Friday, July 27, 2007
Another Wow moment in Iraq
You all those reconstruction projects in Iraq? The ones that we are shelling out Billions of dollars for? It seems that when they are complete, we are have to turn them over to the Iraqi government to run. One small problem.
The process of transferring projects to Iraq “worked for a while,” Mr. Bowen said. But then the new government took over and installed its finance minister, Bayan Jabr, who has been a continuing center of controversy in his various government posts and is formally in charge of the transfers. “After Mr. Jabr took over, that process ceased to function,” Mr. Bowen said.But good old American ingenuity has found the solution to this impediment.
Because the Iraqi government will not formally accept projects ....the United States is “finding someone at the local level to handle the project, handing them the keys and saying, ‘Operate and maintain it,’ ” another official in the inspector general’s office said.Needless to say, this has been about as successful as anything else the Bushoviks have done in Iraq. Like this.
In one of the most recent cases, a $90 million project to overhaul two giant turbines at the Dora power plant in Baghdad failed after completion because employees at the plant did not know how to operate the turbines properly and the wrong fuel was used. The additional power is critically needed in Baghdad, where residents often have only a few hours of electricity a day.And the best is yet to come.
So far, the United States has declared that $5.8 billion in American taxpayer-financed projects have been completed, but most of the rest of the projects within a $21 billion rebuilding program that Mr. Bowen examined in the report are expected to be finished by the end of this year. Some of that money is also being used to train and equip Iraqi security forces rather than finance construction projects.Talk about your Shock and Awe. I think I liked Our Dear Embattled Leader better when he was simply running a couple of small oil companies into the ground.
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