People of Iraq, We Have Failed You

But...you guys all knew that...

At the very least, and I mean the absolute worst case scenario, I thought we would probably make the nation of Iraq itself look nicer. I mean, really...We are the world's strongest and most powerful nation. We walk into Baghdad after only a few weeks of fighting with a huge army and a grim determination to make the nation a fully-functioning democratic ally.

Okay, I knew that was bullshit. Everyone knew that wasn't going to work, despite Judy Miller's insistance that the whole world thought George W. Bush was a complete genius and that al-Qaeda was in bed with Saddam Hussein. But you still figured...Iraq might get a little bit improved. Maybe some new schools and hospitals...better-paved roads...more efficient water and power supply systems...Possibly a swimming pool here or there, with some inflatable palm trees and neon, like in Showgirls.

Nothing. We came in, bombed the shit out of everything, continually promised to clean it all up...And now we're starting our pull-out without improving shit.

The Bush administration does not intend to seek any new funds for Iraq reconstruction in the budget request going before Congress in February, officials say. The decision signals the winding down of an $18.4 billion U.S. rebuilding effort in which roughly half of the money was eaten away by the insurgency, a buildup of Iraq's criminal justice system and the investigation and trial of Saddam Hussein.

Just under 20 percent of the reconstruction package remains unallocated. When the last of the $18.4 billion is spent, U.S. officials in Baghdad have made clear, other foreign donors and the fledgling Iraqi government will have to take up what authorities say is tens of billions of dollars of work yet to be done merely to bring reliable electricity, water and other services to Iraq's 26 million people.

Yeah...Iraq...About that money we promised you...How we said we'd totally all be getting rich on your vast oil supply, and would spend the money making your country really clean and modern? Right...Well, some things came up.

I mean, Hurricane Katrina, am I right? Who saw that coming? People floating on their rooves and shit, did you see that on the news? So they're saying our guy doesn't like black people, which is totally ridiculous, because he absolutely adores old re-runs of "Benson." The thing is...We don't actually have the money. Yeah, so, instead of that whole massive-rebuilding new-infrastructure stuff we promised before we blew up your whole country, how about, instead, a nice tall glass of Get Bent? How's that sound?

"The U.S. never intended to completely rebuild Iraq," Brig. Gen. William McCoy, the Army Corps of Engineers commander overseeing the work, told reporters at a recent news conference. In an interview this past week, McCoy said: "This was just supposed to be a jump-start."

Oh, we all must have simply misunderstood. See, I thought when our military went overseas and destroyed the entirety of a sovereign nation, they were implicitly taking on the responsibility of setting things right again once they wer edone gettin' they war on. But it's just supposed to be a jump-start! See, we've set up all the ingredients for a Civil War, resign the country to a cruel fate of endless cyclical poverty and general hopelessness, and just let them all loose on each other. Should be pretty entertaining stuff!

Since the reconstruction effort began in 2003, midcourse changes by U.S. officials have shifted at least $2.5 billion from the rebuilding of Iraq's decrepit electrical, education, water, sewage, sanitation and oil networks to build new security forces for Iraq and to construct a nationwide system of medium- and maximum-security prisons and detention centers that meet international standards, according to reconstruction officials and documents.

This isn't really surprising. We're setting up a democracy in Iraq just like the one we already have Stateside. No money for the desperate citizens who have nothing, but tons of money for new prisons! Get 'em off the streets and into jail, that's what I say! And it's nice to see that all these detention centers meet international standards. I only want torture methods employed what have been approved by Romanians and North Koreans, thank you very much!

In two of the most crucial areas, electricity and oil production, relentless sabotage has kept output at or below prewar levels despite the expenditure of hundreds of millions of American dollars and countless man-hours. Oil production stands at roughly 2 million barrels a day, compared with 2.6 million before U.S. troops entered Iraq in March 2003, according to U.S. government statistics.

The national electrical grid has an average daily output of 4,000 megawatts, about 400 megawatts less than its prewar level.

Iraqis nationwide receive on average less than 12 hours of power a day. For residents of Baghdad, it was six hours a day last month, according to a U.S. count, though many residents say that figure is high.

The Americans, said Zaid Saleem, 26, who works at a market in Baghdad, "are the best in destroying things but they are the worst in rebuilding."

I'm sorry if I've been even more sarcastic than usual thus far, but I don't even know how else to deal with this Washington Post article. It's a reminder that, though the Iraq mission has been an obvious failure on many fronts, that it has failed in even its most straight-forward, immediate task - we have not made this country more inhabitable. We have made it far, far less livable in Iraq than it was before, under a cruel dictator. I'm not trying to praise the villainous thug Saddam Hussein - I'm saying that, counter-intuitively, we're even worse at governing Iraq than he was!

Every time we build things, we have to tack on an additional 25% price hike just to keep the thing we've built safe from attack! And think about the manpower diverted to protect all of these construction crews. The nation is under seige constantly, to the point that we can't manage to make it cleaner or safer.

Even if you don't have, from a humanitarian standpoint, about the Iraqi people and their living conditions, think about the effect this will have on them as a nation. The cultural effect. Young people in Iraq now will grow up thinking of America in the worst possible way. We killed their friends and family, we destroyed their country, we arrested and then tortured innocent people, and then we left without even fixing up any of the buildings we leveled or property we razed.

Thankfully, all is not neccessarily lost.

At the same time, the hundreds of Americans and Iraqis who have devoted themselves to the reconstruction effort point to 3,600 projects that the United States has completed or intends to finish before the $18.4 billion runs out around the end of 2006. These include work on 900 schools, construction of hospitals and nearly 160 health care centers and clinics, and repairs on or construction of nearly 800 miles of highways, city streets and village roads.

900 schools...That ain't bad...Iraq's a big country, but still...At least something got done.

I can just hear my conservative commentators (or, well, this site's lone conservative voice) poitning out that a quick pull-out from Iraq was exactly what I have been hoping for. This is totally true. I was just sort of hoping that we'd have been doing a better job all along of making Iraq even mildly safer and more inhabitable. It's just another example of the incompetence of this administration - we can't even really argue about the rightness of their policies (I think they're wrong, of course), because their execution is always so horrible. We're always dealing in worst-case scenarios.