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Iraqi Sewer Work Is Mired

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The Associated Press

Published: October 27, 2008

BAGHDAD - Stinking sewage runs through rutted and pocked streets in the former Sunni insurgent stronghold of Fallujah.

It was four years and nearly $100 million ago that Americans promised to take care of the problem, in perhaps one of the most wrong-headed rebuilding projects ever attempted in Iraq.

Now the planned sewage treatment system for the city of some 400,000 people is expected to open next April at the earliest, making it more than three years late and triple the original cost for roughly one-third of the system promised, according to a report being released today by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

Fallujah is 40 miles west of Baghdad and in the long-volatile Anbar province. The Americans destroyed the city, then committed to rebuilding it, in a bid to win hearts and minds after a major counterinsurgency offensive in late 2004, the worst urban combat of the Iraq conflict.

The investigation into what went wrong with the wastewater project reads like a catalog of failings that have become habitual in the multibillion-dollar U.S. reconstruction effort across Iraq: staggering waste, endless delays, U.S. and Iraqi incompetence in contracting and administering the job, suspected sectarian discrimination and worse-than-poor contractor performance. Intense violence overlaid it all.

The report specifically blamed unrealistic U.S expectations from the start, repeated redesigns of the project, financial and contracting problems, and lack of a good contractors to draw from.

"They all weighed on ... this project," said Brian Flynn, assistant inspector general for inspections. "It would be hard to say" which hurt the most.

Certainly high on the list of misjudgments was doing the project at all while Fallujah was convulsing and crumbling in 2004.

"You wouldn't start a Marshall Plan until World War II was over," Flynn said of the rebuilding plan for devastated Europe after that war.

"This has to be the classic example of doing reconstruction while hostilities are still going on," he said. "We've not done another one where security was so bad."

U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker asked in July for the auditor's review because the project had "gone so far off track and for so long."

The project to build Fallujah a treatment plant, pipelines, pumping stations and related facilities originally was to cost $32.5 million. Now it's $98 million. Started in July 2004, it was to be completed in 18 months, by January 2006, and serve the entire city.

The report by Inspector General Stuart Bowen said that it will take some 56 months in all and serve only 9,300 homes of the planned 24,400, about 38 percent of Fallujah's residents.

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