Friday, January 27, 2006

A picture is worth a thousand words

From the Commish

Posted by The Game at 9:06 AM

2 comments:

jhbowden said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
January 27, 2006 9:29 AM
Jim said...

Slightly off topic but just wanted to give an example to "support" Game's claim that things are going fantastically well in Iraq:

Quoting the NY Times [emphasis mine]:

Because of unforeseen security costs, haphazard planning and shifting priorities, the American-financed reconstruction program in Iraq will not complete scores of projects that were promised to help rebuild the country, a federal oversight agency reported yesterday.

Only 49 of the 136 projects that were originally pledged to improve Iraq's water and sanitation will be finished, with about 300 of an initial 425 projects to provide electricity, the report says.

The planners of the rebuilding effort did not take into account hundreds of millions of dollars in administrative costs, and mostly did not realize that the United States would have to spend money to keep things like power plants and sewage treatment plants running once they had been built, the report says. That ultimately forced the United States to pare the list of projects to cover such expenses.

Beyond the huge cost of protecting reconstruction projects, which the report says the planners did not foresee, billions of dollars were shifted from the rebuilding effort to things like training Iraqi police and guarding Iraq's borders. The report, by the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, adds that the overall rebuilding plan was also devised without a clear understanding of the decrepit state of Iraq's infrastructure after decades of war, United Nations-imposed penalties and sheer neglect.

And competence is not an issue?

January 27, 2006 11:41 PM

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