliver decent living conditions damaged their standing with the Iraqi people. Recent data "suggest a rather severe backward trend" in those areas, the CSIS team reports.

It took months for the electricity system to regain its prewar generating capacity of 4,500 megawatts. Iraq is still 1,500 megawatts short of the target of 6,000 set for last July 1 -- and far short, the GAO notes, of the 7,000-8,000 megawatts Iraq needs.

As a result, much of the country goes for hours each day without power.

This "raises concerns about the ability of the coalition to support power-dependent infrastructure, improve Iraq's economy and promote stability in Iraq," the U.S. auditors say.

For ordinary Iraqis, the concerns turn real at the water tap.

The power shortage means Iraq's water-treatment plants still don't operate at prewar levels, ICG reports. Its sewage-treatment plants are no better, the CSIS says, dumping untreated waste into Iraq's rivers, the source of much piped water.

The contaminated water is claiming victims: Health officials last month said scores of Iraqis were stricken with hepatitis E in at least two poor districts. Meanwhile, of $786 million in a U.S. reconstruction fund for hospitals, clinics and equipment, only $2 million has been spent. As for schools, although 3,100 have been renovated, an additional 12,000 need to be rebuilt or repaired, the State Department says in its latest Iraq Weekly Status Report.

Up and down the budget tables, reality falls far short of plans.

In all, of $18.4 billion approved by Congress for Iraq reconstruction in 2004, only $1.2 billion has been spent. Even that $18.4 billion in aid is just a start: Joint U.S.-U.N. estimates see $55 billion needed over four years.

Little help is coming from elsewhere, in a world largely alienated when President Bush defied the United Nations to wage war on Iraq. Of $13.6 billion in Iraqi aid pledged by 37 countries a year ago, less than $1 billion has materialized.

Signs of economic revival can be found, and ICG's 28,000-word analysis cites some:

• Planeloads of U.S. cash boosted civil servants' salaries sharply, spurring sales of cars and other consumer items; telephone service has more than doubled from prewar levels; real-estate prices quintupled, and yet inflation is still in check.

• Despite more than 100 attacks on oil targets, daily production is back up to 2.5 million barrels of crude.

That's still short of the prewar average of almost 3 million barrels, however, and "wholly inadequate to Iraq's needs," Jabar's U.S. Institute of Peace report says.

Studies conclude that whatever the gains, they're overshadowed by $120 billion in Iraqi foreign debt, much of which will have to be repaid, and outweighed by the mass of Iraq's unemployed.

Hard numbers are lacking, but the CSIS team's report, Progress or Peril?, says unofficial estimates on unemployment range from 25 to 60 percent of a work force of some 7 million. Besides an army of cashiered soldiers, the jobless ranks were swelled by hundreds of thousands of workers from abandoned state-owned factories -- bombed in the invasion or looted and burned afterward.

Ambitious to remake Iraq, the Bush administration dispatched U.S. business planners to Baghdad last year to apply "shock therapy" privatization to the old state-dominated economy, selling off industries to foreigners if necessary.

But the Iraqis resisted, few buyers appeared, and in the end, the U.S. occupation "neither privatized nor relinquished the objective," ICG's Reconstructing Iraq says. "As a result, it failed to devise an alternative approach that might have revived ailing state companies."

Putting masses of jobless to work on reconstruction proved too ambitious a goal. The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad reported Oct. 7 that of 2,400 U.S.-financed projects planned, just 373 are under way.

"We are, in fact, trying to construct under some extremely adverse circumstances," embassy construction chief Charles Hess acknowledged. Skilled foreign workers have been fleeing for months.

The circumstances led the U.S. government on Sept. 29 to take one more step in the "vicious circle," shifting $3.46 billion from electric and water repair to other tasks, primarily security.

Because he is a man of moral clarity and convictions, who does what he says he is going to do and doesn't give a rat's ass what people think. And, he puts his trust in a Higher Authority.

I also feel that the President should be a moral leader as well; thus adulterers and millionaire playboys that marry for money need not apply!

No Curt...you have that wrong. He prays that he will do the right thing. Didn't you hear his answer during the debate? He never said he hears little voices from God telling him what to do. Your comparison between TRUE Christianity and the Taliban and Osama is stupid. They don't worship the same God.

...My point is that all logic and rational thought goes out the window when a person believes that he/she is doing what God wants them to.

Curt, my man...you have a lot to learn. When you think that mere mortal humans know more than God himself, it shows that humanism has pretty much taken over your thought process. If someone prays to God for peace in their decision, and they get that peace, what is wrong with that? You really do have to differentiate between Osama's "God" and the God that TRUE Christians worship.

Curt, there are wack jobs in every religion. You are making it sound like that kind of behavior is prevalent.

Catholicism is a man-made sect.

There are also Baptists, Methodists, etc., that are.

That are...what?

It's a man-made sect of a man-made religion.

Wrong! Not a man-made religion... Christianity was started by Jesus Christ, not by Man.

Ok. I don't understand the point being made.

Jesus Christ was a man...

Died like a man,

There is that jt512 guy...being his usual sarcastic self. Jay, what if you are wrong?

You left out a very important point...he rose from the dead, very much unlike an ordinary man. :)

He's the less offensive of two bad options.

His whole Family SUCKS

Jay, what if you are wrong?

Well, if I am wrong(and I'm not), I am in the same boat as all of you. If you are wrong...you'll burn in hell forever. :evil:

Well, if I am wrong(and I'm not), I am in the same boat as all of you. If you are wrong...you'll burn in hell forever. :evil:

Well, if I am wrong(and I'm not)

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage."

One thing sums up the abject failure of our political machine, and that's the Vote-For-Me-Cuz-I'm-On-A-Stick! Ads. You know the ones. You drive buy them all the time, and it's nothing more than a name on a stick. Sometimes it's a name and an office on a stick. Sometimes there's a party on the stick.

Because he is a man of moral clarity and convictions, who does what he says he is going to do and doesn't give a rat's ass what people think. And, he puts his trust in a Higher Authority.

Kerry, on the other hand, has no moral clarity or convictions, has aever done anything, let alone what he says he is going to do, but who knowsw what he says he is going to do or if he even knows what he is going to do or if he knows what he said he knows he is going to do or what side of what issue he thinks he says he is going to do or...you get my point. And, John Kerry trusts in himself.

No Curt...you have that wrong. He prays that he will do the right thing. Didn't you hear his answer during the debate? He never said he hears little voices from God telling him what to do. Your comparison between TRUE Christianity and the Taliban and Osama is stupid. They don't worship the same God.

Well, if I am wrong(and I'm not), I am in the same boat as all of you. If you are wrong...you'll burn in hell forever. :evil:

In the contest between Bush and Kerry, I am compelled to endorse the president of the United States. Why? Because, while Bush and Kerry are both wrong on Iraq, Sharon, NAFTA, the WTO, open borders, affirmative action, amnesty, free trade, foreign aid, and Big Government, Bush is right on taxes, judges, sovereignty, and values. Kerry is right on nothing.
The only compelling argument for endorsing Kerry is to punish Bush for Iraq. But why should Kerry be rewarded? He voted to hand Bush a blank check for war. Though he calls Iraq a “colossal� error, “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time,� he has said he would—even had he known Saddam had no role in 9/11 and no WMD—vote the same way today. This is the Richard Perle position.

Assuredly, a president who plunged us into an unnecessary and ruinous war must be held accountable. And if Bush loses, Iraq will have been his undoing. But a vote for Kerry is more than just a vote to punish Bush. It is a vote to punish America.

For Kerry is a man who came home from Vietnam to slime the soldiers, sailors, Marines, and POWs he left behind as war criminals who engaged in serial atrocities with the full knowledge of their superior officers. His conduct was as treasonous as that of Jane Fonda and disqualifies him from ever being commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of the United States.

As senator, he voted to undermine the policy of Ronald Reagan that brought us victory in the Cold War. He has voted against almost every weapon in the U.S. arsenal. Though a Catholic who professes to believe life begins at conception, he backs abortion on demand. He has opposed the conservative judges Bush has named to the U.S. appellate courts. His plans for national health insurance and new spending would bankrupt America. He would raise taxes. He is a globalist and a multilateralist who would sign us on to the Kyoto Protocol and International Criminal Court. His stands on Iraq are about as coherent as a self-portrait by Jackson Pollock.

With Kerry as president, William Rehnquist could be succeeded as chief justice by Hillary Clinton. Every associate justice Kerry named would be cut from the same bolt of cloth as Warren, Brennan, Douglas, Blackmun, and Ginsburg. Should Kerry win, the courts will remain a battering ram of social revolution and the conservative drive in Congress to restrict the jurisdiction of all federal courts, including the Supreme Court, will die an early death.

I cannot endorse the candidate of Michael Moore, George Soros, and Barbra Streisand, nor endorse a course of action that would put this political windsurfer into the presidency, no matter how deep our disagreement with the fiscal, foreign, immigration, and trade policies of George W. Bush.

Bush is right on taxes, judges, sovereignty, and values.

Pat Buchanan's thoughts on the subject:

If my choices were Bush or Buchanan, I would vote for Buchanan. That is scary.

Go my entire life believing fairy tales...Burn in hell...

Funny priorities there Jay. :?

Curt, there are wack jobs in every religion. You are making it sound like that kind of behavior is prevalent. .

So your belief is merely a risk-reduction strategy?

If my choices were Bush or Buchanan, I would vote for Buchanan. That is scary.

Blah blah blah... rhetoric.... blah blah blah

Saddam Hussein

Give me a break

Curt, my man...you have a lot to learn. When you think that mere mortal humans know more than God himself, it shows that humanism has pretty much taken over your thought process. If someone prays to God for peace in their decision, and they get that peace, what is wrong with that? You really do have to differentiate between Osama's "God" and the God that TRUE Christians worship.