why did rebuilding iraq failstricklin-king obituaries

The IGC set the tone for later Iraqi governments, particularly the transitional governments of Ayad Allawi and Ibrahim Jaafari that followed. As of this writing, the situation in Iraq seems bleak, but there are still areas of progress that could lead one to be hopeful that all is not lost. 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). The seeds of a great many of Iraqs problems lay in this arrangement. Of greatest importance, they convinced themselves that solving Iraqs problems did not require any difficult political, economic, or military decisions, and no matter how much the evidence diverged from their theories, they refused to accept reality and give up their theories. 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. That power vacuum and that failed state allowed an insurgency to develop in the Sunni tribal community of Western Iraq, left the Shia communities to be slowly taken over by vicious sectarian militias, spawned organized crime rings across the country, and prevented the development of governmental institutions capable of providing Iraqis with the most basic services such as clean water, sanitation, electricity, and a minimally functioning economy capable of generating basic employment. [14], As has been documented by many other authors, the result of all this was a fundamental lack of attention to realistic planning for the postwar environment. Both the CENTCOM commander, General Tommy Franks, and the office of the Secretary of Defense made clear that they wanted to reduce the American military presence in Iraq as quickly as possible, and if there were any serious efforts at nation-building to be made, they were determined that someone else do it. Two major theories have emerged regarding the American endeavor in Iraq. The people had all gone home and most were not reporting to work. The violence has also sparked a "brain drain" as professionals flee Iraq, leaving unskilled workers to try to carry on. He was prevented from cooperating with Central Command planners, and many of his requests for key personnel were denied. (Atef Hassan/Reuters), ultimately happened there tells the story. At the political level, the United States actually began to do a bit better starting in 2005. 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. Most did not, but enough did to create some serious headaches for commanders throughout the chain of command. This Iraqi leadership will not save the country. Dismally. Many of the current problems with the virtually unchecked insurgent attacks on the Shia, the explosive growth of vicious Shiaand Sunni, and Kurd, and othermilitias, and the spiraling sectarian violence among them, can all be traced to this mistaken approach. U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), now chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said he was astonished when he heard about it. The summary above barely scratches the surface of the many tragic mistakes made in the American reconstruction of Iraq. It was here that King Hammurabi produced the worlds first written law. The best known of these decisions was the disbanding of the Iraqi military and security services. In some cases, like Chalabi, they were genuinely disliked. They likewise assumed that the Iraqi armed forces would largely remain cohesive and would surrender whole to U.S. forces. While States capacity to handle postwar reconstruction and nation-building probably would also have proven inadequate without massive international cooperation, it was still orders of magnitude beyond what DoD possessed. This was carried over into a larger dearth of planning for the provision of security and basic services in the mistaken belief that Iraqi political institutions would remain largely intact and therefore able to handle those responsibilitiesespecially after Americas Iraqi friends (particularly Chalabi) were installed in Baghdad in Saddams place. The U.S. couldnt even restore the countrys electric system or give a majority of its people potable water. The November 15 Agreement received a lot of undeserved bad press. U.S. officials once described reconstruction aid for Iraq as a gift from the American people. Why was that? Washington insisted that the reconstruction be headed by an American and that all UN and international personnel be integrated into the American effort. One of the greatest problems the United States faced was that it simply did not have enough people who knew how to do all of the things necessary to rebuild the political and economic systems of a shattered nation. However, because Washington had not allowed enough timelet alone created the circumstancesfor genuinely popular figures to emerge, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) simply appointed twenty-five Iraqi leaders well-known to them. The small number of officers who understood it were typically relegated to the special forces and rarely ever rose to prominent command positions. By Abbas Kadhim. 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. 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. [33] Second, because the insurgency grew stronger and stronger over time despite the massive exertions of the U.S. military, Iraqis increasingly began to see the United States as a paper tiger, with a variety of detrimental consequences. Moreover, by insisting that all of the problems of the country were caused by the insurgencyrather than that all of the problems of the country were helping to fuel the insurgencyand that, especially in 2004 and early 2005, the insurgency was really about al-Qaida operatives and former regime dead-enders, the United States concentrated its efforts in the wrong places and on the wrong problems. Yet the invasion was not the war. It was supposed to become a thriving, Western-style economy. 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. 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. 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. 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. On August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded the independent nation of Kuwait. To make matters worse, not until 2006 did the U.S. military even acknowledge that their strategic conceptand tacticsin Iraq were not working. The biggest footprint Americans left behind, most of these Iraqi officials said, was more corruption and widespread money-laundering. They cut deals with nefarious figures, many in organized crime. 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. Some of their rationales for war were quite reasonable: the international consensus that Saddam had reconstituted his WMD programswhich turned out to be entirely mistaken but was considered incontrovertible[5] at the time;[6] the fact that Saddam was one of the most brutal tyrants of the previous sixty years; the fact that his ambitions ran directly counter to those of the United Statesand his efforts to achieve them had destabilized the Persian Gulf for twenty-five years; and the problem that the world was losing interest in keeping him bound by sanctions, as evinced by the postwar revelations of the Volcker commission concerning the corruption and manipulation of the Oil-for-Food program by the Iraqi government to secure the political support of France, Russia, and China, among other countries. 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.". They used the instruments of government to exclude their political rivals from gaining any economic, military, or political powerparticularly Chalabi, who gained control of the de-Bathification program and used it to exclude large numbers of Sunnis from participating in the new Iraqi government. 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. It was as if he had inherited leadership of an Eastern Europe nation that had just shed Soviet-style Communismand not an Arab country suddenly freed from war, comprehensive sanctions, and a near-genocidal dictatorship. "Because of the nature of the original contract, the government was unable to recover any of the money wasted on this project," Bowen said. Unfortunately, in the Iraq operation, the U.S. defense planning system did not work. Unfortunately, the mistakes did not end there. But instead of spending two months to rebuild the span over the Tigris River at an estimated cost of $5 million, they decided for security reasons to bury the pipelines beneath it, at an estimated cost more than five times greater. 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] However, it is essential that the United States recognize that it is perilously close. $60.45 billion has been spent in Iraq, more than $100 billion in Afghanistan. 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. And there was plenty of money to go around, including an initial $18 billion appropriated by Congress. Authors, like Andrew Bacevich, present the first theory1. Washington began to put intense pressure on its small, but constantly growing, staff in Baghdad to produce results, and fast. However, Washington did impose conditions on that involvement that made it unattractive for the UN, international NGOs, and a long list of foreign governments to participate.

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