Quick, put some lipstick on that pig!

Yesterday, I wrote that Iraq has already been lost politically, and that sending in more troops is a bad idea based on the misguided belief that we are in some way still able to influence events as they unfold.

One of our many pro-war visitors took umbrage with said characterization, falling on the ever-handy baton of media bias to argue that I'm just not mentioning the many wonderful things that are transpiring in Iraq.

S/he posits:

I'm not saying the Bush administration hasn't made some big mistakes, but I am saying that the media and the far left NEVER have anything positive to say about our progress there.

I assume that the same logic that holds that those who criticize the war are automatically members of the "far left" holds true both ways -- we wouldn't want to be inconsistent -- so it's safe to say that our commenter is a member of the far right. S/he then adds:

As a twenty year Veteran, which included combat in Desert Storm, I have some insight into our military. Here are a few things we have accomplished in Iraq that the far left will never discuss, let alone praise, our current administration for doing.

And then s/he dumps data from the USAID website, a sampling of which follows:

# In all, USAID partners have trained more than 2,500 primary health care workers to expand access to essential primary health care services.

#In 2002, Baghdad had access to electricity 24 hours a day; the rest of Iraq was limited to 3-6 hours.Currently, all 18 governorates receive nearly 14 hours of electricity daily.

#USAID efforts have added 1,400 megawatts (MW) of generating capacity to the national electrical grid, expanding access to 4.2 million Iraqis throughout most of Iraq.

# Over 4 million Iraqis who had no clean drinking water in 2002 now have safe, potable water piped to their homes following USAID efforts to refurbish water treatment plants in 15 cities.

# Since 2003, USAID has rehabilitated nearly 3,000 schools.

As I said, it's a long list, and you're welcome to check the comments on that post for the whole thing.

In response to this comment, I'll make three points.

First, while it all sounds nice and suggests a lot of progress, neither the commenter, nor myself, nor USAID knows if any if that is actually true. Why? Because the pig that lipstick is supposed to adorn is a violent, chaos-ridden society that is far too dangerous for USAID inspectors to venture into in order to conduct the kind of inspections they would do elsewhere.

This member of the far right consulted the USAID's Iraq info pages, with content no doubt provided by the agency's public affairs department. Its job, of course, is to make the agency look good -- to gild the lily. But venture for a moment into another USAID division, one charged with evaluating just what the agency is really accomplishing: the USAID Inspector General's office.

From the IG's August 16 report:

We could not determine if USAID's Transition Initiatives in Iraq achieved their intended outputs for all 4,798 activities funded by the Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI). To answer the audit objective, we attempted to verify outputs by reviewing documentation and making site visits when possible. We found, though, that documentation was insufficient to verify that outputs were achieved, and we were only able to physically verify the achievement of outputs through site visits for 8 of the 81 activities.

As I've written before, Iraq's reconstruction is like a Boondoggle by Design, with layers of U.S. firms -- whose managers are also rarely able to venture beyond the relative safety of Iraq's Green Zone -- serving as bloated middle-men for sub-contractors who can (Iraqis and various foreign nationals). As the IG points out, "Because of the precarious security conditions in Iraq, OTI/Iraq site visits were extremely limited."

USAID hired a contractor called Development Alternatives, Inc. (DAI), which had, among other tasks, the job of monitoring some of the projects listed above. They assured AID that they were on top of things, but …

DAI staff in Erbil and Hillah stated that they made site visits, but, based on a statistical sample, there were no site visit or evaluation reports for a projected 4,383 grants totaling $294 million… OTI/Iraq management stated that pictures are a means of explaining and demonstrating progress towards completion. However, the pictures provided for 51 of the selected 81 grants were determined to be insufficient as evidence; the picture files contained no explanation of the picture, the date, or the place. For example, for one grant with an intended output to employ 250 local people to clean an area, two pictures show a major road with no explanation. Sufficient evidence to support the completion of this output would have included a payroll log for workers to sign when they were paid.

But it gets better. In many cases, AID can't even get "insufficient documentation" to show that work was done. Which leaves them with, in reconstruction-speak, "Grantee Self-Monitoring and Documentation."

… the minimum reporting required in a non-permissive environment is a note signed by the grantee certifying that all goods and services were delivered in satisfactory condition and that the activities took place. Because OTI/Iraq and DAI were unable to adequately monitor the projects in person due to security conditions, they relied to a significant extent upon self-monitoring by grantees. Of the 81 randomly selected grants, 91 percent of final certification reports were signed and submitted by the grantees. However, during site visits when grantees were asked about the certification reports that they signed, 22 percent of grantees stated the documents they signed were in English and were not translated. Several grantees further stated that they signed a "thank you letter," not a final certification report regarding the completion or adequacy of the work.

Now maybe the majority of contractors are acting in good faith and can be trusted. So let's look at what the Pentagon's Special Inpector General for Iraq Reconstruction has to say.

The Guardian, May 1:

A US congressional inspection team set up to monitor reconstruction in Iraq [reported] failures by contractors, mainly from the US, to carry out projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars. In one case, the inspection team found that three years after the invasion only six of 150 health centres proposed for Iraq had been completed by a US contractor, in spite of 75% of the $186m (£100m) allocated having been spent.

The detailed and lengthy report on work projects in Iraq has been drawn up by Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction (SIGIR)… The report says Mr Bowen's inspection team is investigating 72 cases of alleged fraud and corruption, and is pursuing leads not only in the US but in Europe and the Middle East. In March, investigators conducted a successful sting operation which led to the arrest of a contractor who offered a bribe to one of its undercover agents.

The result of both contractor rip-offs and a savage civil conflict raging on was described in his October 14, 2005 report:

… the Inspector General highlighted a growing area of concern--the reconstruction gap. SIGIR defines the reconstruction gap as the difference between the number of projects that the United States originally proposed to build in Iraq and the number of projects that the United States will ultimately complete. When the U.S.-led portion of Iraq's reconstruction concludes, many planned projects will remain on the drawing board for execution by other funding sources.

So, in a nutshell, our far-right friend is trusting the self-reporting of proven liars and perpetrators of fraud (see our war-profiteering page for much more detailed reporting on this issue), as advertised by USAID, whose own IG, by the way, notes that the agency can't even keep track of it's own equipment ("a projected $21.3 million out of $23.5 million of nonexpendable property could not be verified" it said in it's February 15 report). And we should, what, celebrate the successes they claim they've made?

The second point is that it is the height of intellectual dishonesty to compare existing infrastructure to "pre-war' infrastructure, as if history began in 2002. The U.S.-led coalition devastated Iraq's infrastructure in 1991 (destroying an estimated 75% of it), managed a sanctions program that denied it necessary spare parts and starved a good chunk of the population.

In the twelve years between what we like to think of as the first and second Gulf Wars, coalition aircraft -- mostly American and British, but also French and Turkish in the early stages -- flew over 115,000 combat missions over Iraq. They bombed targets about every other day.

So when you talk about achieving "pre-war" levels of water and electricity (which we accomplished in Baghdad just this past summer), remember that all of Iraq had those things 24/7 before we started attacking it. See this post.

Lastly, and this is related to the first two, of course we've achieved something! So what? After spending the tax dollars we have, it would be almost impossible to have accomplished nothing. We've spent over $30 billion dollars on reconstruction and we shouldn't pat ourselves on the back for reaching a tiny portion of the goals we originally set out for ourselves.

What's more, a poll last year cited by the Inspector General found that after more than two years of work, only 30 percent of Iraqis had any idea that there was any kind of reconstruction effort underway at all.

All of this means that, contrary to our necessarily far-right war supporters, it would be irresponsibly biased to report on the reconstruction in a positive light. It's just not accurate to tout a few schools being painted while 1500-1800 civilians are being slaughtered in an orgy of violence each month.