It was four years and nearly $100 million ago that Americans promised to take care of the problem, in perhaps one of the most wrong-headed rebuilding projects ever attempted in Iraq.
Now the planned sewage treatment system for the city of some 400,000 people is expected to open next April at the earliest, making it more than three years late and triple the original cost for roughly one-third of the system promised, according to a report being released Monday by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.
Fallujah is 40 miles west of Baghdad and in the long-volatile Anbar province. The Americans destroyed the city, then committed to rebuilding it, in a bid to win hearts and minds after a major counterinsurgency offensive in late 2004, the worst urban combat of the Iraq conflict.
The investigation into what went wrong with the wastewater project reads like a catalog of failings that have become habitual in the multibillion-dollar U.S. reconstruction effort across Iraq: staggering waste, endless delays, U.S. and Iraqi incompetence in contracting and administering the job, suspected sectarian discrimination and worse-than-poor contractor performance. Intense violence overlaid it all.
