As the US
rebuilding efforts wind down, and as the White House shifts its storyline to emphasize new timetables, checklists, tick-boxes (or whatever they are calling them this week) setting out Iraqi steps towards self-governance, Iraq has remained stateless, a horrific wild west fueled by the embarrassment and attendant dishonor of overbearing imperial rule amid the widespread cronyism and fiscal idiocy that inevitably accompanies colonialism:
PIPELINE
In 2004, the Army found that Halliburton Co. subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root had spent all US$76 million allocated for running a pipeline beneath the Tigris River, but completed only 28 per cent of the drilling. It had gone ahead despite expert warnings the drilling would fail. A new contractor switched to a more feasible route.
HOSPITAL
Bechtel Corp.'s work on a children's hospital in Basra City bogged down so badly that it said its September 2006 deadline would have to be moved to July 2007, and its US$50 million cost might double. In July, Bechtel was dropped from the project, which was put on hold.
CLINICS
Last March, U.S.auditors found that Parsons Corp. had spent US$186 million over two years, 77 per cent of the budget, but had completed only six of 150 primary health care clinics planned for Iraq. Army engineers said Parsons failed to supervise subcontractors' work. The contract was terminated by mutual agreement.
And of course Parsons is responsible for overseeing this disaster
A special inspector general said Thursday [28 Sept] that he planned to review all of the Iraq building projects overseen by Pasadena City's Parsons Corp. in the wake of severe plumbing problems that have surfaced at Baghdad City's new police academy.
Sewage is seeping through the floors at the academy, and in one of the buildings "the water has been dripping at such a rapid rate that the Baghdad Police College director refers to this room as the 'Rain Forest,'"; the auditors said in a report delivered to Congress by Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.
Last Wednesday, Cheney once more made the increasingly hollow claim that Iraq can and will emerge as a viable state. On Wednesday, 25 Oct...
...Vice President Dick Cheney traveled to Ohio to give a vigorous defense of the administration's Iraq policy in words almost identical to Mr. Bush's. "For the sake of our own generation and the ones that follow, we have a clear responsibility to press on in this fight," Mr. Cheney told the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce today. "Our goal in Iraq is victory -- with a nation that can govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself."
Please view this short film by Guardian photographer Sean Smith. It says much about the colonial/subject relationship as one that, based ultimately on fear and humiliation, can only fail to win hearts and minds:
Sean Smith, the Guardian's award-winning war photographer, spent nearly six weeks with the 101st Division of the US army in Iraq. Watch his haunting observational film that explodes the myth around the claims that the Iraqis are preparing to take control of their own country.