Billion-Dollar Start Falls Short in Iraq

The United States is making major investments in Sadr City, a teeming Shiite slum with about 2 million residents in northeast Baghdad that is a stronghold of militia leader and cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

A $15 million repair of a water-distribution system was finished in January. Work continues on a $47.5 million project to build a water-treatment plant and lay new pipes in the area. A $106.5 million rehabilitation of the neighborhood's power grid is also underway.

Talib Hussein Hailoon, a member of the Sadr City Council, said the projects were the most important infrastructure improvements in the neighborhood in decades. Council President Jawad Kadhum said the water improvements would mean that leaking water would no longer swamp the streets and clean water, not raw sewage, would come from taps.

U.S. officials hope that this and similar projects will ease anti-U.S. sentiment and perhaps reduce support for Iraq's insurgent groups and violent militias.

"If I can sit in a La-Z-Boy and if the TV and AC work, why am I going to go out and lay an IED?" said Col. Peter J. Rowan, a commander in the Gulf Region Division of the Army Corps of Engineers who lives in Fairfax County.

Despite the massive U.S. investment, there is a huge funding shortfall, and how Iraq will make it up is anybody's guess.

The country has no real tax base, and the government projects that about 90 percent of its annual operating revenue will come from oil. The oil sector is not producing or exporting as expected. Last year 186 attacks on oil facilities kept production and exports about 800,000 barrels below prewar levels and cost the country $6.25 billion, the Oil Ministry reported in February.

The needs are glaring. At the Wehda water-treatment plant on the Tigris River, eight water pumps built in 1945 and 1958 sit alongside massive new electric generators from USAID, which were purchased to ensure reliable electricity to pump water even during the capital's long power failures. But the generators have not been connected, and only half the pumps are working. Water seems to drip from every joint.

Lt. Col. Joe Gandara, a special troops battalion commander with the 4th Infantry Division from Fort Hood, Tex., walks around the facility with pride and consternation. The United States has spent $6 million to get the facility to this semi-respectable state, and another $6 million has been approved to finish the job. In the meantime, he has given the Iraqis $18,000 worth of tools to keep everything operating, although with two different generations of pumps -- both of them old -- finding spare parts is difficult.

"This is a big challenge because there's no standardization, and it's tough keeping up," said Gandara, 42, a father of six with a master's degree in civil engineering from Texas A&M. "We're not trying to fix an entire network, we're trying to take someone on life support and get them to live on their own."

The Karkh sewage plant and landfill have different problems.

Eight months ago, the governor of Baghdad province sent a group of armed men to the mayor's office and ran him out, then installed a new one. The circumstances did not allow for the new mayor and his staff to be fully briefed, according to Busher, a lanky, professorial civil engineer prone to understatement. "Initially, the new mayor didn't even know he had a new landfill," he said.

The sewage treatment plant was opened in September; the landfill in October; and in December, the manager of the treatment plant was killed, Busher said. No one has been back to operate either facility since, he said.

The new mayor has sent letters to the prime minister and the ministers of defense and interior requesting protection for the facilities, Busher said, but has gotten no response.

An official in the office of the Interior Minister said the projects were enmeshed in bureaucratic disputes over how to protect the facilities and who was responsible for doing so.

The new mayor, Saber al-Esawey, said it was unclear when the facilities would reopen. He blamed the United States for not coordinating the projects with local authorities and for picking a poor location. Even though they are "good projects," he said, "they did them without the advice of the Baghdad municipality, and we got no benefit at all."