The Foreign Service Journal, March 2005

sion in Lebanon, in a security envi- ronment reminiscent of that in Iraq today, he relied heavily on Foreign Service Nationals employed by the State Department to tap the pulse of the Lebanese people. But, he points out, Embassy Baghdad had been closed for so long that the institution- al memory of its FSNs is attenuated. When the embassy opened, for example, only one-sixth of the 581 Iraqis the State Department said it needed for logistical support had been hired. “One of the great under-reported stories of all this is the intimidation of everyone that works with us,” Hambley says. Underscoring that point, one FSN working in the political section as an interpreter, Riyadh Wahiab Hamad, was assassinated on Jan. 10, 2005, on his way to work. After investigation, the embassy concluded that Hamad had been targeted because he worked for the U.S. government. Partly as a result, reconstruction efforts have contin- ued to stumble. Last June, before the embassy opened, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz painted an optimistic portrait of how well the $18.4 billion in reconstruction funding appropriated by Congress in 2003 was being spent, telling the Senate Armed Services Committee that he expected that the “dam is starting to break” and that the amount spent was “going to grow very rapidly. We want to make sure it doesn’t grow so rapidly that Amb. Negroponte has nothing left to work with.” Reprogramming Reconstruction That turned out not to be much of a problem. In December, USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios reported that of the $18.4 billion, government agencies had slated $11.8 billion for specific projects, but had only spent $3.6 billion so far. Last year, Senate Foreign Relations Committee member Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., called the slow pace “beyond pitiful and embarrassing.” To be fair, that represents a marked improvement over what the CPA had achieved: as of June 2004, when State opened Embassy Baghdad, only about $366 mil- lion of the $18.4 billion in reconstruction funds had been spent. In September, State announced that it had decided to “reprogram” the $18.4 billion, scrapping large infra- structure projects scheduled to start in 2006 aimed at boosting wastewater processing and electricity produc- tion. Instead, State shifted $3.4 bil- lion for more immediate expenditure on improving security and law enforcement, oil production and export capacity, job creation and democratic governance. The reprogramming means that there are now “more people to clean the irrigation canals, to pick up the garbage, to paint the schools, to do the simple things a community needs to put its people back to work,” said Robin Raphel, State’s director of Iraq reconstruction, during a briefing with reporters last year. She added that, “We need for Iraqis to believe that this assistance is really doing something for them, so to a degree, they have to be able to physically see it.” Natsios says that U.S. efforts to boost job creation have led to 90,000 new jobs as of December and yielded other significant successes as well. “You haven’t heard anything about food riots from the beginning of this [effort] or major food shortages, and I think that’s a testament to how well the system has worked,” Natsios said during a briefing for reporters last December. Natsios cited success stories ranging from the recon- struction of the port of Umm Qasr, which now offloads 50 ships a month, to upgrades to the electrical grid that have boosted megawattage by more than 10 percent; overhauls of nine sewage treatment plants; immuniza- tion of more than three million children; and repair of 2,500 schools. Even so, an evaluation of the reconstruction efforts conducted by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan think-tank, found that many aspects of the effort are not going well, and that the Iraqi public is growing increasingly angry with the U.S. presence there. The report, published late last year, looked at progress in six areas — security, governance, economic opportu- nity, services, education and health care — and found that “Iraq reconstruction continues to stagnate.” One of the principal goals of the reprogramming was to shift more of the responsibility for policing to Iraqis themselves. Toward that end, State indicated in September that it planned to increase the capacity F O C U S 24 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A R C H 2 0 0 5 The establishment of Embassy Baghdad was, in and of itself, highly symbolic.