Iraqi officials in charge of rebuilding their country's shattered and decrepit infrastructure are warning that the Bush administration's plan to divert US$3.46 billion from water, sewage, electricity and other reconstruction projects to security could leave many people without the crucial services that generally form the backbone of a stable and functioning democracy.
Under the plan, which was proposed last week and would require approval by Congress, the money would pay for training and equipping tens of thousands of additional police officers, border patrol agents and Iraqi national guardsmen in an attempt to restore order to a land where lawlessness and violence have replaced Saddam Hussein's repression since the US-led invasion last year.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
But the move comes as a grievous disappointment to Iraqi officials who had already seen the billions once promised them tied up for months by US regulations and planning committees, consumed by administrative overhead and set aside for the enormous costs of ensuring safety for the workers and engineers who will actually build the new sewers, water plants and electrical generators. Of the US$18.4 billion that Congress approved last fall for Iraq's reconstruction, only about US$1 billion has been spent so far.
"Nobody believes this will benefit Iraq," said Kamil N. Chadirji, deputy minister for administration and financial affairs in the Iraqi Ministry of Municipalities and Public Works, which has responsibility for water and sewage projects outside Baghdad.
"For a year we have been talking, with beautiful PowerPoint documents, but without a drop of water," Chadirji said, waving a colorful printout that he received from US officials.
The decision to shift the money, which had been earmarked for rebuilding everything from roads and bridges to telecommunications and the outdated equipment pumping oil, appears to signal an abandonment of the administration's original plan for putting Iraq back on its feet as a functioning nation.
In the original view, restoring Iraq's physical infrastructure assumed an importance equaled only by the US-led military action in creating a stable democratic country and winning the sympathies of ordinary citizens. Propounded again and again by L. Paul Bremer, the top US civilian administrator here until an Iraqi government took over on June 28, that approach assumed that once the conduits for electricity, water, sewage, oil and information were in place, an efflorescence of industrial and national institutions would follow.
But with little actually being built and the deteriorating security situation making it doubtful that anything dramatic would happen if it were, a much more conventional set of nation-building priorities were put in place with the arrival last June of John D. Negroponte, the US ambassador to Iraq. Those priorities are security, economic development and democracy building.
Somewhere implicit in the economic peg of this three-legged stool is the concept, much demoted, of physical reconstruction. And even then, said officials at the US Embassy in Baghdad, the rebuilding is best done not by Americans but by Iraqis, who can not only hone their construction skills but also do the work more cheaply.
"It doesn't matter what we build," a senior embassy official said in a succinct expression of the new principles. "In the end, it's got to be an Iraqi solution."
"I feel a lot better about this mission than I did about `rebuilding Iraq,"' the official said. When asked why, the official said, "Because this one makes sense."
William B. Taylor Jr., director of the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office at the embassy, said the change represented something more akin to a shift in emphasis rather than a complete reordering of priorities.
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