www.nytimes.com/2006/01/24/international/middleeast/24reconstruct.html
Iraq depicts a program hobbled from the outset by gross understaffing, a lack of technical expertise, bureaucratic infighting, secrecy and constantly increasing security costs, according to a preliminary draft.
Forum: The Transition in Iraq The document, which begins with the secret prewar planning for reconstruction and touches on nearly every phase of the program through 2005, was assembled by the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction and debated last month in a closed forum by roughly two dozen experts from outside the office. A person at the forum provided a copy of the document, dated December 2005, to The New York Times. The inspector general's office, whose agents and auditors have been examining and reporting on various aspects of the rebuilding since early 2004, declined to comment on the report other than to say it was highly preliminary. "It's incomplete," said a spokesman for the inspector general's office, Jim Mitchell. "It could change significantly before it is finally published." In the document, the paralyzing effect of staffing shortfalls and contracting battles between the State Department and the Pentagon, creating delays of months at a stretch, are described for the first time from inside the program. The document also recounts concerns about writing contracts for an entity with the "ambiguous legal status" of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the question of whether it was an American entity or a multinational one like NATO. Seemingly odd decisions on dividing the responsibility for various sectors of the reconstruction crop up repeatedly in the document. At one point, a planning team made the decision to put all reconstruction activities in Iraq under the Army Corps of Engineers, except anything to do with water, which would go to the Navy. At the time, a retired admiral, David Nash, was in charge of the rebuilding. "It almost looks like a spoils system between various agencies," said Steve Ellis, a vice president and an authority on the Army corps at Taxpayers for Common Sense, an organization in Washington, who read a copy of the document. "You had various fiefdoms established in the contracting process." One authority on reconstruction who attended the session last month, John J Hamre, said the report was an unblinking and unbiased look at the program. "It's gutsy and it's honest," said Mr Hamre, president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a public policy group based in Washington. Even in the early stages of writing the draft, Mr Hamre said, one central message on the reconstruction program was already fairly clear, that "it didn't go particularly well." "The impression you get is of an organization that had too little structure on the ground over there, that it had conflicting guidance from the United States," Mr Hamre said. "It had a very difficult environment and pressures by that environment to quickly move things." A situation like that, Mr Hamre said, "creates shortcuts that probably turn into short circuits." The draft report is emerging as the rebuilding comes under fresh criticism in the United States and Iraq. Partly because of sabotage to oil and gas pipelines and electrical transmission lines, Iraq's oil exports have plummeted over the last several months, and its national electrical output has again dipped below prewar levels. After years of shifting authority, agencies that have come into and out of existence and that experienced constant staff turnover, the rebuilding went through another permutation last month with almost no public notice. The Corps of Engineers has been given command of the severely criticized office set up by President Bush to oversee some $13 billion of the reconstruction funds. The shift occurred days before Mr Bush said the early focus of the rebuilding program on huge public works projects - largely overseen by the office, the Project and Contracting Office - had been flawed. William H McCoy, commander of the gulf region division of the Corps of Engineers, said Lt. Stan Heath, a spokesman for the corps who has served in Iraq. Officials with the contracting office said the move was natural as more and more projects went from the contracting phase to construction and completion. A spokesman for the office, James Crum, said 1,636 projects of 2,265 originally under the office had been completed.
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