Trying to rebuild while enemy tries to destroy is hard

NY Times:

An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the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.’ ”

Mr. Powell’s assertion that the Pentagon inflated the number of competent Iraqi security forces is backed up by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former commander of ground troops in Iraq, and L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator until an Iraqi government took over in June 2004.

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.

The bitterest message of all for the reconstruction program may be the way the history ends. The hard figures on basic services and industrial production compiled for the report reveal that for all the money spent and promises made, the rebuilding effort never did much more than restore what was destroyed during the invasion and the convulsive looting that followed.

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I think that conclusion is a little harsh considering how much better off Iraq is today than it was before the war. There are some structural problems that need to be addressed. Let's start with what department is in charge of rebuilding infrastructure in a country like Iraq. Apparently the report nor the Times writers can say. However, there have been other deficiencies in the war effort that we still have not addressed.

For example, the enemy says that half his war effort is in the media, but the US has no one in charge of defeating the enemy's campaign in the media battle space and too often our own media have been too compliant in repeating the enemy message and have failed to put into perspective the enemy's war crimes.

Too often the media has had a double standard on war crimes, overplaying the hazing and humiliation at Abu Ghraid while never mentioning the blatant war crimes of the enemy in attacking non combatants and chopping off the heads of detainees. It is not that they did not report these events, they just did not present them as the war crimes they were. In short, there was no outrage at enemy war crimes and there is still little today. If the US had someone in charge of this battle space they could at least remind the media of the war crimes.

As for the rebuilding, it was most ineffective when pursued on a top down basis as the programs mostly reviewed in this report. It was most effective on a bottoms up basis in grants supplied by commanders in the field. Once we got the troops into the neighborhood and started working with the locals we had much better success with these programs and had fewer attacks on the infrastructure too. That is a lesson that I don't see reflected in the story of the report.