Iraq’s reconstruction a 100 billion dollar failure

As of mid-2008, 117 billion dollars had been spent on the reconstruction of Iraq, including about 50 billion in US taxpayer money.An unpublished US government report says US-led efforts to rebuild Iraq was a 100-billion-dollar failure.

The New York Times said it had gotten hold of a copy of the 513-page federal history of the reconstruction effort that is circulating in Washington in draft form among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials.

The document has former Secretary of State Colin Powell complaining that 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.'"

The overarching conclusions is that the US government has in place neither the policies nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake the largest reconstruction program after the Marshall Plan, the report said.

[AFP]