PHA-Exchange> Iraq UPDATE: Iraq is worse off than before the war began, GAO reports

[UNNIKRISHNAN P.V. (Dr)]

Source: boycott-bush-international-network at lists.riseup.net>

Iraq is worse off than before the war began, GAO reports


 By Seth Borenstein
 
 Knight Ridder Newspapers
 
 WASHINGTON - In a few key areas - electricity, the judicial system and overall
> security - the Iraq that America handed back to its residents Monday is worse
> off than before the war began last year, according to calculations in a new
> General Accounting Office report released Tuesday.
> 
> The 105-page report by Congress' investigative arm offers a bleak assessment
> of Iraq after 14 months of U.S. military occupation. Among its findings:
> 
> -In 13 of Iraq's 18 provinces, electricity was available fewer hours per day
> on average last month than before the war. Nearly 20 million of Iraq's 26
> million people live in those provinces.
> 
> -Only $13.7 billion of the $58 billion pledged and allocated worldwide to
> rebuild Iraq has been spent, with another $10 billion about to be spent. The
> biggest chunk of that money has been used to run Iraq's ministry operations.
> 
> -The country's court system is more clogged than before the war, and judges
> are frequent targets of assassination attempts.
> 
> -The new Iraqi civil defense, police and overall security units are suffering
> from mass desertions, are poorly trained and ill-equipped.
> 
> -The number of what the now-disbanded Coalition Provisional Authority called
> significant insurgent attacks skyrocketed from 411 in February to 1,169 in May.
> 
> The report was released on the same day that the CPA's inspector general
> issued three reports that highlighted serious management difficulties at the
> CPA. The reports found that the CPA wasted millions of dollars at a Hilton
> resort hotel in Kuwait because it didn't have guidelines for who could stay
> there, lost track of how many employees it had in Iraq and didn't track
> reconstruction projects funded by international donors to ensure they didn't
> duplicate U.S. projects.
> 
> Both the GAO report and the CPA report said that the CPA was seriously
> understaffed for the gargantuan task of rebuilding Iraq. The GAO report
> suggested the agency needed three times more employees than what it had. The
> CPA report said the agency believed it had 1,196 employees, when it was
> authorized to have 2,117. But the inspector general said CPA's records were so
> disorganized that it couldn't verify its actual number of employees.
> 
> GAO Comptroller General David Walker blamed insurgent attacks for many of the
> problems in Iraq. "The unstable security environment has served to slow down
> our rebuilding and reconstruction efforts and it's going to be of critical
> importance to provide more stable security," Walker told Knight Ridder
> Newspapers in a telephone interview Tuesday.
> 
> "There are a number of significant questions that need to be asked and
> answered dealing with the transition (to self-sovereignty)," Walker said. "A
> lot has been accomplished and a lot remains to be done."
> 
> The GAO report is the first government assessment of conditions in Iraq at the
> end of the U.S. occupation. It outlined what it called "key challenges that
> will affect the political transition" in 10 specific areas.
> 
> The GAO gave a draft of the report to several different government agencies,
> but only the CPA offered a major comment: It said the report "was not
> sufficiently critical of the judicial reconstruction effort."
> 
> "The picture it paints of the facts on the ground is one that neither the CPA
> nor the Bush administration should be all that proud of," said Peter W.
> Singer, a national security scholar at the centrist Brookings Institution. "It
> finds a lot of problems and raises a lot of questions."
> 
> One of the biggest problems, Singer said, is that while money has been pledged
> and allocated, not much has been spent. The GAO report shows that very little
> of the promised international funds - most of which are in loans - has been
> spent or can't be tracked. The CPA's inspector general found the same thing.
> 
> "When we ask why are things not going the way we hoped for," Singer said, "the
> answer in part of this is that we haven't actually spent what we have in pocket."
> 
> He said the figures on electricity "make me want to cry."
> 
> Steven Susens, a spokesman for the Program Management Office, which oversees
> contractors rebuilding Iraq, conceded that many areas of Iraq have fewer hours
> of electricity now than they did before the war. But he said the report, based
> on data that's now more than a month old, understates current electrical
> production. He said some areas may have reduced electricity availability
> because antiquated distribution systems had been taken out of service so they
> could be rebuilt.
> 
> "It's a slow pace, but it's certainly growing as far as we're concerned,"
> Susens said.
> 
> Danielle Pletka, the vice president of foreign and defense policy studies at
> the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said other issues are more
> important than the provision of services such as electricity. She noted that
> Iraqis no longer live in fear of Saddam Hussein.
> 
> "It's far better to live in the dark than it is to run the risk that your
> mother, father, brother, sister, husband or wife would be taken away never to
> be seen again," Pletka said.
> 
> Pletka pointed to a Pentagon slide presentation that detailed increases and
> improvement in telephone subscribers, water service, food, health care and
> schools in Iraq.
> 
> But Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign
> Relations Committee that asked for the GAO report, said the report showed
> major problems.
> 
> "So while we've handed over political sovereignty, we haven't handed over
> practical capacity - that is, the ability for the Iraqis themselves to provide
> security, defend their borders, defeat the insurgency, deliver basic services,
> run a government and set the foundation for economic progress," Biden said in
> a written statement. "Until Iraqis can do all of that, it will be impossible
> for us to responsibly disengage from Iraq."
> 
> ---
> 
> The GAO report can be found at
> 
> http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d04902r.pdf 
> 
> http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/9041465.htm(c)
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