Plan’s $1 billion in aid not likely to help much

The extra billion dollars of reconstruction aid in President Bush’s Iraq plan won’t go far in a country where electricity output still barely meets half the demand and oil production is falling short by almost a million barrels a day.

And a companion part of the plan, to expand U.S. aid teams scattered across Iraq, may falter because of a shortage of volunteers. Some say the Bush administration may have to start ordering civilian U.S. government employees into the war zone, as was done for Vietnam.

“The fact of the matter is that the State Department has had a hard time filling current manning levels on these teams,” said retired Maj. Gen. William Nash, a specialist in postwar reconstruction at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The bulk of U.S. reconstruction aid came in 2003-2005, when almost $22 billion poured into Iraq. As violence spread, some aid was diverted to Iraqi army and police forces, and much of the rest was spent on private security for rebuilding projects. Experts had estimated Iraq needed $55 billion to recover from war, mass looting and years of economic deterioration.

By this 2007 fiscal year, new reconstruction aid had dwindled to $750 million. On Wednesday night, Bush proposed adding $1.2 billion to that. By comparison, Washington is spending roughly $100 billion a year on the war itself.

Costly projects

In its December recommendations, the Iraq Study Group had called for boosting U.S. reconstruction assistance to $5 billion a year.
For electricity alone, Iraq needs $27 billion to fully rebuild the grid to meet growing power needs, Baghdad’s Electricity Ministry estimates.

“It is symbolic, at best, and is unlikely to have substantial impact in Iraq,” Gordon Adams, a budget expert at Washington’s Woodrow Wilson Center, said of the Bush aid proposal.

In a new Iraq oversight report, the U.S. Government Accountability Office says Iraq’s electricity demand averaged 8,210 megawatts last year, but peak generation reached only 4,317 megawatts. Baghdad residents received only six hours of power a day on average last summer.

The U.S. reconstruction effort added more than 2,000 megawatts of generating capacity to a system that produced 4,200 before the 2003 U.S. invasion. But the grid has been crippled by toppled transmission towers and other sabotage, insurgent attacks, looting, poor maintenance and poor planning.

Meanwhile, as of August the Oil Ministry had spent almost none of its $3.5 billion capital budget for 2006 because of weak financial management systems, the GAO said.