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Analysis: A Reconstruction Abyss in Iraq

Council on Foreign Relations

May 1, 2006
Prepared by: Lionel Beehner

In the three years since the fall of Baghdad, Iraq's postwar reconstruction efforts have suffered from lax oversight, endemic corruption, and reams of red tape. But the biggest threat to rebuilding the country, a new report suggests, remains poor security. "It's incomparably more problematic than either corruption or bureaucratic red tape," says Stuart Bowen Jr., who heads the independent office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), in an interview with cfr.org.

Other problems include a yawning reconstruction gap. Of 142 health-care clinics slated to be built as part of a $243 million Army Corps program, for example, only twenty have so far been completed (NYT). Meanwhile, a $592 million U.S. embassy, inside Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone, went up on schedule (USA Today). Projects involving sewage-treatment facilities and electricity plants have also been shelved or scaled back due to cost overruns and looting, according to this recent RAND report. Security requirements such as guards and surveillance cameras eat up an estimated 25 percent of Iraq's $21 billion reconstruction tab.

The New York Times reports that poor security and insurgent attacks are often the scapegoat for Iraq's reconstruction failures, but that bad decision-making and poor execution are equally to blame. This was the case with Halliburton subsidiary KBR's $75.7 million pipeline project at Al Fatah, part of the $2.4 billion no-bid contract handed to Halliburton back in 2003. Because of ill-advised holes drilled into the pipeline's underground terrain, the Fatah project was sidelined in the summer of 2004. The doomed pipeline has cost Iraq as much as $5 million a day in lost crude oil exports, estimates SIGIR.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2006 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.