One of Ours

The single greatest error in the Rebuild of Iraq is the lack of speed in processing the US Congress mandated funding ($18 billion in 04) for the Iraqi Rebuild. The Washington DC professional bureaucrats considered the disbursement of approved funds as just “Business As Usual” that has lead to slow political and economic progress, even delaying building security forces...

...U.S. Troops are still in harms way in Iraq. The rebuilding of Iraq falls prey to government bureaucrats, Byzantine contracting rules and politically correct contactor preferences.

I personally worked two programs, one for $110 million and one for $15 million, for security forces for six months. The $110 million was nickled and dimed, bits and pieces according to the desires of accountants, not the people building the seurity forces. Heck, the $15 million for weapons security, a usable program in Iraq, has not been still spent due to financial bureaucratic bungling. Rather than rant, I will say only that accounts and the bureaucracy delayed the implementation of the program...

The real failure in Iraq is in the lack of timely disbursement of funds that allowed chronic unemployment and disrupted services to demoralize a liberated people.

One year after the war, the initial funding has put in more electricity and water capacity than Iraq ever had even before the war. The $18 billion has not yet hit Iraq. The rebuild was not to restore Iraq infrastructure but to have an overwhelming, visionary program to create a representative government within a free economy...