In Ramadi, Real Rebuilding, With Fresh Paint

RAMADI, Iraq — Cloudlets of silty dust puffed up around Col. Matthew Dougherty’s combat boots with each resolute step he took through a construction site in this provincial capital in the Anbar desert. If Colonel Dougherty, a battle-tested Marine reservist, at times showed flashes of nervousness, it had nothing to do with the security situation in this former cauldron of the insurgency.

Instead, it was all about his visitor: Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the veteran inspector whose scathing reports about Iraq reconstruction projects have provided a chronicle of widespread waste and failure, and isolated successes, in the $50 billion American program.

Accompanying Mr. Bowen around the construction site for a provincial courthouse and jail complex last Tuesday, Colonel Dougherty explained that the first phase of the $21.5 million effort was behind schedule. Because of startup delays after the contract was signed in May, work that should have been finished in October instead may not be done until December, he said.

But Mr. Bowen was pleased. Wading through the dust in penny loafers and a borrowed Army Corps of Engineers hard hat, he offered some encouraging words. “On Iraq time, two months behind is ahead of schedule,” he said. “That’s not bad at all.”

Through Mr. Bowen’s eyes, the reasons for good cheer were all around. Instead of the empty desert or piles of rubble he has found on visits to other construction sites in an expensive and ill-fated rebuilding program, there were actual buildings that smelled of fresh paint. Instead of absent workers and managers visible only on payroll ledgers, there were swarms of Iraqis in blue dungarees working under the watch of Colonel Dougherty, an adviser to the State Department’s Provincial Reconstruction Team, or P.R.T., in Anbar.

“It’s good work, for the most part,” said Mr. Bowen, who as head of the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction has seen hundreds of such projects — and embarrassed many a project manager with his reports — since he assumed his position in February 2004.

At last, in this relatively modest project in Ramadi and in others like it around the country, it appears that some of the lessons that Mr. Bowen and other reconstruction watchdogs have been expounding on for years are being taken to heart. The central question now is whether those epiphanies have come too late to do more than isolated good for Iraqis looking for improved services and infrastructure in their ramshackle, war-ravaged country.

A great majority of the Bush administration’s reconstruction money has been spent, and more than $12 billion of it has gone to just 10 private contractors, Mr. Bowen’s office determined in its most recent quarterly report. Some of the most severely criticized companies to work in Iraq, like Parsons, K.B.R. and the joint venture called FluorAMEC, have benefited from cost-plus contracts, a format that virtually invites abuse, as it allows companies to charge the United States costs plus a fixed profit no matter how poor, even disastrous, the companies’ performance was.

To make matters worse, the Westerners brought in by the companies often racked up huge administrative and security costs even though they simply hired Iraqi subcontractors to do the work and seldom ventured out of fortresslike compounds.

But in what Mr. Bowen says has become a trend, the judicial complex in Ramadi was contracted directly to an Iraqi company, called Almco, was negotiated for a fixed price and is taking shape under the daily supervision of company managers and P.R.T. officials.

The head of the company, Namir al-Akabi, a large, urbane man with excellent English, trudged around with the group during the inspection. Mr. Akabi knows his reconstruction history: he worked with some of the big Western contractors early in the effort and saw their flaws firsthand.

Mr. Akabi said the Western company’s main advantage was that they knew how to write contract proposals in a format acceptable to the United States government. Since Iraqis gained some of those skills, the situation has strikingly changed, and Mr. Akabi appeared momentarily sheepish when someone asked how much business his company was doing these days.

“Sir, total about $300 million a year I am turning over,” Mr. Akabi said finally.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the judicial complex itself is that it is being built in Ramadi, which not long ago appeared so irredeemably violent that it might have been a scene from “Apocalypse Now.” But during Mr. Bowen’s visit, not a single explosion or burst of gunfire was heard.

When asked what the biggest factor was in carrying out reasonably successful projects these days, Colonel Dougherty did not hesitate in his answer: security.

“In the past, you couldn’t get out and monitor projects,” he said. “That makes a huge difference.”

But if there has been one theme running throughout Mr. Bowen’s stream of reports, it is that projects in Iraq have been doomed less by violence than by failures in the everyday tasks of planning, management and construction. For example, his inspection team, part of which was with him, seems to have a particular talent for discovering substandard concrete, nonfunctioning toilets and dangerous wiring.

Appropriately, Mr. Bowen, whose earnest demeanor might best be described as straight out of “Mr. Smith Goes to Iraq,” dispenses with the war-zone panache that consumes so many Western civilians who arrive here with a grander idea of their role. Last Tuesday, protected by a private security detail wearing what appeared to be designer flight suits, Mr. Bowen wore baggy brown pants and a button-down shirt that could have been purchased in the men’s section at Macy’s.

(When asked about his penny loafers, Mr. Bowen denied that he was trying to make a cryptic fashion statement, saying he had simply been in a rush in the morning and put on the wrong shoes. They did allow Colonel Dougherty to display a bit of Southern graciousness as the group wandered into deeper and deeper dust at one point. “I tell you what, since you’re in loafers, why don’t we cut back and get to the road,” the colonel said. Mr. Bowen’s reply: “Good.”)

With Mr. Bowen having recently survived the third major attempt with strong political overtones to shut down his office — allies of President Bush’s White House have never been pleased with Mr. Bowen’s disclosures — it looks as if the rebuilding program will still have to pass muster with his team. The current Congressional mandate essentially keeps Mr. Bowen’s office open as long as there is any rebuilding money to spend. So his office, like the reconstruction itself, still has some life in it.
NYT