5 years and $100 billion into the Iraq occupation we hadn't fixed what we destroyed while invading

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2008/12/14/Iraq_reconstruction_called_100B_failure/UPI-85441229260820/

Iraq reconstruction called $100B failure

Published: Dec. 14, 2008 at 8:20 AM

WASHINGTON, Dec. 14 (UPI) -- U.S. efforts to rebuild Iraq have been a $100 billion failure, hampered by poor pre-invasion planning and ongoing turf wars, a federal report says. snip

Five years after the invasion of Iraq, the report contends, rather than helping to build the country into a modern democracy, the reconstruction program has never been successful at more than restoring some of the infrastructure destroyed in the 2003 invasion and the looting that followed, the Times said.

[lapfog_1]

1. It's real hard to bring back the dead

or repair a little girl's missing legs or arms.

Wonder how much that costs?

[dpbrown]

2. In other words, Iraqis have less power and less clean water and less safety than they had...

Iraqis are worse off now than they were as a sovereign country under their own leaders and not under the puppet leaders of an occupying army.

[Xenotime]

4. It is unbelievable the amount of horror we have brought to that land.

Only Obama can fix this. And, not a moment too soon.

[EFerrari]

3. Rumsfeld said we weren't going to spend a billion dollars in Iraq.

Looks like he got that wrong, too.

[Ganja Ninja]

5. I think it's more like $1000 billion.

$100 billion wouldn't pay for 1 year and we've been there over 5.

[NNN0LHI]

6. Thats just the money allocated to rebuild what we destroyed

The big ... bigger money was spent mostly on mercenaries for muscle.

Don

[pinto]

7. Official History Spotlights Iraq Rebuilding Blunders (NY Times)

By JAMES GLANZ and T. CHRISTIAN MILLER
Published: December 13, 2008

BAGHDAD — An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.

The history, the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form here and in Washington among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials. It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag — particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army — the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures.

In one passage, for example, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is quoted as saying that in the months after the 2003 invasion, the Defense Department “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.’ ”

<snip>

Among the overarching conclusions of the history is that five years after embarking on its largest foreign reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan in Europe after World War II, the United States government has in place neither the policies and technical capacity nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake such a program on anything approaching this scale.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/world/middleeast/14reconstruct.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=James%20Glanz&st=cse