While $60 billion was spent to reconstruct Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion left the country in ruins, numerous projects were left unfinished, most of the money was poorly managed and $8 billion was either wasted or unaccounted for, according to the “Learning from Iraq” report.
The report only focused on reconstruction and didn’t include the cost of military operations in Iraq, which cost more than $800 billion. The money wasted on reconstruction was blamed on fraud, waste and abuse, says the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) who wrote the report.
“During SIGIR’s six months of effort, we could not find reliably complete information showing what U.S. construction funds accomplished,” the SIGIR report states. “The full story on the use of billions of U.S. dollars for reconstructing Iraq will forever remain incomplete.”
Both countries say the United States tackled too many large projects in Iraq and often didn’t consult Iraqis sufficiently to find out the best way to accomplish them. Some projects were left unfinished and other contracts lacked ethical standards, such as awards to contractor Philip Bloom for “bribes and kickbacks, expensive vehicles, business-class airline tickets, computers, jewelry, and other items,” said Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, in Wired.
“We couldn’t look at every project — that’s impossible — but our audits show a lack of accountability,” said Bowen. “We are not well structured to carry out stability and reconstruction operations.”
Plus, government contracting databases didn’t have “an information management system that keeps track of everything built,” Bowen said. Iraq’s acting interior minister told Bowen that, “You can fly in a helicopter around Baghdad or other cities, but you cannot point a finger at a single project that was built and completed by the United States.”
The United States tackled too much, too fast and planned to “do it all and do it our way,” while discovering that Americans quickly “wore out our welcome,” said William J. Burns, the deputy secretary of state, to the inspector general, in The New York Times.
Numerous factors contributed to the waste in Iraq, including the hasty awarding of construction projects to Iraqis that lacked the capacity to finish them. And while nearly 174,000 contract personnel flooded Iraq in 2009 a persistent “lack of sufficient contracting personnel in Iraq weakened acquisition support, hampering project outcomes,” the report says.
The reported provides a “solid foundation on which to base seven final lessons learned from Iraq seven final Lessons from Iraq”:
1. Create an integrated civilian-military office to plan, execute, and be accountable for contingency rebuilding activities during stabilization and reconstruction operations;
2. Begin rebuilding only after establishing sufficient security, and focus first on small programs and projects;
3. Ensure full host-country engagement in program and project selection, securing commitments to share costs (possibly through loans) and agreements to sustain completed projects after their transfer;
4. Establish uniform contracting, personnel, and information management systems that all self-regulatory organization (SRO) participants use;
5. Require robust oversight of SRO activities from the operation’s inception;
6. Preserve and refine programs developed in Iraq, like the Commander’s Emergency Response Program and the Provincial Reconstruction Team program, which produced successes when used judiciously; and
7. Plan in advance, plan comprehensively and in an integrated fashion, and have backup plans ready to go.
