Iraq Non-Surprise of the Day (2): Deconstruction

In the category of If You Don't Build It, The Insurgency Will Come, from The New York Times:

An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the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 report's conclusion is a bit of a downer:

The hard figures on basic services and industrial production compiled for the report reveal that for all the money spent and promises made, the rebuilding effort never did much more than restore what was destroyed during the invasion and the convulsive looting that followed.

It could have been worse, however. The authors might have noted that this failure was a major cause of the immediate breakdown of "Mission Accomplished" into a war by local groups against the US-led "coalition". And, since the report is still private as it is passed amongst "technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials", it may be watered down even further to spare Bush Administration blushes.

Kudos to the Times, then, for providing a full draft version of the report.