Summarizing the Mess

Today the NY Times published a draft copy of a five-year report by Stewart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. It is appropriately titled "Hard Lessons: the Iraq Reconstruction Experience". It's over 500 pages long and, if the Times is correct, it documents a mess:

Among the overarching conclusions of the history is that five years after embarking on its largest foreign reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan in Europe after World War II, the United States government has in place neither the policies and technical capacity nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake such a program on anything approaching this scale.

The bitterest message of all for the reconstruction program may be the way the history ends. 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.