.Rebuilding effort in Iraq faces roadblocks
WASHINGTON - American concerns about Iraq have focused largely on problems of the insurgency, but just as important for Iraq's future and the U.S. mission is something less frequently discussed: the effort to rebuild the country's roads, sewers and power lines.
Unless Iraqis see successful reconstruction that improves their daily lives soon, experts say, they'll lose faith in the ability of the new society to provide for them.
"The bottom line is we'll be judged on whether the lights are on or not - and the lights aren't on," says Michael Rubin, a former administration official in Iraq, now with the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
"We have promised again and again to get the electrical grid up," Rubin said. "And what you get from every Iraqi; you hear this repeatedly, `You guys can land a man on the moon, but you can't get the electricity up.'"
Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill., an Army veteran and strong supporter of U.S. policy in Iraq, traces the problem to what he calls "unimaginably large infrastructure needs" created by the failure of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to maintain the country's physical structure.
"I remember visiting the power plant in Baghdad," said Shimkus, who has been twice to postwar Iraq. "It was built in the mid-1960s, and the most recent piece of equipment was from 1982. More smoke was coming out the side of that plant than going out of the smokestack.
"And the electrical lines were so old and so decrepit. Saddam made no improvements to the infrastructure of the country. Today it's better. Is it where we would like it to be? No, it's not."
Sen. Christopher "Kit" Bond, R-Mo., who also backs the U.S. war effort, acknowledged that while progress on reconstruction is being made, the effort faces "large challenges" and won't improve markedly until a unified government is formed.
But the problem, experts say, is that the twin challenges of the insurgency and infrastructure are linked in a vicious cycle, with continuing violence complicating reconstruction, and the lagging quality of life turning people against the government. And those factors, in turn, make political stability elusive.
"There is a real chicken-and-egg problem there," said Nathan Brown of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "You can't really do much in terms of reconstruction in the current security situation, but you can't really improve the security situation unless you can communicate to people that there's something in this new Iraq for them."
Areas from electricity to sewage collection are experiencing problems.
"From all the indications we see, things are fairly low, even by prewar standards," Brown said. If Iraq's politicians can't offer their constituents tangible benefits, they won't be able to deliver those constituencies to forge national political consensus and a working coalition, he added. Moreover, Americans will be increasingly discounted as a force for a better future.
"It's leading to a broad disillusionment with the American presence there, with people saying, `You created some of these problems, and you're really not part of the solution.'"
Rubin spent 18 months handling Iraq matters for the Pentagon, with a stint from July 2003 to March 2004 as political adviser at the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Yet he is sharply critical of the results of the U.S. effort to rebuild the country and improve the daily lives of average Iraqis.
"The reconstruction obviously hasn't gone that well," Rubin says. "But we have put together a lot of PowerPoint presentations about the problem."
The importance of electricity, he said, extends beyond lights: "The sewers back up without electricity, the irrigation pumps don't work and the factories close."
Administration mismanagement is partly to blame, Rubin said, including officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development.
"I think U.S. AID in Iraq makes FEMA look competent," Rubin said. "What looks good on paper doesn't necessarily correlate to reality, and too many of the people in Iraq don't know what reality is because they're shut up in the world's biggest embassy and they're not interacting with Iraqis. It's easy to blame things on security problems, but that gets stale after a while."
Agency officials acknowledged that "restoring and improving Iraq's electricity supply has been (their) biggest challenge," despite $1.5 billion provided to the agency to do so. But they cited progress in water treatment, with services restored to 2.3 million Iraqis and sewage treatment restored to 5.1 million.
Improving Iraq's infrastructure is a daily job for Army Sgt. Maj. Gregory Glen, the command sergeant major for the Army Corps of Engineers. Recently back in the United States to attend a conference in St. Louis, the 28-year Army veteran was interviewed while in the Washington area.
His focus is on electrical, water and oil facilities and transportation, Glen said, and he works closely with about 500 Iraqi contractors and others whom he regards as pioneers for their country.
There is a common misconception, he said, that the roughly $18 billion Congress appropriated two years ago would do the job. In fact, the World Bank estimated in 2003 that it would take $50 billion to $60 billion to meet the country's needs, and in fact now it appears it will require "closer to $100 billion."
"The $18 billion is just to get them jump-started," he said.
One key issue, Glen said, is the regional disparity in Iraq, which can feed discontent. For example, in terms of electricity, the goal was to achieve 10 to 12 hours a day of electricity. The current average is 13, he said, but divergent expectations cloud that achievement.
"If you talk to a person in Baghdad who before the war was getting 24 hours a day of electricity, or a person in the provinces who was getting one to three hours, the person in Baghdad is going to be a little more disgruntled," he said.
The initial U.S. effort was criticized for focusing on large capital projects that had little immediate effect on people. Now, Glen said, there's a dual approach, with power plants being done along with small water treatment facilities that can help local areas. Those latter efforts produce "a lot of ownership by the people there, lots of pride," he said.
Glen is in his 11th month in Iraq this time around, after a yearlong tour from 2003 to 2004, when he "had the pleasure of capping that hole (Saddam) was in" after the former ruler was discovered hiding in a hole in the ground.
Despite the "can-do" spirit of the military and progress "here and there," overall reconstruction is lagging, said Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution. He noted a poll two weeks ago by the International Republican Institute depicting most Iraqis as downbeat about the economic rebuilding of their country, citing poor electrical service and a shortage of jobs.
Continuing violence makes it hard to improve the infrastructure for several reasons: Security problems limit what work can be done, resources must be diverted from projects to protection, and what is built risks being destroyed.
The problems stem in part from earlier U.S. policies in Iraq that discouraged countries that hadn't joined in the military invasion from helping to rebuild Iraq, said Lawrence Korb, assistant secretary of defense in President Ronald Reagan's administration. That reduced the assistance available from other countries, he said.
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Unless Iraqis see successful reconstruction that improves their daily lives soon, experts say, they'll lose faith in the ability of the new society to provide for them.
"The bottom line is we'll be judged on whether the lights are on or not - and the lights aren't on," says Michael Rubin, a former administration official in Iraq, now with the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
"We have promised again and again to get the electrical grid up," Rubin said. "And what you get from every Iraqi; you hear this repeatedly, `You guys can land a man on the moon, but you can't get the electricity up.'"
Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill., an Army veteran and strong supporter of U.S. policy in Iraq, traces the problem to what he calls "unimaginably large infrastructure needs" created by the failure of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to maintain the country's physical structure.
"I remember visiting the power plant in Baghdad," said Shimkus, who has been twice to postwar Iraq. "It was built in the mid-1960s, and the most recent piece of equipment was from 1982. More smoke was coming out the side of that plant than going out of the smokestack.
"And the electrical lines were so old and so decrepit. Saddam made no improvements to the infrastructure of the country. Today it's better. Is it where we would like it to be? No, it's not."
Sen. Christopher "Kit" Bond, R-Mo., who also backs the U.S. war effort, acknowledged that while progress on reconstruction is being made, the effort faces "large challenges" and won't improve markedly until a unified government is formed.
But the problem, experts say, is that the twin challenges of the insurgency and infrastructure are linked in a vicious cycle, with continuing violence complicating reconstruction, and the lagging quality of life turning people against the government. And those factors, in turn, make political stability elusive.
"There is a real chicken-and-egg problem there," said Nathan Brown of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "You can't really do much in terms of reconstruction in the current security situation, but you can't really improve the security situation unless you can communicate to people that there's something in this new Iraq for them."
Areas from electricity to sewage collection are experiencing problems.
"From all the indications we see, things are fairly low, even by prewar standards," Brown said. If Iraq's politicians can't offer their constituents tangible benefits, they won't be able to deliver those constituencies to forge national political consensus and a working coalition, he added. Moreover, Americans will be increasingly discounted as a force for a better future.
"It's leading to a broad disillusionment with the American presence there, with people saying, `You created some of these problems, and you're really not part of the solution.'"
Rubin spent 18 months handling Iraq matters for the Pentagon, with a stint from July 2003 to March 2004 as political adviser at the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Yet he is sharply critical of the results of the U.S. effort to rebuild the country and improve the daily lives of average Iraqis.
"The reconstruction obviously hasn't gone that well," Rubin says. "But we have put together a lot of PowerPoint presentations about the problem."
The importance of electricity, he said, extends beyond lights: "The sewers back up without electricity, the irrigation pumps don't work and the factories close."
Administration mismanagement is partly to blame, Rubin said, including officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development.
"I think U.S. AID in Iraq makes FEMA look competent," Rubin said. "What looks good on paper doesn't necessarily correlate to reality, and too many of the people in Iraq don't know what reality is because they're shut up in the world's biggest embassy and they're not interacting with Iraqis. It's easy to blame things on security problems, but that gets stale after a while."
Agency officials acknowledged that "restoring and improving Iraq's electricity supply has been (their) biggest challenge," despite $1.5 billion provided to the agency to do so. But they cited progress in water treatment, with services restored to 2.3 million Iraqis and sewage treatment restored to 5.1 million.
Improving Iraq's infrastructure is a daily job for Army Sgt. Maj. Gregory Glen, the command sergeant major for the Army Corps of Engineers. Recently back in the United States to attend a conference in St. Louis, the 28-year Army veteran was interviewed while in the Washington area.
His focus is on electrical, water and oil facilities and transportation, Glen said, and he works closely with about 500 Iraqi contractors and others whom he regards as pioneers for their country.
There is a common misconception, he said, that the roughly $18 billion Congress appropriated two years ago would do the job. In fact, the World Bank estimated in 2003 that it would take $50 billion to $60 billion to meet the country's needs, and in fact now it appears it will require "closer to $100 billion."
"The $18 billion is just to get them jump-started," he said.
One key issue, Glen said, is the regional disparity in Iraq, which can feed discontent. For example, in terms of electricity, the goal was to achieve 10 to 12 hours a day of electricity. The current average is 13, he said, but divergent expectations cloud that achievement.
"If you talk to a person in Baghdad who before the war was getting 24 hours a day of electricity, or a person in the provinces who was getting one to three hours, the person in Baghdad is going to be a little more disgruntled," he said.
The initial U.S. effort was criticized for focusing on large capital projects that had little immediate effect on people. Now, Glen said, there's a dual approach, with power plants being done along with small water treatment facilities that can help local areas. Those latter efforts produce "a lot of ownership by the people there, lots of pride," he said.
Glen is in his 11th month in Iraq this time around, after a yearlong tour from 2003 to 2004, when he "had the pleasure of capping that hole (Saddam) was in" after the former ruler was discovered hiding in a hole in the ground.
Despite the "can-do" spirit of the military and progress "here and there," overall reconstruction is lagging, said Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution. He noted a poll two weeks ago by the International Republican Institute depicting most Iraqis as downbeat about the economic rebuilding of their country, citing poor electrical service and a shortage of jobs.
Continuing violence makes it hard to improve the infrastructure for several reasons: Security problems limit what work can be done, resources must be diverted from projects to protection, and what is built risks being destroyed.
The problems stem in part from earlier U.S. policies in Iraq that discouraged countries that hadn't joined in the military invasion from helping to rebuild Iraq, said Lawrence Korb, assistant secretary of defense in President Ronald Reagan's administration. That reduced the assistance available from other countries, he said.
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