US effort in Iraq 'abysmal'

2007-05-22 23:44

Washington - Veteran Democratic congressman Tom Lantos on Tuesday took aim at the Bush administration for "serious misconduct" in its "abysmal" attempt to rebuild violence-shattered Iraq.

Lantos, chair of the House of Representatives foreign affairs committee, accused top US officials of wallowing in the "mud of incompetence" and said they were guilty of "stunning mismanagement" in post-war Iraq.

He used a $6.8m modernisation of a maternity hospital in the Iraqi city of Arbil as a symbol of US failures in Iraq following the 2003 invasion.

Hospital drains were now backed up, spewing overflow water throughout the hospital, and water was contaminated by used syringes, drug vials, and bandages, he said.

'Incompetence'

"This is just one of scores of projects among many so-called 'completed' reconstruction projects in Iraq that are now literally crumbling," said Lantos, at a hearing featuring US inspector general for Iraq reconstruction Stuart Bowen.

"It is simply outrageous that we are mired in the same mud of incompetence that we got stuck in last year and the year before that," Lantos said.

"But knowing the administration's abysmal track record on Iraq reconstruction planning, this is no surprise."

Bowen was asked whether the US reconstruction programme in Iraq could be classified as a failure.

"The short answer is 'no'" he said, but added the effort was "fraught with problems" notably fragile security conditions and rampant corruption.

Bowen, who has compiled a serious of plain spoken reports analysing US failures in Iraq, said it was now time for Iraqi officials to take the lead in framing their blood-soaked nation's future.

Iraqi government must take responsibility

"Although substantial US investment supporting Iraq's recovery continues, the phase wherein the US bears the burden for financing Iraq's reconstruction has passed," Bowen said.

"The Iraqi government now must take responsibility for financing Iraq's national recovery," Bowen said, adding that woeful accounting meant the government in Baghdad had not even spent all the aid money it had been granted.

From a 2006 budget of $34bn, only 67% had been spent. The Ministry of Oil had spent only $90m of its $3.5bn capital budget in the same year, he said.

Bowen faced stiff questioning in the hearing from other US House members.

Democratic congresswoman Lynn Woolsey, a key voice in the movement to get US troops home, said the whole war was a misadventure.

"We should not be in Iraq in the first place," she said. "We have destroyed a sovereign nation, their economy and their infrastructure."

- AFP