When you want SysAdmin bad, you get it bad

NYT story on shabby construction efforts as we drawdown in Iraq:

After two devastating battles between American forces and Sunni insurgents in 2004, this city needed almost everything — new roads, clean water, electricity, health care.

The American reconstruction authorities decided, however, that the first big rebuilding project to win hearts and minds would be a citywide sewage treatment system.

Now, after more than six years of work, $104 million spent, and without having connected a single house, American reconstruction officials have decided to leave the troubled system only partly finished, infuriating many city residents.

The plant is just one of many projects that the United States has decided to scale back on — or in some cases abandon — as American troops who provide security for reconstruction sites prepare to leave in large numbers.

Even some of the projects that will be completed are being finished with such haste, Iraqi officials say, that engineering standards have deteriorated precipitously, putting workers in danger and leaving some of the work at risk of collapse.

The American officials give many reasons for their decisions to scale back or drop some projects before more troops leave, including that they discovered in some cases that the facilities diverged from Iraq’s most pressing needs, or that the initial work — overseen by American contractors and performed by Iraqi workers — was so flawed that problems would take too long to fix.

Reconstruction officials point out that they have completed the vast majority of the $53 billion in projects they planned throughout Iraq, from bridges to honey-bee farms.

And the officials, along with the United States Embassy in Baghdad, say they are aware of only isolated concerns about the quality of reconstruction work now under way in the country, or about projects being left undone.

“I am not aware of the Iraqis having any sort of hard feelings that we will not finish current projects and award projects we said we would,” Col. Dionysios Anninos, head of the Army Corps of Engineers office in Iraq, wrote in an e-mail message. “We will finish strong!”

But some Iraqis have compared the current hurried reconstruction effort to the haphazard American withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975. In Diyala Province, northeast of Baghdad, Iraqi officials said they found that construction standards had slipped so drastically that they ordered an immediate halt to all American-financed projects, even though American inspectors had deemed the work to be adequate.

The Americans had told local authorities they were speeding up projects because a nearby United States Army base was scheduled to close this summer.

Shaymaa Mohammad Ameen, who works with reconstruction officials as a liaison for the Diyala Provincial Council, said American officials frequently threatened to leave when Iraqis questioned engineering standards and brought up other safety issues.

“They constantly tell us that if we do not approve, they can always move the allocated funds to projects in other provinces,” she said.

In Baghdad and Salahuddin Provinces, local officials say Americans have simply walked away from partly completed police stations, schools, government buildings and water projects during the past several months without explanation.

And in Dhi Qar and Babil Provinces, there are complaints that roads and buildings recently completed by the Americans do not meet basic construction standards.

I've said for years, given our mindset toward exiting, and China's mindset for wanting to own resources in the ground, we would have been much better off subcontracting the entire reconstruction effort to the Chinese.

Hard to see how it wouldn't have cost far less and accomplished far more.

Another point I've made in the brief for close to a decade now:  the SysAdmin is necessarily more rest-of-world than just the United States.  We are not good at everything and shouldn't try to be.