"Cactus Jammies" <cactusjammies@tetrahedron.net> wrote > Oh... Did
Haliburton recently bail out of Iraq or perhaps Baghdad, btw?  One

Hay Cac you agitator:
No, it was Bechtel Corp, the contractor that was supposed to rebuild Iraqi
infrastructure.

see yer noos:
                          ()0()
-Chester Field o(===)o
                        /        \

Bechtel calls it quits after more than 3 years in Iraq
Violence has left few of the company's infrastructure projects in the
war-torn country operating as planned.

By David Streitfeld
Times Staff Writer
Published November 3, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO - Bechtel Corp. helped build the Bay Area subway system,
Hoover Dam and a city for 200,000 in the desert of Saudi Arabia. It likes to
boast that it can go anywhere, under any conditions, and build anything.

In Iraq, Bechtel met its match.

A firm that prides itself on its safety record saw dozens of its workers
killed. And a company that celebrates achievement won't know for a long
time, if ever, exactly what it accomplished.

The assignment Bechtel won from the U.S. government in early 2003 was
unique: Apply the brick and mortar needed to restart the long-starved and
war-damaged Iraqi economy, allowing the country to blossom into a modern and
free industrial state. Rarely had a single corporation been given so much
power to affect so many so quickly.

More than three years later, Bechtel says its work on Iraq's water and
electrical plants, its bridges, schools and port, is done.

The company said this week at its headquarters here that it had completed 97
of 99 projects for a total of $2.3 billion, a sum that included its
undisclosed fee. Only two Bechtel employees are left in the country. At its
peak, there were 200 people from Bechtel supervising tens of thousands of
Iraqis.

If the story for Bechtel is drawing to a close, this isn't anything like the
happy ending it once expected.

The company went to Iraq with a good deal of well-earned swagger. Chairman
Riley Bechtel told the firm's employees in April 2003 that Bechtel's record
was one "that few, if any, companies in the world can match." The tasks it
would undertake in Iraq, he added, were "the kind of work we do best."

The company expected Iraq to develop from an aid recipient to a customer.
The biggest U.S. engineering firm would help one of the world's most
distressed countries into the 21st century.

That hope receded with each suicide bombing.

"We were told it would be a permissive environment. But to the horror of
everyone, it never stabilized. It just went down, down, down, and to this
day it continues to go down," said Cliff Mumm, who ran Bechtel's Iraq
operation. "I'm proud of what we did, but had law and order prevailed, it
would be a different situation."

At one Bechtel project, in the southern city of Basra, the company recorded
this toll: The site security manager was murdered; the site manager resigned
after receiving death threats; a senior engineer resigned after his daughter
was kidnapped; 12 employees of the electrical-plumbing subcontractor were
assassinated in their offices; and 11 employees of the concrete supplier
were murdered.

All told, 52 workers associated with Bechtel projects were killed, most of
them Iraqi. Forty-nine others were wounded.

Bechtel says it completed nearly all its assigned projects, but that doesn't
mean they are necessarily operating as planned.

"Once projects were complete, the plant operating crews we trained often
lacked the leadership, resources or motivation needed to run and maintain
their facilities," Mumm said in September testimony to the House committee
on government reform.

If Bechtel gives itself high grades under the circumstances, others aren't
so generous.

"They thought, 'We're the world's best, and we can go in and make this
happen,' " said Rick Barton, a reconstruction specialist at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

"After all the money that's been invested, the Iraqi people should be able
to make it on their own. But we're nowhere near that, let alone creating a
shining city on a hill," Barton added.

The looting and vandalism outpaced the rebuilding from the beginning.

In May 2003, the supposed end of open warfare, a survey of Iraq's
dilapidated electrical system showed 13 downed transmission towers. Four
months later, the total had grown to 623.

"We were trying to hold the infrastructure together and at the same time
build a platform to go forward and at the same time cope with a
deteriorating security situation," said Mumm, who recently returned to the
U.S. "There were a lot of moving parts."

The company's critics give it points for remaining free of corruption,
unlike some Iraq contractors. But they say it was too slow in restoring the
power grid.

"In the critical years of 2003 and 2004, part of the growing sense in the
Iraqi population that Americans were incompetent occupiers rather than
effective liberators came because Bechtel hadn't gotten the power grid on in
the scorching hot summers," said Charles Tiefer, a professor at the
University of Baltimore School of Law and an expert on government
contracting. "American corporate reconstruction efforts like Bechtel's
failed worse in Iraq than American arms."

The lack of an infrastructure fed the insurgency, which made it its goal to
destroy the infrastructure. As time went on, Bechtel spent increasing
amounts not on rebuilding but on protecting its workers.

Now that the reconstruction funds are running out, the fate of the Iraq
infrastructure, like so much else in the country, is uncertain.

"Bechtel is putting a 'Mission Accomplished' banner over their work in Iraq
and then coming home," said Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a
watchdog group. "But the mission has not been accomplished. Iraq still
doesn't have enough power, hospitals, clean water."

Most of the bridges and roads and other projects built by Bechtel in the
last century are still in use. Mumm hopes that the work the firm did in Iraq
will survive.

"All that stuff is there, and available, should the Iraqis find themselves
in a stable enough position to use them and take advantage of them," he
said. "I believe eventually that will happen."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
david.streitfeld@latimes.com