why did rebuilding iraq fail

The ability to tap into a much larger network of people with desperately needed skills, by itself, was a crucial virtue of the UN that was lost to the United States out of sheer hubris.[18]. There were too few Coalition troops, which meant that long supply lines were vulnerable to attack by Iraqi irregulars, and the need to mask entire cities at times took so much combat power that it brought the entire offensive to a halt. Several investigations led by Stuart Bowen, the special inspector-general for Iraq reconstruction, have found that the reconstruction effort was riddled with waste, fraud, On August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded the independent nation of Kuwait. While the Administration does not seem to have intended to use the Iraqi army to secure the population, they believed that because it would remain cohesive, there would be little threat from disgruntled soldiers joining organized crime or insurgent groups, as actually happened. The Baghdad rail station was repaired on time and under budget. KBR did not respond to a request for comment. The people had all gone home and most were not reporting to work. Almost immediately, the mistaken assumptions and inadequate planning for postwar Iraq began to plague U.S. actions. Khalilzad and his colleagues struggled against this conundrum unflaggingly, but the challenges were enormous. It was sometimes a tough sell. Average U.S. expenditures for Iraqi reconstruction in 2005, for example, were more than $25 million a day. It disregarded the advice of experts on Iraq, on nation-building, and on military operations. At the very least, we should not assume that the United States has much longer to turn things around. US-led bid to rebuild Iraq riven by infighting and ignorance, US government report says. The Brookings Institution is a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C. Our mission is to conduct in-depth, nonpartisan research to improve policy and governance at local, national, and global levels. But they had enough infra and systems and institutions to avoid what you see happening in Afghanistan. The November 15 Agreement received a lot of undeserved bad press. 1 Aug 2020. U.S. officials did get a number of things right, but they never understood-or even listened to Meanwhile, the Shia militia leaders convinced Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistanithe Marja-e Taqlid al-Mutlaq, the most revered figure in Shia Islam and the spiritual leader of the Iraqi Shia communityto oppose the November 15 Agreement based on the spurious claim that because it did not include direct elections, it was therefore undemocratic and a plot to prevent the Shia from realizing their rightful place in Iraqi society. However, rather than mobilize and deploy additional American soldiersor do what would be necessary to secure greater participation in the Coalition by other nationsWashingtons response was to have Eaton start pumping out as many Iraqi troops as he could, heedless of the fact that the accelerated programs would inevitably produce Iraqi soldiers who were neither properly trained nor fully committed to the mission. More than $1.5 billion in oil revenues may have been lost as a result of the delays. I'm not quite sure what those projects are going to look like,' " said Steve Schooner, the co-director of the government procurement law program at George Washington University Law School. "We have no idea where that money went. It never had to be this bad. He knew that real power-sharing arrangements had to be crafted so that the major figures in Iraq would commit to supporting the governmental structure. Neocons did their best to turn Iraq into a failed state, and it almost happened (and might still). However, because Washington had not allowed enough timelet alone created the circumstancesfor genuinely popular figures to emerge, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) simply appointed twenty-five Iraqi leaders well-known to them. This Iraqi leadership will not save the country. They also have confirmed that billions of dollars were diverted from civil reconstruction to security efforts after the military abuses at Abu Ghraib helped stoke widespread hostility to the U.S. occupation. Plans that began with high hopes and were aimed at improving everything from Iraq's dilapidated infrastructure to its health care and education systems have instead become mired in corruption, waste and mismanagement. The United States has no one to blame but itself. Thousands of reconstruction contracts were awarded. The United States was never willing to commit more than about 150,000 troops, and the Coalition allies never produced more than 20,000. But the group is by no means defeated. It was at that moment, in April 2003, that the United States created the most fundamental problems in Iraq. The US Congress authorized $20.9 billion in civilian funds to help reconstruct Iraq in the three and one half years immediately following Operation Iraqi Freedom in April 2003. While States capacity to handle postwar reconstruction and nation-building probably would also have proven inadequate without massive international cooperation, it was still orders of magnitude beyond what DoD possessed. As a result, the United States created the twenty-five-member IGC and gave it an important role in guiding reconstruction. However, while numbers are always soft in warfare, historically it has required a rough ratio of twenty security personnel per thousand of the population to create such security in both counterinsurgency and stability operations. This was a realistic goal, and Eatons plan was fully capable of achieving it. "You can build anything, and if you just hand it to somebody and they don't know how to operate it, then you really didn't do very much," he said. The result was an outbreak of lawlessness throughout the country that resulted in massive physical destruction coupled with a stunning psychological blow to Iraqi confidence in the United States, from neither of which has the country recovered. He said several other potential sites were in the middle of lakes or riverbeds, while another site was already occupied by a mosque. The Consequences of Forced State Failure in Iraq ANDREW FLIBBERT THE WAR IS OVER, but a broad understanding of the American experience in Iraq remains elusive. One such project was a $50 million hospital in Basra awarded to Bechtel Corp. "At that time, total, there were 24 people who had died trying to do that children's hospital. They then built public support by providing the security and basic services that the government could not, explicitly following the model employed so successfully by Hizballah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories. [8] Likewise, during the 1990s, this author personally heard individuals who would later become senior Bush Administration officials insist that Saddams opposition had doomed American efforts to make peace between the Arabs and the Israelis in the 1980s. Bowen recommends that the Obama administration create a new U.S. office for "contingency operations," and even includes draft legislation on it in his report. Even countries that disagreed with the United States on the decision to invade Iraq were eager to assist with the reconstructionindeed some, like Germany, hoped that their fulsome participation in reconstruction would help assuage the anger that their opposition to the war itself had created in the United States. During its various forays into nation-building in the 1980s and 90s, the United States learned the importance of a Disarm, Demobilize, and Retrain (DDR) program for any reconstruction effort. Such capabilities were resident in segments of the UN bureaucracy and, to an even greater extent, in scores of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have assisted in nation-building around the world in the past. The result was that the United States created a failed state and a power vacuum, which even as of this writing has not been properly filled. In retrospect, the meager participation of the international community was an important factor in the many failures of reconstruction. What was most needed in Iraq by early 2004 and on through 2005 and 2006, were basic security and basic services for the Iraqi people (electricity, water, sanitation, gasoline, as well as jobs, medical care, and in some cases food). Now, its definitive. In unconventional warfareincluding counterinsurgency and stability operationsthe only way to win is to do the exact opposite: remain mostly on the defensive, focus on protecting good guys, and create safe spaces in which political and economic reform/reconstruction can take placethereby undermining popular support for the bad guys. The U.S. military, and particularly the U.S. Army, has never liked unconventional warfare. Yet Bremer knew even less about Iraq when he took charge than Garner had, having never handled operations there before and not even having had the benefit of Garners few months of pre-planning to get a sense of the country. Not surprisingly, the ICDC turned out to be a total debacle: It had virtually no combat capability, was thoroughly penetrated by the insurgents, militias, and organized crime, and collapsed whenever it was committed to battle. For comparison, the U.S. spent less than $35 billion in todays dollars in Germany from 1946 through 1952. It is clear that there were never going to be 450,000 troops available to adequately blanket the entire country,[32] at least not until many years into the future when much larger numbers of competent Iraqi troops would be available. Experts say it will return to its insurgent roots while rebuilding and remains a global threat. Although the early U.S. blunders in the occupation of Iraq are well known, their consequences are just now becoming clear. All of these strategies had been previously employed by the Sunnis themselves under Saddam; thus, the Sunnis became convinced that in the new Iraq they would be oppressed just as they had once oppressed the Shia and the Kurds. The United States has invested more reconstructing Iraq and Afghanistan than it did rebuilding Germany after World War II. In other words, it does not yet look like the point of no return has been crossed. [11] Other members of the Administration, particularly those close to Iraqi National Congress (INC) leader Ahmed Chalabi, saw no need for a major American reconstruction effort, because they hoped to turn the country over to Chalabi and have him run it for the United States.[12]. To make matters worse, officials at the Department of Defense (DoD), the Office of the Vice President (OVP), and some at the National Security Council (NSC) decided that the State Department was against the war and would sabotage their plans to run Iraq the way they saw fit and to install Chalabi in power. A special system of urgent payments by military commanders -- created to tamp down the Iraqi insurgency and known as the Commander's Emergency Response Program -- dispensed $4 billion without any formal oversight. It cannot defend its airspace or its coastline, and is weak in counterterrorism. What happened? The manifest problems in Iraqfrom the looting and anarchy, to the persistent insurgent attacks, to the lack of any progress in restoring basic servicescoupled with the lack of progress in finding WMDs, were putting a serious damper on the Administrations ability to claim that it had truly liberated Iraq and would quickly be able to leave it a stable, prosperous state. U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), now chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said he was astonished when he heard about it. However, Washington did impose conditions on that involvement that made it unattractive for the UN, international NGOs, and a long list of foreign governments to participate. However, in Washingtons fever to churn out more Iraqi soldiers to hold up as proof that no more American or other foreign forces were needed, the Administration insisted on a breakneck pace that virtually eliminated any ability to vet personnel before they were brought into the ICDC. The result was a massive boost to the forces of instability in the country.[22]. Although senior military commanders decided that the State Department would be responsible for reconstruction, thereby alleviating themselves of any responsibility for it, the Department of Defense prohibited Garners team from interacting with Franks staff, while also working to minimize its cooperation with the State Department. It too seems likely to fail as a result of the too little, too late approach Washington has taken toward the reconstruction of Iraq from start to finish. Studies conducted before the digging of the new pipelines started showed that the soil was too sandy, but neither the Army Corps of Engineers overseeing the effort nor the main contractor at the site, Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), heeded the warning. This was the failure to entice, cajole, or even coerce Iraqi soldiers back to their own barracks or to other facilities where they could be fed, clothed, watched, retrained, and prevented from joining the insurgency, organized crime, or the militias. Given the current political environment, I am not particularly optimistic. Article The Seven Deadly Sins of Failure in Iraq: A Retrospective Analysis of the Reconstruction Kenneth M Pollack Friday, December 1, 2006 It never had to be this bad. But after four years and tens of billions of dollars invested in reconstruction, Iraqis have less electricity, less clean water and fewer jobs than they did before the U.S. invasion. Nearly all of the U.S. commitment of $32 billion dollars is spoken for, and large brick-and-mortar projects have given way to more local efforts. Both the CENTCOM commander, General Tommy Franks, and the office of the Secretary of Defense made clear that they wanted to reduce the American military presence in Iraq as quickly as possible, and if there were any serious efforts at nation-building to be made, they were determined that someone else do it. Deputy Under-Secretary of Defense for Business Transformation Paul Brinkley has spent much of the past year traveling around Iraq, trying to revitalize and spark international investment in those factories. The reason for the complexity was that it was designed to exclude the unpopular exiles and militia leaders who had been brought into the power structure through the creation of the IGC and allow for genuinely popular leaders to be elected to new regional and national political bodies.[29]. Instead, the Defense Department put together a small team (about 200 people at the time of the invasion) led by retired Lieutenant General Jay Garner to handle postwar reconstructionat least temporarilyuntil a presidential envoy could be appointed. They used the instruments of government to exclude their political rivals from gaining any economic, military, or political powerparticularly Chalabi, who gained control of the de-Bathification program and used it to exclude large numbers of Sunnis from participating in the new Iraqi government. Bremers early remarks upon arrival in Baghdad were largely focused on the need to privatize Iraqi industry. why Iraq is still a primary focus of American foreign policy. "State's role in managing the reconstruction ebbed and flowed in cycles driven by the personalities involved, with State frequently on the losing end of arguments," Bowen reports. Tragically, Sistanis opposition and Washingtons machinations doomed the November 15 Agreement, Americas best chance to derail the pernicious political system inaugurated by the creation of the IGC in the summer of 2003. ago. [31] Even if one allows that the 70,000 Peshmerga are more than adequate to secure Kurdistan, the rest of Iraq would still require roughly 450,000 troops to achieve such a ratio. Can the Saudi-Iranian rapprochement help address Lebanons governance crisis? Today's strike on a busy shopping centre in Kramatorsk has killed at least two people, Ukrainian authorities have said. Investment in post-2003 Iraq refers to international efforts to rebuild the infrastructure of Iraq since the Iraq War in 2003. Unfortunately, its very complexity doomed it. Bremer defended his action, suggesting it was nave to try to impose Western-style accounting practices in Iraq during a war. (Atef Hassan/Reuters), ultimately happened there tells the story. The small number of officers who understood it were typically relegated to the special forces and rarely ever rose to prominent command positions. What happened? By Abbas Kadhim. However, the Bush Administrations stubborn insistence that the United Nations be denied overall authority for the reconstruction, and that the international community conform to American dictates in Iraq effectively denied the United States their assistance. An Army major who was the main contracting official at a base in Kuwait oversaw fraud in the purchase of bottled water and warehouse construction that involved 21 others. [25] It was a combination of wanting to put the Iraqis out in front so that they would take the heat for the mistakes and problems of reconstruction (some of which were inevitable), and wanting Chalabi in charge even though it had become apparent that he could not get himself elected dog-catcher of Baghdad if he were forced to actually work his way up in a process of bottom-up political reconstruction.[26]. "Everybody felt that there was that need to win hearts and minds and make sure that the reconstruction program was moving forward," said Ginger Cruz, the senior adviser to the special inspector-general for Iraq reconstruction. The result was a series of mistaken decisions in the summer and fall of 2003 that further crippled the reconstruction effort.[21]. Across the board, planning was disjointed, inadequate, and unrealistic. Those that haven't stand idle because Iraqis are unwilling to work there, or they can't get fuel to run equipment.

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