Two horribly depressing stories from today's NYT:
Rebuilt Iraq Projects Found Crumbling
In a troubling sign for the American-financed rebuilding program in Iraq, inspectors for a federal oversight agency have found that in a sampling of eight projects that the United States had declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting and expensive equipment that lay idle.
The United States has previously admitted, sometimes under pressure from federal inspectors, that some of its reconstruction projects have been abandoned, delayed or poorly constructed. But this is the first time inspectors have found that projects officially declared a success — in some cases, as little as six months before the latest inspections — were no longer working properly.The inspections ranged geographically from northern to southern Iraq and covered projects as varied as a maternity hospital, barracks for an Iraqi special forces unit and a power station for Baghdad International Airport.
At the airport, crucially important for the functioning of the country, inspectors found that while $11.8 million had been spent on new electrical generators, $8.6 million worth were no longer functioning.
At the maternity hospital, a rehabilitation project in the northern city of Erbil, an expensive incinerator for medical waste was padlocked — Iraqis at the hospital could not find the key when inspectors asked to see the equipment — and partly as a result, medical waste including syringes, used bandages and empty drug vials were clogging the sewage system and probably contaminating the water system.
The newly built water purification system was not functioning either.
Officials at the oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, said they had made an effort to sample different regions and various types of projects, but that they were constrained from taking a true random sample in part because many projects were in areas too unsafe to visit. So, they said, the initial set of eight projects — which cost a total of about $150 million — cannot be seen as a true statistical measure of the thousands of projects in the roughly $30 billion American rebuilding program.
Cheney and Bush have been obsessed with the idea that we cannot let bin Laden and al Qaeda think we are weak. So... will someone please explain to me how this is supposed to be a sign of strength? Nothing is going right in Iraq. Nothing....
Dozens Killed in Bomb Attack on Shiite Shrine:
A suicide car bomber struck near a sacred Shiite shrine in Karbala on Saturday, killing at least 58 people and wounding 169 in the second attack in two weeks against the city’s holy sites, Iraqi police officials said.
The car bomb in Karbala blew up about a third of a mile from the Imam Abbas shrine, the second-holiest site in Shiite Islam, on a busy street packed with shoppers. Video of the blast on an Iraqi news program showed small children burned to death, their skin blackened.The shrine was not damaged, the police said, but witnesses said at least 30 shops were destroyed.
After the bomb exploded, witnesses said an angry mob surrounded the home of the local governor, screaming in anger and outrage. The city, almost exclusively Shiite and ringed by checkpoints, has generally had far less violence than other areas of Iraq. But the explosion on Saturday occurred only two weeks after another strike at the Imam Hussein shrine, killing 36 people and wounding 168.
Taken together, the two attacks suggested that Sunni extremists, who set off a continuing wave of intense sectarian violence by destroying a Shiite mosque in Samarra last year, are again determined to strike Shiite holy sites and elicit a violent response from militias like Mr. Sadr’s Mahdi Army.
The administration will of course claim that we cannot use these attacks to measure our progress. As the president himself has claimed, if we measure success in the war on terror by the size and scope of terrorist attacks throughout the world, the terrorists will have already won.
Of course, what some government report does or does not say is utterly irrelevant to the Iraqis living with the violence. We may not count their deaths as significant, but they certainly do.
Bring them home. Bring them home now.
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