U.S. inspector glad to see buildings and not rubble

RAMADI, Iraq — Cloudlets of silty dust puffed up around Col. Matthew Dougherty's combat boots with each step he took through a construction site in this provincial capital in the Anbar desert.

If Dougherty, a battle-tested Marine reservist, at times showed flashes of nervousness, it had nothing to do with the security situation.

Instead, it was all about his visitor: Stuart Bowen, 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 U.S. program.

Accompanying Bowen around the construction site for a provincial courthouse and jail complex Tuesday, 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 next month, he said.

But Bowen was pleased. "On Iraq time, two months behind is ahead of schedule," he said. "That's not bad at all."

Through 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 floundering rebuilding program, there were 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 Dougherty, an adviser to the State Department's Provincial Reconstruction Team, or PRT, in Anbar.

"It's good work, for the most part," said 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 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 war-ravaged country.