BAGHDAD, Oct. 30 — More than $100 billion has been devoted to rebuilding Iraq, mainly thanks to American taxpayers and Iraqi oil revenues, but nearly five years into the conflict, output in critical areas like water and electricity remain below United States goals, federal oversight officials reported to Congress on Tuesday.
After the influx of that much cash into Iraq’s infrastructure, there are also some hopeful signs, said one of those officials, Stuart W. Bowen Jr., who heads the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. The amount of electricity on Iraq’s national grid, while still well below expectations, has made modest gains recently on the strength of some new generators and improved security.
But another oversight official, Joseph A. Christoff, the director of international affairs and trade at the Government Accountability Office, said some measures of what some see as progress in Iraq were not as clear-cut as they might seem.
For example, Pentagon statistics indicated that a drop in violence in Iraq over the past several months “was primarily due to a decrease in attacks against coalition forces,” Mr. Christoff said in written remarks to a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee.
“Attacks against Iraqi security forces and civilians have declined less than attacks against coalition forces,” Mr. Christoff wrote.
Mr. Bowen’s testimony, before the same committee, showed that some of the same disastrous failures that have repeatedly damaged the reconstruction program are still occurring. A project to fix a dangerously flawed dam on the Tigris River at the northern city of Mosul has cost at least $27 million and achieved essentially nothing of practical value, his testimony and two related reports by his office found.
Oversight of the dam project by the United States Army Corps of Engineers, which had responsibility, was so weak that a contractor hired to build a giant production facility to seal leaks in the soil did the improbable, to say the least: the contractor undertook to build a different kind of facility, which could not seal the leaks.
The Army Corps and its designated oversight personnel apparently did not notice the discrepancy, Mr. Bowen’s office found. Problems with the dam are so severe that in a letter included in one of the reports, Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador to Iraq, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander there, warned that the dam could collapse and unleash a giant flood onto the northern city of Mosul.
Mr. Bowen said in an interview that even with the waste of so much of the $100 billion, there was probably no other choice after the 2003 invasion but to spend it.
“I think it was necessary given the severely debilitated condition of Iraq’s infrastructure,” Mr. Bowen said. “It could have been spent better on all fronts,” he said.
American funds devoted to reconstruction have come to about $45 billion, compared to about $40 billion from Iraq. The rest are international pledges, only a few billion of which have actually been spent.
Among the major expenditures on the American side is what the accountability office estimates to be $19 billion to train and equip Iraqi security forces and $7 billion to rehabilitate the country’s oil and electricity sectors. Even so, despite endless American press releases on Iraqi forces taking over responsibility for parts of the country, the office estimates that just 10 of 140 Iraqi Army, national police and special operations units were in fact operating independently as of September.
The Mosul dam, the largest in the country, was built under Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. It was built on porous and water-soluble soil. So huge cavities continually form beneath the dam, threatening it with collapse.
Iraqi engineers, who are often improvisers on a grand scale, have long dealt with the problem by regularly drilling down to the cavities and filling them with large amounts of grout, a sealing agent. As part of its own solution, the United States awarded contracts to several firms to build five giant new grout-mixing plants around the dam.
But for whatever reason, the contractors built cement-mixing plants instead and even those have never worked, Mr. Bowen’s office found. To make the case still more puzzling, the contractors’ drawings plainly showed that they had the wrong type of plant in mind before the work even started.
One result was essentially nothing besides some shoddily built storage silos and other idle equipment, the office found.
“The Iraqis are facing a very serious problem,” said Ginger Cruz, a deputy inspector general in the office. “The United States tried to do a little bit to help them out, and so far we’ve been completely unsuccessful.”
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