Via the NYT: Official History Spotlights Iraq Rebuilding Blunders
Titled “Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience,” the new history was compiled by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, led by Stuart W. Bowen Jr., a Republican lawyer who regularly travels to Iraq and has a staff of engineers and auditors based here.
[...]
In the preface, Mr. Bowen gives a searing critique of what he calls the “blinkered and disjointed prewar planning for Iraq’s reconstruction” and the botched expansion of the program from a modest initiative to improve Iraqi services to a multibillion-dollar enterprise.
Mr. Bowen also swipes at the endless revisions and reversals of the program, which at various times gyrated from a focus on giant construction projects led by large Western contractors to modest community-based initiatives carried out by local Iraqis. While Mr. Bowen concedes that deteriorating security had a hand in spoiling the program’s hopes, he suggests, as he has in the past, that the program did not need much outside help to do itself in.
Despite years of studying the program, Mr. Bowen writes that he still has not found a good answer to the question of why the program was even pursued as soaring violence made it untenable. “Others will have to provide that answer,” Mr. Bowen writes.
“But beyond the security issue stands another compelling and unavoidable answer: the U.S. government was not adequately prepared to carry out the reconstruction mission it took on in mid-2003,” he concludes.
None of this is surprising, but it does confirm, in official form, the ineptitude of the Bush administration’s reconstruction process. It has been clear for some time that administration policies towards reconstruction was a haphazard mess of half-measures and poor (if not nonexistent) planning. And yes, I know that some rightly warned this would be the case from the beginning, and yes, I was not one of them (a failure of analysis that I take rather seriously, by the way, as I should have known better).
Was it not for the economic crisis and the Blagojevich scandal, this report would be a major story. As it is, I expect it will receive far less coverage than it deserves.
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