Stealing Surge in Iraq

Move over, Halliburton. Dick Cheney's former company has been replaced as the Texas champion of ripping off American taxpayers in the "rebuilding" of Iraq.

A report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, a federal agency, finds that 8 of 11 rebuilding projects by the Parsons Corporation costing $365 million had to be stopped before completion for disastrous waste and ineptness.

The investigation was prompted by the company's $75 million construction of the Baghdad Police College, which ended up with feces and urine pouring from ceilings in student barracks, floors heaving off the ground, and water dripping profusely in a room dubbed "the rain forest."

As the U.S. military makes the country safer from insurgent attacks, American corporations are giving Iraq a taste of democracy in the sluggish, waste-ridden rebuilding of its infrastructure. Audits have found administration and overhead costs running as high as 55 percent on some projects.

In addition to its Texas connections, Parsons is one of the largest contributors to American political campaigns in the construction industry. That makes Middle East baksheesh look like small potatoes.

Building in Baghdad

The new American embassy in Iraq is a perfect metaphor for our experience there. It’s unfinished, behind schedule, unsafe to occupy, more expensive than expected and, from the start, beset by bungling and possible corruption.

Symbolically, the 21 buildings were intended to move American diplomats from Saddam Hussein’s former palace to a compound secure from bomb, mortar and rocket attacks where they could live and work in relative safety.

But the project has been mismanaged to the point that the more than half-a-billion-dollar budget has ballooned by another $192 million and two key structures will not be finished before 2009.

Now, as with everything else in Iraq, Congress is trying to find out what went wrong. The myriad of questions include:

*Why the Washington official overseeing the project has been barred from Iraq by Ambassador Ryan Crocker,

*Why formaldehyde fumes in a facility built to house embassy guards by a Kuwaiti contractor and a faulty electrical system installed by a former Halliburton subsidiary have made it unsafe to open,

*Why offices to house Gen. David Petraeus and his staff are now being reconfigured to safeguard classified material at an additional cost of $14.7 million.

Like nation-building in Iraq, construction of the largest U.S. embassy in the world is not going well. State Department officials, with their Blackwater security guards, are going to be spending an unpredictable amount of time, money and human lives trying to get it right.