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Anti-constitution petition circulated
3.29.04   Anne Barnard Boston Globe

Baghdad   Followers of Iraq's most revered cleric are circulating a petition condemning the country's interim constitution, blueprint for fast-approaching hand-off of power to Iraqi govt. The petition, giving many Iraqis their first news of the interim constitution, is worded to play to many Iraqis' deepest fears. It describes the law as "a tragedy" that paves the way for U.S. to dominate Iraq's future, encourages immoral behavior and opens the door for Jews to take power.
The petition is being passed around Baghdad neighborhoods & colleges by men who say they will deliver the signatures to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a spiritual leader to millions of Shiite Muslims. Some Baghdad residents say they signed the petition for fear that they would otherwise be branded as collaborators.
"The law was made with the help of the occupying authorities, and we can see its stamp very clearly," says the 2 page flier that accompanies the petition. "God only knows where it will lead us."

The petition is the latest challenge to the embattled plan for the transition to Iraqi sovereignty, which U.S. officials have revised numerous times since November because of al-Sistani's objections. The flier criticizes the law for installing an unelected govt that will rule until January 2005, for permitting the Iraqi military to be commanded by a U.S.-led multinational force, and for allowing a proposed permanent constitution to be scrapped if two-thirds of the voters in any 3 provinces reject it, effectively giving veto power to minority Kurds in the northern provinces. The petition has rattled members of Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council, who approved the interim constitution 3.8.04 and now worry that the grass-roots campaign will reach people sooner than the carefully orchestrated, high-security series of town meetings they have planned to educate Iraqis about the new law.

"It's unfortunate because first impressions are hard to correct," said Fareed Yasseen, a senior adviser to Adnan Pachachi, a Governing Council member whose staff played a leading role in drafting the law. U.S. officials touted the interim constitution, called the Transitional Administrative Law as the single biggest achievement in Iraq's political transformation, saying its bill of rights and its balance between majority & minority power are unprecedented in the Arab world. But Yasseen said the council & the U.S.-led occupation authority have been "absolutely abysmal" at disseminating information to Iraqis.
The law is being denounced through the religious & social networks where most Iraqis get their information. At Friday prayers last week in Sadr City, a crowded Shiite neighborhood, an imam told thousands of worshippers, "God will send anyone to hell who says they accept the interim constitution."

At his mosque near the holy city of Najaf, firebrand Shiite preacher Moqtada al-Sadr branded the law "a terrorist document" and called on the Governing Council to disband if it cannot revise the law, the Arab satellite channel Al-Jazeera reported.
Al-Sistani's newest objections have overshadowed the arrival of U.N. technical advisers, who began work Saturday helping the Governing Council design a caretaker govt that is to assume power 6.30.04. U.S. & Iraqi officials say the U.N. team's work is crucial to give the political transition some international legitimacy. But al-Sistani has threatened to oppose U.N. participation if its Security Council endorses the interim constitution.
His main objection is that the law places executive power in the hands of a president & two deputies, presumably a Shiite Muslim Arab, a Sunni Muslim Arab and a Kurd to represent the country's 3 main groups, who must make unanimous decisions.

In a 3.11.04 letter to U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, al-Sistani said that structure could lead to deadlock & sectarian conflict. The letter, posted on the cleric's Web site, says the law has little support among Iraqis, citing the "millions of signatures that have been collected."
It is unclear whether the 73-year-old cleric, who does not speak to reporters, is personally responsible for the Baghdad petition, which is more inflammatory in tone than many of his official statements. But by invoking his name, the people behind the petition, who say they belong to various Shiite foundations & charities, tap into the reverence for a man whose word is law to many Shiites.

The slaughter of Iraq's intellectuals   Since the occupation began, some 200 leading Iraqi academics, most of them in the humanities and social sciences, have been killed.   9.6.04   Intl Coalition of Academics Against Occupation dir. Andrew Rubin, Georgetown Univ. English lit. asst. prof. New Statesman

Victims of unknown assassins

Among scores of sr academics killed since start of western occupation:   Muhammad al-Rawi, University of Baghdad president   Dr Abdul-Latif al-Mayah, Mustansiriyah Univ. poli. sci. prof. (Baghdad)   Dr Nafa Aboud, Univ. of Baghdad Arabic lit. prof.   Dr Sabri al-Bayati, Univ. of Baghdad geographer   Dr Falah al-Dulaimi, Mustansiriyah Univ. asst college dean   Dr Hissam Sharif, Univ. of Baghdad history dept   Prof. Wajih Mahjoub, College of Physical Ed.   Prof. Sabah Mahmoud, Mustansiriyah Univ. Education College ex-dean   Prof. Abdul Jabbar Mustafa, Mosul Univ. politics dept head   Dr Layla Abdul Jabbar & her husband, Law Faculty dean in Mosul   Dr Ali Abdul Husain Jabok, Univ. of Baghdad College of Political Science

Control, intimidation, and even murder of Iraqi intellectuals, professors, lecturers and teachers has become more or less systematic since the US-led invasion of Iraq began in March 2003. Under the subsequent occupation, initially governed by a body called the Coalition Provisional Authority, US military officials dismissed many Iraqi intellectuals from university positions, often on spurious grounds; and a surprisingly large number fell victim to assassination. The Union of Iraqi Lecturers believes that roughly 200 have been killed, and estimates by various professors in Iraq back up this figure.

… To date, the CPA has neither investigated the deaths nor made a single arrest, … US defence dept spokesman, when asked recently about assassinations among the Iraqi intelligentsia, dismissed the matter as simply "obscure". Iraqi interim govt, installed & hand-picked by U.S., has done nothing and said nothing about it. With the exception of a few individuals such as Univ. of Baghdad poli. sci. sr prof. Saad Jawad, people are unwilling to speak out publicly. When a former doctoral student of Jawad's was killed at the University of Mosul, Jawad's colleagues refused to sign a petition supporting a strike.

… One university president and several deans have been murdered. What is most striking is that many of those killed since the occupation began were trained not in the physical sciences, but in soft sciences & humanities … subjects such where discussion about conflict can be converted into the conditions for reconciliation.
… speculation about who is responsible for these killings. Some allege it is Mossad, the Israeli secret service, which obviously has an interest in a weak & possibly theocratic Iraq, better to declare Arabs undemocratically minded terrorists. ("It's not personal; it's business," one professor in Baghdad says of Mossad's possible motives.)

Former asst UN secretary-general Denis Halliday has wondered aloud whether this is the work of anti-secular fundamentalists hoping to recruit students to the madrasas and to tenets of Islamist fundamentalism. Others have pointed to militias such as those commanded by Ahmad Chalabi, once favoured by the Pentagon. At the same time, some allege these are acts of revenge and fury over grades from disgruntled students, now armed, along with the entire civil society, with weapons that the US sold to Iraq … less than 2 decades ago.
Part of the process of dismissing Iraqi intellectuals, professors and lecturers was known as de-Ba'athification: with the exception of a few returned exiles, former Ba'ath Party members make up the vast majority of professors in postwar Iraq. Under Saddam Hussein's regime, all professors who wished to keep their job were required to join the Ba'ath Party. … PM Iyad Allawi, is himself a former Ba'athist & murderer. According to Robert Dreyfuss, writing in the American Prospect, $3bn of the $87bn going to Iraq has been allotted to fund covert CIA paramilitary operations there, …

… curriculum under Saddam Hussein … Known as "Arab culture & socialism", the 4 year undergraduate humanities course was a brain-numbing, chauvinistic and hyper-nationalist occasion for unrestrained celebration of Ba'athism, elevating the writings of party theoreticians to canonical heights.
Like many other universities in countries of the Arab & developing world, Iraq's academic institutions, after years of rule by the Ottomans, followed by British & French colonisation, were fundamental to the modern reinvention of national identity. In Egypt, for example, the curriculum underwent a process of Arabisation after the revolution of 1952. Similarly, modern standard Arabic became the official language of Algeria, a former French colony, only in 1962, and for the first time could be uttered outside the mosques.
Despite tyranny exercised over Iraqi society by Saddam Hussein, the university classroom was (some professors often claim) a relatively autonomous space for learning & instruction, where professors, lecturers and students could be openly critical. They could even criticise the govt, so long as they never mentioned Saddam personally, or his 2 sons. Even today, the textbooks retain the same content, altered only by the elimination of images of Saddam and his sons. …

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new supplement Saddam's propaganda nation USAID
UN ¹   supplement Global Exchange NNEWAI EPIC Voices in the Wilderness Iraq Peace Team

Baghdad   A group of Iraqi tribal leaders, former politicians and intellectuals appealed Wednesday to the United Nations to take control of Iraq in a move they say would help U.S. troops leave the beleaguered country. Both the U.S. administration and the Baghdad govt are unlikely to endorse the request, which was addressed to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and delivered to the Cairo offices of the organization.
"We believe that the only opportunity left for Iraq to be saved from a dark, but not inevitable future, is to engage the international community represented by the United Nations," the letter said. "Such a step will allow the American troops to leave and the occupation to be brought to its end".

The group's coordinators include Adeeb al-Jadir, Ahmed Al-Haboubi and Nouri Abdel Razak Hussein, politicians overthrown in 1968 when Saddam Hussein's Baath party came to power and long part of the liberal anti-regime opposition prior to the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
The U.N. dramatically curtailed its operations in Iraq after an August 2003 suicide attack killed its representative and scores of others. U.S. has been pushing for an expanded U.N. role in Iraq but that did not include supervising the country.
The Iraqi group said the world body should supervise a new security plan to restore order during a transitional period and prepare for new elections of a government to replace Nouri al-Maliki's troubled cabinet.

Representatives for the campaign will travel to the U.N. headquarters in New York to seek support from key members, said al-Haboubi, a former government minister. "We are also ready to discuss our proposals with U.S. officials," he said. The men said the petition was signed by dozens of Iraqi dignitaries and they had scores of supporters in Iraq who preferred to rename anonymous for know to avoid harassment.
Meanwhile, Iraqi govt on Wednesday announced a committee formed to explore ways citizens could sue U.S. forces involved in "unjustified killings," according to the prime minister's office. The U.S. military did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Also Wednesday, the U.S. military acknowledged that a roadside bomb targeting a passing U.S. convoy had struck near a passenger bus, a day after initially claiming no one died in the attack. U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner could not confirm the number of casualties, but said no U.S. forces were involved in any gunfire that followed.
"We are still working with Iraqi security forces, and those now investigating the detailed circumstances of that attack, to learn whatever else we can," Bergner said.

Dr. Hadi Badr al-Riyahi, head of the Nasiriyah provincial health directorate, confirmed that the attack on the bus traveling from Najaf to Basra killed 16 civilians and wounded 20 about 50 miles south of Nasiriyah. At the time of the attack, a local policeman and the assistant bus driver also said 16 people were killed on the bus, which was riddled with holes that appeared to be caused by shrapnel or bullets.
On Tuesday, violence reportedly killed a total of at least 42 people across Iraq. The sudden spike comes in the wake of a 60 percent drop in attacks across the country since June, according to U.S. military figures. According to AP count, at the height of unrest from November 2006 to August 2007, on average approximately 65 Iraqis died each day as a result of violence. As conditions improved, the daily death toll steadily declined. It reached its lowest point in more than two years on January 2008, when on average 20 Iraqis died each day.

Those numbers have since jumped. In February, approximately 26 Iraqis died each day as a result of violence, and so far in March, that number is up to 39 daily. These figures reflect the months in which people were found, and not necessarily, in the case of mass graves, the months in which they were killed.

Chalabi in Iraq's seat as UN session opens
9.23.03   Reuters   ¹ ²

United Nations   The head of Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council was in Iraq's seat Tuesday as the U.N. General Assembly opened its annual high-level meeting of kings, presidents and other top leaders. In the seat set aside for Iraq in the 191-nation assembly was Ahmad Chalabi, holder of Iraqi council's rotating presidency. Seated next to him was fellow council member Adnan Pachachi.
Chalabi is scheduled to address the high-level assembly session next week. The delegation also includes Hoshyar Zebari, the council-appointed Iraqi foreign minister. Akila al-Hashemi, one of the council's three women, had also been expected to come to New York for the session but was wounded in an assassination attempt over the weekend. While still in critical condition, she was expected to survive the attack.

"Despite this tragedy, the Iraqi Governing Council delegation decided to continue with its mission to deliver Iraq's message of hope, peace and democracy to the U.N. body," the council said in a statement issued in Baghdad. Some Iraqis have denounced the council for cooperating with Iraq's U.S.-led administration.
It was named in July by Iraq's U.S. administrator Paul Bremer, and its actions are subject to a U.S. veto. One of its top priorities has been to convince UN it represents the Iraqi people until a permanent new govt can be formed.The council appears to be quietly taking over Baghdad's UN seat. But Iraq cannot vote for the time being, in any case, because it owes $12 million in back dues.

U.N. officials said no one had yet questioned the right of Governing Council members to take the seat. If someone did, U.N. rules stipulate that whoever is occupying the seat at the time of a challenge can remain in it until the General Assembly rules he cannot.

Russia says would back U.S.-Led U.N. force in Iraq   8.30.03   Reuters

Maddalena, Italy   Russia would support a decision to send U.N. sponsored intl military force to Iraq, even under U.S. command, Russian pres. Putin said Saturday during an informal visit to Italy. "Regarding the possible participation of intl forces in Iraq under U.S. command, we don't see anything wrong with this," Putin told a news conference on the island of Maddalena, near the holiday haven of Sardinia. "It is possible, but it would require a decision from the U.N. Security Council," he said.

Russia, along with permanent Security Council members Germany & France, opposed the U.S. led war that ousted Iraqi pres. Hussein. The 3 countries now favor a larger UN role Iraq. Speaking at a formal briefing in the Mediterranean island of Maddalena after relaxed talks in Sardinia on Friday, Putin did not say whether Moscow would be willing to send its own troops to Iraq as part of a U.N. sponsored force.
Earlier on Saturday, Russian deputy foreign minister Yuri Fedotov told Interfax news agency it would be premature to speak of a role for Russia in a future U.N. military contingent. "First of all it is necessary to clarify details and then decide," Fedotov was quoted as saying. "We are ready to discuss the different variations, formats … We are (waiting for) new decisions to be taken by the Security Council in order to determine our standpoint on this question."

Washington, long opposed to idea of U.N. sponsored intl force in Iraq, has recently softened its position as it tries to stabilize the country. Since Bush² declared major combat over in May 2003, U.S. troops in Iraq have faced persistent guerrilla attacks and the Iraqi oil industry has been plagued by sabotage.
Putin told reporters Moscow would back a fresh U.N. resolution to help form a new political leadership in Iraq and hold democratic elections, though questions remain over whether Washington would be willing to share control over post-war Iraq. "We are in constant talks and consultations with our partners in U.S. as well as in Europe," Putin said Saturday after a visit to Russian warships. "The day before yesterday I spoke with German Chancellor (Gerhard) Schroeder."

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, currently at the helm of the EU's rotating presidency, said an Oct. 2003 European Council meeting would help the bloc mend fences after Iraq. "We are working to find common ground between European countries and to again find common ground with U.S.," he told the press conference.
Berlusconi, who greeted Putin with friendly bear-hugs & jokes, has billed the Russian leader's visit to his holiday villa as a boost to efforts to bring Moscow closer to Brussels. A Russia-EU meeting is scheduled in Rome Nov. 2003.
In a joint statement, the 2 vowed to work to bring Russia & European Union closer together over key issues including visa requirements, but offered no concrete initiatives.

PM Nuri al-Maliki will fly to Iraq's second city Basra on Wednesday to end faction fighting among fellow Shi'ites and said he is ready to use force against "gangs" holding oil exports and other trade to ransom.
"We must restore security in Basra and if any defy peaceful solutions then force will be the solution," he told Reuters on Tuesday. "There's no way we can leave Basra, the gateway to Iraq, our imports and exports, at the mercy of criminal, terrorist gangs. We will use force against these gangs."

In an interview 3 days after a small Shi'ite faction warned it could halt oil exports from Basra to win concessions in Baghdad, Maliki said: "I will go tomorrow with a delegation from the govt and from the parliament."
"We will spare nothing to find a solution," he added, saying he would stay in the city beyond Wednesday if needed.
Maliki said he was unhappy with some policies on the part of British forces who patrol the oil-rich southern province, where various factions of his dominant Shi'ite Islamist Alliance bloc are competing for power and influence. He said a further complication was foreign "infiltrators" coming across the border from Shi'ite Iran, though he declined to say whether he believed the incomers were themselves Iranian.

"What is happening in Basra has many dimensions," said Maliki, whose Dawa party is part of the Alliance coalition.
The main Alliance factions involved in Basra's power struggles are the armed Badr organization, the Fadhila party and the movement of cleric & militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr. ¹
Noting an open conflict between the governor and the police chief against a backdrop of daily killings and widespread accusations of corruption and organized crime, he said: "We cannot blame whatever is happening on terrorists. There is a tribal dimension and also there are the armed organized criminal gangs kidnapping & killing people, and these are the most dangerous element in the crisis."
"There are infiltrators complicating the situation in Basra because Basra is Iraq's oil artery," he added. "Also there is some behavior from the British," he said without specifying which policies he was complaining about. "We will work on reconciling tribes and religious figures and political parties, and also increase the security presence to stop the criminals," he said.
"We have to go to find solutions   We have a crisis but it is not an insolvable crisis and, God willing, our efforts will be enough to find solutions acceptable to all sides involved."

Commerce Dept ¹
Titan Corp. Electronic Iraq IraqJournal.org Islamic news IViews Vincent Ferraro Sam Francis Bay of Pigs metaphor

Najaf Iraq   In April, Najaf's main maternity hospital received rare good news: an $8 million refurbishment program financed by U.S. would begin immediately. But 5 months and millions of dollars later, the hospital administrators say they have little but frustration to show for it.
"They keep saying there's renovation but, frankly, we don't see it," said hospital dir. Liqaa al-Yassin, her exasperated face framed by a black hijab, or scarf. "Each day I sign in 80 workers, and sometimes I see them, sometimes I don't."

She walks a visitor through the hospital's hot, dim halls, the peeling linoleum on the floors stained by the thousands of lighted cigarettes crushed underfoot. Anxious women, draped in black head-to-foot chadors, or veils, sit in the sultry rooms fanning their sick children.
"My child has heart problems, she can't take this heat," pleaded one mother as Dr. Yassin walked past.
U.S. has poured more than $200 million into reconstruction projects in this city, part of the $10 billion it has spent to rebuild Iraq. Najaf is widely cited by the military as one of the success stories in that effort, but American officers involved in the rebuilding say that reconstruction projects here, as elsewhere in the country, are hobbled by poor planning, corrupt contractors and a lack of continuity among the rotating coalition officers charged with overseeing the spending.

"This country is filled with projects that were never completed or were completed and have never been used," said a frustrated civil affairs officer who asked not to be identified because he had not been cleared to speak about the reconstruction.
Najaf would seem to be one of Iraq's most promising places to rebuild. As a Shiite holy place, it has few Sunnis and, as a result, none of the insurgent attacks and sabotage that plague other parts of the country. Just a year after fighting between American forces and Shiite militias left much of the city in smoking ruins, a new police force is patrolling the streets and security in the city has been handed over to Iraqis.

There are some successes. The Army Corps of Engineers finished refurbishing several police and fire stations, one of which has shiny new fire engines donated by Japan. It is spending tens of thousands of dollars to refurbish crumbling schools and has replaced aging clay water pipes in the suburb of Kufa with more durable plastic ones. It is spending half a million dollars to renovate the city's soccer stadium, putting in new lights and laying fresh sod.
But in a series of interviews, American military officers and Iraqi officials involved in the reconstruction described a pattern of failures and frustrations that Army officers who have worked in other parts of Iraq say are routine. Residents complain that the many of the city's critical needs remain unfulfilled and the Army concedes that many projects it has financed are far behind schedule.

Officers with the American military say that corruption and poor oversight are largely to blame.
"We were told to stimulate the economy any way we can, and a lot of money was wasted in the process," said Capt. Kelly Mims, part of the Army liaison team that maintains an office in Najaf's local government bldg. "Now we're focused on spending the money more wisely."
He said the Army was forming a committee with provincial authorities to create a master list of all current and future projects so that the money goes where it is most needed. Several agencies are charged with reconstruction in Iraq. In Najaf it is primarily the work of the Army Corps of Engineers and U.S. Agency for Intl Development.

They award some projects to foreign contractors, many of them American companies that hold master contracts for reconstruction work. Other projects are awarded directly to Iraqi companies, but even the American companies subcontract much of the work to Iraqis. A handful of Army reservists and civilian employees hand out cash to Iraqi contractors and try to keep track of the projects they underwrite.
But American officers say there is almost no oversight after a contractor is given the job. The Army pays small Iraqi contractors in installments, 10 percent at the outset, 40 percent when the work is half done, 40 percent on completion and the final 10 percent after fixing problems identified in a final inspection. On larger projects, contractors are paid by the month, regardless of how much work is actually done.

Penalty clauses for missing deadlines are rare, and some contractors drag out their projects for months, officers say, then demand more money and threaten to walk away if it is not forthcoming. Maj. William Smith, charged with overseeing most of the reconstruction work in the area, walks around the bright blue pipes and yellow tanks of an unfinished water treatment plant outside of town. A control panel with its array of monitoring lights sits baking in the sun beside broken bags of filtering sand.
The plant was supposed to be finished in June, but the feed pipe from the river has not even been connected; it was buried unmarked and now has to be relocated.
"Sometimes, the only way to go is to pay off the contractor and put it out for new bids," the major said with a weary chuckle. He said the water treatment plant was one of 4 that he was considering repossessing, even though he has paid out more than $200,000 on each one.

Major Smith says that contractors can technically be blacklisted. But they simply change the names of their companies and submit bids for new projects, "and we don't really have a choice but to use them" if they submit the winning bid, he said. That is because U.S. blacklists only companies, not individuals, he said.
Army engineers have to scrutinize tenders carefully because contractors sometimes leave out major pieces of equipt to lower their bids, he said. Once the contract is awarded and the omission is discovered, the Army is forced to pay more to complete the project.
All bids must be submitted in English and the companies are required to have an English-speaking representative on site whenever the Americans visit, but they rarely do, many officers said.

At a U.S. financed health clinic going up on the outskirts of town, Major Smith resorts to pantomime as he tries to make himself understood to an eager foreman. In response, the foreman draws furiously in the sand, but all a bemused Major Smith can say is, "O.K., O.K." He promises to return with an interpreter in a few days, but even that message is lost.
Driving through the city, Major Smith points out a new, $5.5 million sewage treatment plant, built by Bechtel with funds from the Agency for Intl Development. The plant was completed in February but was not commissioned until August because no one in Najaf had been trained on how to operate it. The agency said that it was now operating at full capacity, serving 141,000 people. But a similar plant has sat unused in the nearby town of Diwaniya since its completion last December, also for lack of trained personnel. An agency spokesman said it was expected to begin operating in September.

Muhammad Yusef al-Yasiri, an engineer who sits on the project committee of Najaf's city council, grumbled that the Americans hired contractors and handed out projects without consulting the local institutions involved. "Even the hospitals have no idea what kind of work is being done," he said. As a result, he added, "the money isn't going to the right places."
He cited the Al Sadr Teaching Hospital, which was caught in last year's crossfire between coalition forces and fighters loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, son of the grand ayatollah for whom the hospital is named. Sadr's fighters used the hospital's high floors to fire on a coalition base nearby before being driven out. After coalition troops pulled out in July last year, looters moved in, carting away almost anything of value.

To refurbish the hospital, the Army hired the Parsons Corporation, a private engineering and construction company that has been awarded a master contract to build and renovate hospitals and health centers throughout the country. It was paid $2 million to lay new linoleum and hang new ceiling tiles in the hospital's ground floor, drain the flooded basement and fix the central air-conditioning.
But the work has not assuaged angry doctors whose first priority is to replace the equipt lost in the looting, which they say U.S. should have prevented in the first place.A resident doctor who gave his name as Ather led a visitor through the hospital, pointing out where the advanced equipt once stood. Looters damaged the magnetic resonance imaging machine and stole the control unit of the CT scanner. The large white doughnut of the scanner sits idle in a pristine room, untouched by the fighting. Only two of the hospital's four X-ray machines remain.

In the emergency room, a family sat on a blanket eating a lunch of bread, grilled meat and cucumbers. "This was Najaf's most advanced hospital," he said with distress. "A lot of money has been spent on the rehabilitation of this hospital, but not very much has changed."
Part of the problem is that much of the money is spent before any work is done. Intl Monetary Fund reported recently that a third to half of the money paid to foreign contractors is spent on security and insurance. Importing equipt also eats up cash. Major Smith said the hospital's new boiler, for example, was being shipped from U.S.. At the maternity hospital across town, Dr. Yassin could hardly disguise her mounting frustration. She said the contractor, the Parsons Corporation, had repaired the hospital's reverse osmosis water purification equipt, but that little else had been accomplished in the 5 months since the renovation began.

Only one of the hospital's four elevators is working, and that is the one Parsons left in operation while the others were supposedly being repaired, she said, adding that no one is working on the elevators now. Major Smith said Parsons had completed the work but that it was so shoddy the Army would not certify the elevators for use. He said the company had since agreed to bring in elevator specialists to redo the job.
Parsons was also supposed to fix the hospital's incinerators, but it completed the work without hooking up gas lines to fuel them, Dr. Yassin said. A Parsons spokesman in California said that all work on the hospital would be completed in November and blamed insurgent activity in the area for the delays.

The hospital director, though, said that there had never been any fighting around the site, and that Najaf had been free of major violence for more than a year. Dr. Yassin said that, in any event, she would prefer that the money be spent on new facilities and had asked the Ministry of Health to finance an expansion.
"Were doing our best, despite this process of rehabilitation," she said. "I hope that they will work faster in the future."