The basic story of the American reconstruction effort in Iraq has been for massive levels of incompetence, gross mismanagement, fraud, insecurity and chaos to siphon off funds from most projects that US planners at one point wanted to complete. This failure to provide basic infrastructure services delegitimatizes the Iraqi government and the US military while feeding into multiple narratives that are negative to US security. However every now and then there will be a couple of positive projects completed, most notably the schools that have been painted.
Whoops!!!
The New York Times is reporting that a significant number of completed reconstruction projects are complete failures when the project is re-inspected six months or more after its completion date. Some of the failures are a lack of security for the foreign contractors, other failures are traced to a lack of maitenance and repair funds, while other projects are attacked by insurgents.
Whoops -- there goes another $20 billion dollars down the drain.
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