Disgest by David Smith-Ferri, Voices in the Wilderness

This Digest begins with a brief summary, followed by media reports.

“Almost a year after Congress approved a U.S. contribution of more than $18 billion to rebuild Iraq, very little (only $600M) of this money has been spent. Very little has actually been built in Iraq, and most of what has been done has been paid for out of Iraq’s own revenues” (NYT, 8/10/04).

Three U.S. senators have called on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to account for 8.8 billion dollars entrusted to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq earlier this year but now gone missing.

With the “security situation” spiraling out of control, the US is now considering redirecting more than three billion dollars — originally approved by congress for infrastructure repair – toward “training and equipping more than 75,000 Iraqi national guard, police and border patrol officers.” The plan, recommended by US ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte, would also “pump some 225 million dollars into Iraq’s much sabotaged oil sector in an effort to enhance revenue to make up for the diverted US assistance by raising output from about 2.2 million barrels per day to three million” (AFP 8/30/04).

Of the $18.4B approved by the US Congress for Iraq rebuilding, $3.7B was set aside for drinking water, irrigation, and sewage treatment. The cost of providing drinking water alone, however, could cost $10B, according to Iraq Water Resources Minister Abdul Latif Rasheed.

Unclean water is not the only serious pollution problem facing people in Iraq. Lakes of sewage and large piles of uncollected garbage, especially in southern cities, are places where diseases can incubate and from which they can spread.

“Pollution in all its kinds seems to be spreading in Iraq especially with the unstable situation in the country where all eyes are turned to the security and political dilemma ignoring the crucial issue of maintaining a clean environment for people to lead healthy lives” (Mirror, 8/23/04).

In the inescapable face of threats to health haunting Iraqi citizens, and given how little “reconstruction” has actually been accomplished, it would be hard to argue that the architects of the war and the subsequent occupation care about ordinary Iraqi people. It would be equally difficult to explain the lack of reconstruction as simply a result of the degenerating “security situation,” of obvious poor planning, or even of gross incompetence. The almost total lack of provision for people’s basic needs suggests instead what some may have suspected all along: despite rhetoric to the contrary, at the level of US foreign policy decisions, the Iraqi people are incidental. The war and occupation have nothing to do with their welfare.

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