Iraq Reconstruction a "Failure" (Al Jazeera, QATAR)

The US-led coalition's $100bn effort to rebuild Iraq has failed amid bureaucratic quarrels, ignorance of Iraqi society and violence in the country, the New York Times has quoted a US government report as saying.

The newspaper said on its website on Saturday that it had obtained a draft copy of Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience, which is circulating among senior officials.

Compiled by the Office of the Special Inspector-General for Iraq Reconstruction, led by Stuart Bowen Jr, a Republican lawyer, the draft text concluded that the US defence department issued false reports to cover up poor progress of the reconstruction effort.

Colin Powell, the former US secretary of state, is quoted as saying that the Pentagon gave inflated figures on the number of Iraqi security forces on the ground. The defence department "kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces - the number would jump 20,000 a week! We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000", he is quoted as saying.

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