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US to shift funds to raise Iraqi security

The Bush administration said on Tuesday that it would shift nearly 20 percent of its aid budget for Iraq out of reconstruction projects and into security and short-term job-creation programs, acknowledging that continued violence threatened its plans for elections early next year.

The State Department said it would ask Congress to take US$3.46 billion out of the US$18.4 billion aid package that President George W. Bush signed into law last November and authorize its use to speed the training of Iraqi security and police personnel, create temporary public works programs and take other steps to help stabilize the country. Officials said the money would come mainly out of plans to build water and sewer systems and repair and modernize the electricity system.

"The security situation presents the most serious obstacle to reconstruction and economic and political development in Iraq," said Marc Grossman, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, who said the decision was made after consultations with American military commanders and the Iraqi government.

"They decided that without a significant re-allocation of resources to the security and law enforcement sectors, the short-term stability of Iraq would be compromised and the longer-term prospects for a free and democratic Iraq undermined," Grossman said at a news conference.

The announcement came on a day when attacks by insurgents left dozens of Iraqis dead, many of them police recruits or officers, underscoring the difficulties and dangers of trying to shift all responsibility for security to the Iraqis. Saboteurs also temporarily knocked out much of the nation's electricity supply through an attack on an oil pipeline.

Democrats said the change was evidence that the administration was grasping for solutions to a situation that was not getting any better.

The announcement "is an acknowledgment that the current situation in Iraq represents a failure of the administration's plan to bring stability and democracy to Iraq," Representative Nita Lowey of New York, the senior Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee's foreign operations subcommittee, said in a statement.

Noting that the US has spent only about US$1 billion of the US$18.4 billion aid package so far while the costs of the war are running billions of dollars a month, she added: "This has not gotten results. Right now, violence is rampant, many Iraqis live without basic services, and we have failed to turn Iraqi public opinion in our favor."

But the administration's package appeared likely to win the backing of the Republican-controlled Congress. Representative Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., chairman of the foreign operations subcommittee, backed the proposal. He said that it was unclear whether the money could make a difference quickly enough to ensure that elections go ahead as planned, but that the US had to recognize that it was facing a different situation from what it had assumed when it drew up reconstruction plans last year.
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