Thursday, September 25, 2003

The devil is in the details The Washington Post reports that even the GOP is getting nervous about the President's $87 billion spending request for Iraq and Afghanistan. The issue of the 20 or so billion dollars for reconstruction is growing more contentious. The devil is in the details and some of the details are bedeviling even staunch conservative supporters of the President. As the Post reports: "Those details include $100 million to build seven planned communities with a total of 3,258 houses, plus roads, an elementary school, two high schools, a clinic, a place of worship and a market for each; $10 million to finance 100 prison-building experts for six months, at $100,000 an expert; 40 garbage trucks at $50,000 each; $900 million to import petroleum products such as kerosene and diesel to a country with the world's second-largest oil reserves; and $20 million for a four-week business course, at $10,000 per pupil." Read the Post report and make up your own mind. The graph from the Post article provides a breakdown of the funding request. 11:43:10 PM    comment []

Whither the UN? BBC online reports today that despite American claims that security in Iraq is improving, the UN will further reduce its presence in the country. Some 600 UN personnel were stationed in Iraq before the first bomb attack on August 19 in which 22 UN workers were killed. UN presence was reduced to around 100 after the attack. There are currently 86 UN personnel in Iraq and the number will be decreased even more over the next few weeks.  BBC Online says that "The decision is a blow to United States' claims that the security situation in Iraq is under control, and is likely to undermine efforts by US President George W Bush to increase the UN role in Iraqi reconstruction." Who needs the UN anyway? Read the whole article.  James P. Rubin, in an article "Stumbling into war" that appeared in the September/October 2003 issue of Foreign Affairs put it this way: "When it comes to occupying a country, there is simply no substitute for a UN stamp of approval." The New York Times has reprinted the article as post mortem analysis of the failed US efforts to garner more international support for its attack on Iraq. (James P. Rubin is a Visiting Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and was Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs from 1997 to 2000.) Kofi Annan has suggested reform of the UN, particulary the Security Council. He wants it expanded. No wonder Gerhard Schroeder was nice to George Bush in New York earlier this week. The BBC offers an analysis of the Annan's call for reform. Read it. 3:03:12 PM    comment []

Did we get anything right about Iraq? Things are not just going well in Iraq for the US, much less for the Iraqis themselves. Electricity for one thing has not even reached pre-attack levels and is not likely to for some time to come. This seems to result from a combination of poor planning by the US, sabotage and looting by Iraqis. But more fundamentally, early failure on the part of the US to accurately assess the conditions in Iraq and the slow reaction to the reality in Iraq has led to the present catastrophic deterioration. An article in today's Washington Post by Rajiv Chandrasekaran quotes an American electrical engineer currently working with the occupation forces as saying that " 'If they had recognized the problem sooner and devoted more resources to it, the problem wouldn't be as bad as it is now.' " We knew Iraq had weapons of mass destruction but we didn't know how badly deteriorated the infrastructure was. At least this is the only conclusion I can draw after reading the article in the Washington Post .  According to the article, "U.S. officials insist that in the months before the Iraq war, the signs of trouble were impossible to see. 'This was a closed-off, Stalinist society,' one U.S. official here said. 'We knew there were repairs that were needed, but we had no idea just how bad things were.' But the UN knew about the condition of Iraq's power generation system and released and publicly reported that Iraq's power generating infrastructure was " 'technically and economically obsolete.' "  So now the US taxpayer is being asked to completely rebuild the electrical infrastructure. The price tag for starting represents $5.7 billion of the $87 billion requested by the President. Read the entire article. 2:39:49 PM    comment []