NYT reports Iraq reconstruction to be a $100 billion failure according to federal report

The New York Times tonight cites a federal report showing reconstruction of Iraq to be a $100 billion failure with economic activity only restored to what it was when Saddam Hussein reigned.

And yes, while there is less violence and no Saddam Hussein in Iraq, general media reporting of Iraq shows a country with less electricity during the day and less fresh water.

The report breaks down overall spending at $117 billion, with $50 billion from U.S. taxpayers. That figure is not related to the more than $500 billion that has been spent on the war and policing itself, along with more than 4,000 American lives and 100,000 Iraqi lives lost. It is quite a tragedy.

The Times reports:

BAGHDAD — An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.

The history, the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form here and in Washington among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials. It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag — particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army — the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures.

In one passage, for example, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is quoted as saying that in the months after the 2003 invasion, the Defense Department “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces — the number would jump 20,000 a week! ‘We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.’ ”

And it is upon these points that many but not all liberals and conservatives believe the Bush administration's rebuilding of Iraq after the fall of Saddam has not only been a failure for the people over there but the taxpayers over here.