Report Reveals Major Problems With Iraq Reconstruction

Remember when we were told that the Iraq invasion would be a quick and straightforward venture, and that the resulting reconstruction effort would pay for itself? Those notions, like so many others that held sway in recent years, have been belied by the actual outcomes, as evidenced by a new report about the highly problematic rebuilding process in Iraq.

The New York Times:

An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.

The history, the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form here and in Washington among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials. It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag — particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army — the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures.

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