So WHERE DID ALL THE MONEY GO?
"Congress Told of Problems in Rebuilding Provinces" by JAMES GLANZ
As the top American officials in Iraq prepare to deliver a critical set of progress reports, the program devised to rebuild Iraq at the provincial level has gone through three directors in the past four months; much of the staff hired to organize the effort in Baghdad has left; and the agencies in charge are still not coordinating their efforts, a senior oversight official told Congress on Thursday.
The official, Ginger Cruz, the deputy inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, said just 29 of the 610 people deployed in Iraq as part of the provincial reconstruction program have extensive knowledge of Arabic culture, history and language.
[Can you say STOO-PID FUCKING OCCUPIERS?! I knew ya' could!]
As a consequence of those difficulties, Fred Barton, co-director of the post-conflict reconstruction project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research organization in Washington, said at the same hearing that the so-called provincial reconstruction teams, or P.R.T.’s, may have little impact on life in Iraq.
Within days, Ryan C. Crocker, the United States ambassador to Iraq, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander there, are expected to present Congress with keenly anticipated reports on political, economic and military progress in Iraq.
“The idea of P.R.T.’s in Iraq is probably too late to be of much value,” Mr. Barton said. The testimony by Mr. Barton and Ms. Cruz was delivered to a meeting of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee. The chairman, Vic Snyder, a Democrat from Arkansas, said concern over interagency coordination was a prime reason for the meeting, which also touched on the situation in Afghanistan.
The main agencies in question in Iraq are the Pentagon, the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development. But the Treasury and Energy Departments, along with a few others, also play supporting roles.
Mr. Snyder said that as part of what President Bush called his “new way forward” in Iraq early this year, the number of reconstruction teams has jumped to 25 from 10. The new teams are embedded with military units — instead of extremely expensive private security crews — as a way of allowing them to circulate more freely through the country.
[That is where SOME OF IT went!]
Early indications are that some of the new teams are able to move more readily, said Ms. Cruz, who has visited most of the teams in Iraq on inspection tours. But coordination between the military and the civilian-dominated teams has been far from smooth, she said.
For example, when the United States military hands over security operations in provinces to Iraqi forces, there is often little coordination with the reconstruction teams, she said. That leaves some teams with no way to visit the provinces for which they are responsible. Just that situation has developed in the province of Najaf, in the south, she said.
But even with little coherent support from Baghdad and Washington, individual members of the reconstruction teams have carried parts of the effort forward, Ms. Cruz said.
Ms. Cruz said in an interview after her testimony:
“P.R.T.’s are making progress in spite of the system in which they operate. I don’t want to take anything away from the people who, under fire every day, are undertaking this mission and having some successes.”
In a filing with the committee, Mr. Barton said that in Anbar Province, which Mr. Bush visited on his trip to Iraq, progress was possible because several of the new teams were there. The relatively large number of teams in that province, he said, could “create ‘tipping point’ opportunities in a problematic area.”
Still, those opportunities clearly are at risk of being undermined by a lack of coordination among the groups involved in reconstruction.
Just last week, Ms. Cruz said, she went with a young Army lieutenant to meet technical representatives of the governor of Baghdad. When the officer showed slides of his teams’ work in the Baghdad area, she said, it became apparent that the technical representatives were unaware that dozens of the projects existed."
[Tell me again how much progress is being made in Iraq!]
