Fast Iraq reconstruction could mean lost money

By Sonya Ross
The Associated Press

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U.S. officials now say speeding up the power transfer requires getting Iraqis more involved in setting the priorities for reconstruction — an idea the Bush administration once rebuffed. "There are lots of activities that they're already taking. Expect them to take more," President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said last week.

Many observers caution that the climate in Iraq is ripe for corruption. They say moving reconstruction along too quickly, without proper oversight, means a lot of money will be lost. And if too much money goes down the drain the postwar Iraqi government will suffer as well.

"We have a sort of 'obligate-it-and-forget-it' approach to a lot of this," said Anthony Cordesman, a former State and Defense Department official who just returned from a visit to Iraq with a firsthand assessment of the reconstruction.

Cordesman says the United States does not effectively monitor Iraqi perceptions of the reconstruction, nor has it properly assessed what rebuilding needs to be done first. There are not enough experienced experts in the country to ensure the work gets done correctly, there still is warfare and the civilian contractors who are there "are not about to go into the field without an armed escort."

"It is always wasteful to half-fix something, or to design a system which really isn't all that good and doesn't meet international standards. But, if you need something now, you may be better off with the mediocre rather than the good," Cordesman said. "Either trade-off I don't see being made very well."

The bulk of an extra $87 billion allocated recently by Congress will be devoted to Iraq, and the contracts this type of money produces are beyond the reach of many companies — particularly those in other countries — and beyond the comprehension of most American taxpayers, said Lloyd Dumas, an economist at the University of Texas in Dallas.

The Iraqis say they are concerned that this money will be mismanaged — for example, they have complained that it was unnecessary to train 35,000 Iraqi police in nearby Jordan at a cost of $1.2 billion, Dumas said.

"The Iraqis said we could have done it much cheaper in Iraq. The French and the Germans offered to do it for nothing," Dumas said.

"We're spending money in Iraq like drunken sailors," he said. "We're trying to create a democracy in Iraq, we're trying to create a competitive economy. We have to use a process that is competitive and open. That's not what we've been doing."

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