Life in Iraq a 'vicious circle'
2004-10-14 09:46
Charles J Hanley
New York - The blood of Fallujah, the thunder of Baghdad and the daily struggles of life have been distilled in columns of numbers and pages of dry prose. The experts have taken a hard look at Iraq and they don't like what they see.
Recent in-depth studies - by official auditors and unofficial watchdogs, by economists and lawyers, by pollsters, political scientists and ex-Pentagon aides - find a few good economic signs and some cause for hope in January's planned elections.
Even more, however, they find dashed expectations and rising fears, missed deadlines, mismanaged money and grand schemes lost in the smoke of car bombs and air strikes.
With Iraq so unstable, "there are questions about what options and contingency plans are being developed to address these ongoing and future challenges," the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) observes in a report to Congress.
Iraq a 'dismal failure'
Anthony H Cordesman is more blunt. In many ways the US occupation has been "a dismal failure," this veteran national security analyst says.
His colleagues at Washington's Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) - in a separate 102-page analysis - note that "failure" and "success" are sensitive words as the US presidential election nears. Nonetheless, they conclude, Iraq "will not be a 'success' for a long time".
The Associated Press reviewed a dozen such status reports against the backdrop of non-stop violence in Baghdad and sharpening rhetoric in Washington.
The studies were conducted by US government agencies and private international and US research organisations, in some cases drawn from months of work and hundreds of interviews inside Iraq.
Iraq's 'vicious circle'
Again and again, their focus falls on what the authoritative International Crisis Group calls Iraq's "vicious circle."
"Lack of security leads to lack of reconstruction, which leads to lack of jobs, which leads back to lack of security," the European-based ICG finds.
Perhaps 60% of Iraq doesn't have work. With no jobs, more Iraqis turn to armed resistance, out of resentment of the occupiers and sometimes for money. Insurgents will pay a man up to $100 to attack a US patrol, the CSIS says.
Security has spiralled downward since the US-British invasion of March 2003. Iraqis see and hear it around them - in the car bombings, kidnappings, highway banditry, and in the unrelenting mortar, rocket and roadside bomb attacks on the US military.
From a handful a day in mid-2003, those anti-US assaults have exploded - to more than 70 on average every day last month.
The GAO report, "Rebuilding Iraq," describes what happened:
"The insurgents' targets expanded... The group of insurgents grew... The areas of instability expanded" - from Fallujah and the Iraqi heartland, to Mosul in the north, to Najaf and Basra in the south.
Along the way, the total of US military dead rose to above 1 060, and of wounded above 7 100. Last month American deaths averaged three a day.
More and more, Iraq's US-supported interim government is also a target. An estimated 750 Iraqi policemen have been killed.
Iraqi civilians have 'suffered the most'
Iraqi civilians have suffered the most. Washington's Brookings Institution notes that unofficial estimates range from 13 000 to 30 000 civilians killed by acts of war since the invasion, by both US coalition forces and anti-US fighters and terrorists. No reliable count exists for insurgents killed.
The studies, issued between June and September, repeatedly suggest that two steps taken by the Bush administration last year fed the uprising: the disbanding of Iraq's 400 000-man military, and the stripping of government and other jobs from 30 000 members of the old regime's Baath Party.
"Abruptly terminating the livelihoods of these men created a vast pool of humiliated, antagonised, and politicised men," says Faleh A Jabar, of the US Institute of Peace. "Serious policy blunders," concludes Carl Conetta of Boston's Project on Defense Alternatives.
As the guerrilla war intensified, the US leadership reached a turning point last April, cancelling the planned pullout of some US troops, deciding to keep a force of 138 000 in Iraq until at least 2006.
"How many more US or other multinational force troops would be needed if the security situation were to deteriorate further?" the GAO asks.
US effort 'paralysed'
That deterioration did more than kill people. It also paralysed much of the US effort to rebuild a society crippled by wars and UN sanctions.
"We can't even get out of the Green Zone," one reconstruction official lamented to ICG interviewers, referring to the bunkered Baghdad enclave where the Americans are headquartered.
Even in its makeshift Green Zone offices, the US occupation had problems, Washington auditors found.
The occupation administration, which evolved into a US Embassy this June, usually had only two-thirds of the staff it needed, the GAO reports. And many of those were unqualified.
Outside auditors eventually found, for example, that the Americans operated one $600 million fund, of Iraq's own money, with poor controls and accountability. The occupation's inspector general determined that 67% of one group of purchase contracts had incomplete or missing documentation.
A 'picture of disorder'
It was "a picture of disorder and negligence," says Iraq Revenue Watch, an unofficial US monitoring group. The inspector general says the mismanagement was "not surprising," in view of the "daunting challenges."
From the start, amid post-war looting and arson, one of the most daunting was restoring power, water and sanitation. The Americans' failure to deliver decent living conditions damaged their standing with the Iraqi people. Recent data "suggest a rather severe backward trend" in those areas, the CSIS team reports.
It took months for the electricity system to regain its pre-war generating capacity of 4 500 megawatts. Iraq is still 1 500 megawatts short of the target of 6 000 set for last July 1 - and far short, the GAO notes, of the 7 000-8 000 megawatts Iraq needs.
Iraq a 'powerless' country
As a result, much of the country goes for hours each day without power.
This "raises concerns about the ability of the coalition to support power-dependent infrastructure, improve Iraq's economy, and promote stability in Iraq," the US auditors say.
For ordinary Iraqis, the concerns turn real at the water tap.
The power shortage means Iraq's water treatment plants still don't operate at pre-war levels, the ICG reports. Its sewage-treatment plants are no better, the CSIS says, dumping untreated waste into Iraq's rivers, source of much piped water.
The contaminated water is claiming victims: Health officials last month said scores of Iraqis were stricken with hepatitis E in at least two poor districts. Meanwhile, of $786m in a US reconstruction fund for hospitals, clinics and equipment, only $2m has been spent. As for schools, although 3 100 have been renovated, an additional 12 000 need to be rebuilt or repaired, the State Department says in its latest Iraq Weekly Status Report.
Up and down the budget tables, reality falls far short of plans.
In all, of $18.4bn approved by Congress for Iraq reconstruction in 2004, only $1.2bn has been spent. Even that $18.4bn in aid is just a start: Joint US-United Nations estimates see $50bn needed over four years.
Economic crisis
Little help is coming from elsewhere, in a world largely alienated when President George W Bush defied the United Nations to wage war on Iraq. Of $13.6bn in Iraqi aid pledged by 37 countries a year ago, less than $1bn has materialised.
Signs of economic revival can be found, and the ICG's 28 000-word analysis cites some:
Planeloads of US cash boosted civil servants' salaries sharply, spurring sales of cars and other consumer items; telephone service has more than doubled from pre-war levels; real-estate prices quintupled, and yet inflation is still in check.
Despite more than 100 attacks on oil targets, daily production is back up to 2.5m barrels of crude.
That's still short of the pre-war average of almost 3m barrels, however, and "wholly inadequate to Iraq's needs," Jabar's US Institute of Peace report says.
Studies conclude that whatever the gains, they're overshadowed by $120bn in Iraqi foreign debt, much of which will have to be repaid, and outweighed by the mass of Iraq's unemployed.
Hard numbers are lacking, but the CSIS team's report, "Progress or Peril?", says unofficial estimates on unemployment range from 25 to 60 percent of a work force of some 7 million.
Besides an army of cashiered soldiers, the jobless ranks were swelled by hundreds of thousands of workers from abandoned state-owned factories - bombed in the invasion or looted and burned afterward.
"Iraq's transition to a stable, cohesive democracy is in jeopardy," concludes the International Crisis Group. The way forward is far from clear. "What is most difficult," says Conetta, "is charting a reliable path out of the Iraq mess as we find it today."
Photo source: The Associated Press
- AP