Yesterday I spoke to Brigadier General Michael Walsh, chief of the Army Corps of Engineers in Iraq, about his group’s efforts to rebuild Iraq. His comments reflect those of other U.S. and Iraqi officials highlighting slow but steady progress shoring up basic services following a lull of several years in reconstruction. The surge – combining military and civil efforts – is having an effect. The question is … is it sustainable?
Here’s Walsh:
The Iraq reconstruction mission has been quite a challenge. We were unaware of how poor the infrastructure was when we came here in 2003; it had been neglected for 25 years. The requirement from the World Bank was for $100 billion to bring Iraq’s infrastructure up to standard. Our [the U.S. government’s] plan was just to jumpstart that with $22 billion. The rest was supposed to be picked up by donor nations and the government of Iraq. To that end we’re trying to help the Iraqi government spend their capital funds.
The Army Corps of Engineers has been given $13 billion for reconstruction [in Iraq] and has completed projects worth $8.5 billion. We have worked on 20 hospitals across Iraq doing renovations, including at the Najaf teaching hospital, where we did complete renovation of the heating, ventilation and water systems for $14 million. We also worked on 130 primary health clinics that are equipped with x-ray and dental facilities. The Iraqi Ministry of Health will provide the doctors and staff. Eight of those are done and are seeing 250 patients per day. We worked on the Basra children’s hospital, a 94-bed teaching hospital, building a residence hall for the doctors. That is 51-percent complete and we will finish up in July 2008. Iraqi hospital logistics systems are facing difficulties. They’re running into shortages on a lot of their consumables. One of the things we’re concerned with is facilities that run on generator but can’t get fuel trucks through. So there are problems with getting logistics in place. But generally, the doctors are in place and waiting for people to walk in the door.
We work fairly closely with Paul Brinkley’s group [working to restart Iraqi factories]. We talk every couple of months. One of the things he needs to do is get additional electricity out to state-owned enterprises, especially out to the Al Anbar cement factories. That’s one of the most difficult challenges in Iraq. We’re still at 12 to 13 hours of power per day around country now. Cement plant takes tremendous amount of electricity. Brinkley is now thinking about putting generators in for those plants. A lot of reporters report about how there is not enough electricity in Iraq. But Iraq never did have 24-hour power. There are a lot of generators compensating. They do have power; what they don’t have is power off the grid.
Everybody is excited about how well the Marines are doing in working with the Sunnis in going after Al Qaeda coming across the border [with Syria in Al Anbar]. We’re down to three attacks per day in Ramadi versus 20 before.
Oil production in Iraq is now at 2.6 million barrels per day with capacity for 3 million. The difficulty is making sure the pipelines stay intact. Iraqis have to work their piece to get that exported.
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