Dan Rather
The problem of Iraq is not one for which obvious solutions are plentiful. But in several post-invasion trips to Baghdad, your reporter heard time and again about one thing that had the potential to improve both the average Iraqi's quality of life and the security situation as well: Turning on the lights, and keeping them on.
More than three years into the United States (U.S.) occupation, electricity production in Iraq as a whole is now above prewar levels. But in Baghdad, the capital city and epicentre of much insurgent and sectarian violence, residents must still make do with about eight hours of electricity a day, which is less than they had before the war.
This telling point is but a small part of a larger picture of the U.S. reconstruction effort in Iraq that is emerging in reports from the office of Stuart W. Bowen Jr., special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.
Signs of greed, corruption
Most of $21 billion allocated for the reconstruction of Iraq has been spent, and almost all of it is spoken for in one way or another. Mr. Bowen's latest quarterly audit of reconstruction activities does reveal some genuine successes achieved amid what are, by any reasonable analysis, extremely daunting security pressures. But the overall impression it leaves is one of an undertaking marked by "mistakes made" and "waste, greed and corruption," in the words of Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who heads the Senate's Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.
This is a story that has been unfolding for some time now, with isolated allegations of overcharging by U.S. contractors briefly making the news before the public's attention moved to other matters. It was just this April, though, that we began to get a hint of the scope of the problem, with the story that a project that was supposed to lay the foundation for a modern health care system in Iraq - the construction of 142 primary health centres - was expected to wind down with about $200 million spent and only 20 health centres completed.
Now come the latest reports from Mr. Bowen's office. Among the recent stories that have emerged from his auditing is one in which The New York Times reported that a State Department agency in charge of $1.4 billion in reconstruction money used, in the Times' words, "an accounting shell game to hide ballooning cost overruns" on its projects in Iraq.
Tens of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars have been spent with the ultimate aim of making the Iraq infrastructure "the best in the region," as President Bush put it three years ago. Mr. Bowen's report, however, reveals a U.S. government that was unprepared to oversee and coordinate such an ambitious project. Now, with American funding running out, new preparations are being made to hand over reconstruction to an Iraqi Government that this same report describes as rife with corruption that "threatens to undermine Iraq's democracy."
The unanswered question
In a war that has claimed more than 2,500 American lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives, it is perhaps understandable that the public focus hasn't always been on money. But one might also ask what effect a better-planned, better-run and better-executed reconstruction may have had in winning over the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, and in consequently blunting the Iraq insurgency in its early stages.
We'll never know the real answer to that question. But we are beginning to get answers to the many questions surrounding Iraq's reconstruction. And three years into the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the lights in Baghdad are still on only eight hours a day.
Dan Rather is an American television broadcaster.
