A thorough draft of a federal report on rebuilding Iraq authored by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction has fallen into the hands of a NY Times reporter while circulating around Washington D.C. The 500+ page report is comically stamped "NOT FOR FURTHER DISTRIBUTION" in the header, but, lucky for us, it has been distributed further, and it’s brimming with gems. The following are some of the juiciest findings as reported by the NY Times:
- Pentagon officials, who were charged with nation-building in Iraq, rejected the concept of nation building. The natural result was the squandering of 100 billion reconstruction dollars as violence escalated, infrastructure deteriorated and Pentagon planners flatulated.
- When the failure to reach reconstruction goals (e.g., rebuilding Iraqi police and army) became apparent, the Pentagon fudged its metrics to shield its failures from public scrutiny. According to a flustered Colin Powell at the time:
"kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces — the number would jump 20,000 a week! ‘We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.’ "
- Amazingly, the US still lacks the "policies and technical capacity," as well as the "organizational structure" required to implement a project billed as "the largest foreign reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan."
- Overall, the reconstruction "never did much more than restore what was destroyed during the invasion" and subsequent looting.
- To date, no single agency in the US government is accountable for reconstruction in Iraq.
- The manner in which reconstruction projects were allocated was likened to the Sopranos.
- Extreme partisanship guided the funding for reconstruction.
- Rumsfeld, that moronic buffoon, was in denial that the Iraq reconstruction would cost "billions" in US dollars
draft report on Iraqi reconstruction boondoggle (pdf)