Associated Press
BAGHDAD - In their makeshift offices in a former palace, a small army of American builders and engineers, oilmen and budgeteers is working overtime on last-minute projects to help reconstruct Iraq.
Their time is running short, their money running out.
After three years in which the U.S. government allocated more than $20 billion for Iraqi reconstruction, a bill making its way through Congress adds only $1.6 billion this year, just $100 million of it for construction - not of schools or power stations, but of prisons.
Does the sharp cut in aid surprise and disappoint the planners here?
"Probably both," said Michael P. Fallon, U.S. reconstruction program chief. But "the program in general has been very successful," he said in an interview - "with the caveat that it hasn't gone as far as we thought we'd be able to go."
The ambitions of 2003, when President Bush spoke of making Iraq's infrastructure "the best in the region," have given way to the shortfalls of 2006, in electricity and water supply, sanitation, health facilities and oil production. A University of Maryland poll in January found strong majorities of Iraqis hopeful about their country's future in general, but only one in five thought the Americans had done a good job on reconstruction.
Even after billions were spent on power plants and substations, electricity generation still hasn't regained the level it had before the U.S. invasion of 2003.
Barely one-third of the water-treatment projects the Americans planned will be completed. Of more than 150 planned health clinics, only 15 have been completed, under a contract ending this month.
Oil production, meanwhile, has stagnated, averaging 2.05 million barrels a day in mid-March, short of the 2.5 million-a-day U.S. goal, and far short of Iraq's production peak of 3.7 million in the 1970s.
Iraq's insurgency dealt a major blow to the rebuilding efforts, leading U.S. officials in 2004 to begin siphoning off reconstruction money to help train Iraqi police and military forces, build prisons, and pay for private security for projects already under way.
Rather than sending more rebuilding money, the U.S. effort this year will shift toward "sustainability" - to an oversight role, to training Iraqis to maintain what has been built, and to urging others to fill the aid gap.
"I think we've been pretty clear that we never intended to fix the entire infrastructure," said Kathye Johnson, Fallon's boss as reconstruction director for the U.S. projects agency in Iraq.
"Fixing" Iraq's infrastructure would probably cost at least $70 billion, experts estimate. Johnson and other U.S. officials say that money should begin to come from other foreign donors and the Iraqi government itself.
But prospects for that are uncertain.
More than two years ago, other foreign governments and international institutions pledged more than $13.5 billion in Iraq aid, but thus far barely $3.2 billion has been spent.
Donors continue to shun this dangerous country; the World Bank, front-line lender elsewhere, has not opened an office in Baghdad. The Bush administration is pressing wealthy Persian Gulf states, in particular, to help their fellow Arabs in Iraq.
As for Iraq's own money, lagging oil exports leave it with nothing to spare.
The U.S. Embassy estimates that Iraq must export 1.65 million barrels a day just to begin accumulating funds for repairing more roads and leaking water pipes, laying sewer lines, rebuilding hospitals, and making other capital improvements. But in early March its foreign sales averaged only 1.38 million barrels a day.
"It is unclear how Iraq will finance these additional requirements," U.S. congressional auditors said in a recent study.
That budget gap will cripple the Iraqis as they try to pick up where the U.S. government leaves off. They estimate they'll need $20 billion to rebuild the electrical system alone. On water treatment, Ghazi Naji Majid, director-general of the Public Works Ministry, says plans for six major plants are on hold "until the money becomes available."
Even where there's money, plans can stall. Majid said his ministry had stopped building a water-treatment plant in Abu Ghraib, just outside Baghdad, "because workers were being kidnapped and killed." Within a few days last month, in the northern city of Beiji, attackers killed 12 workers - engineers and others - with the local oil refinery and power plant.
Insurgency, lack of money, widespread corruption, inadequate training, poor maintenance - all threaten to undercut even what has been accomplished. Congressional auditors, from the Government Accountability Office, went back to check completed water-treatment plants in Iraq and found that one-quarter were operating below capacity or not at all.
To preserve what's been done, to aid "sustainability," the 2006 U.S. budget allocates almost $300 million to operations and training at new or rebuilt power and water plants and other facilities.
"What you don't want to happen is for facilities to fail because they didn't know which part was broken, or they didn't have the part," said David Leach, in charge of capacity development for the U.S. projects agency.
Leach sees a "high risk with the investments we've made." Iraq's violence can make it difficult for trainers and trainees even to get to their work sites, he said.
"A lot of trips get canceled," he said.