corrente

Rajiv Chandrasekaran of WaPo reports:

BAGHDAD -- When grease-stained technicians at the Baghdad South power plant needed spare parts recently, they first submitted a written request to Bechtel Corp., the engineering firm given more than $1 billion in U.S. government contracts to fix Iraq's decrepit infrastructure.

Then they went to the junkyard.

They scoured piles of industrial detritus for abandoned items that could be jury-rigged into the geriatric plant, such as the hydraulic pump from a bulldozer that was used to restart a broken water condenser.

"Of course we'd like new parts," sighed Ahmed Ali Shihab, the senior operations engineer. But he said repeated appeals to Bechtel and the U.S. military had not yielded any significant new equipment. "All we have received from them are promises," he said.

Now that sounds familiar! Maybe tax cuts would help?

Although U.S. officials said the requests for new parts were beyond the scope of Bechtel's contract, the failure to get much-needed equipment to Baghdad South more than five months after the first reconstruction teams arrived here illustrates the dearth of planning, funding and coordination that has fettered the overall American effort to rehabilitate Iraq.

This is the same deal as Proconsul Bremer not being able to get a working cell phone.

In fact, Iraq's decayed infrastructure is a result of the sanctions regime—the ideologues on Team Bush had faith that the sanctions weren't working, and therefore never bothered to do any intelligence work to get the facts on the ground.

Anyone know a really good abusive term for "ideologue"? I'm getting so tired of this faith-based neo-con crapola...

NOTE: Read the whole thing. It's got lots of good, vivid detail, which so much Iraq reportage lacks. It's really great to see "Washington Post Foreign Service" on a byline. More like that!

UPDATE: Farmer suggests "ideolackey." I like it...