Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times
November 15, 2007 By Alissa J. Rubin
BAGHDAD, Nov. 14 — Iraq will spend an unprecedented $19 billion on capital projects across the country in 2008, including $900 million in Baghdad, senior Iraqi officials said Wednesday, even as they warned that the fight against insurgencies, gangs and militias was far from over.
“We must confront the terrorism and extremism that hampers the building of a country of citizenship and law and that provides opportunity, water, electricity and fuel,” Barham Salih, the deputy prime minister, said in a speech to a gathering of senior Iraqi government and local Baghdad officials.
But Mr. Salih, who is also in charge of economic development for the Baghdad security plan, which began in February, added, “We still have a lot of security challenges.”
The government reached agreement late Tuesday on a $40 billion budget for 2008, including capital and operating costs, and sent it to the Parliament for review, said Mr. Salih, who made the announcement at the gathering. Those present included the two vice presidents, Adel Abdul-Mehdi and Tariq al-Hashemi; Gen. Aboud Qanbar, the military commander overseeing the security plan; and the United States ambassador, Ryan C. Crocker.
Although the city would get more money than ever for capital projects, as well as at least $300 million for its operating budget, it is not clear whether it could spend the capital funds. American development experts say that, at best, only 60 to 65 percent of the $450 million in capital funds allocated for 2007, half as much as for 2008, has actually been spent. Spending has been slowed by security problems, a lack of expertise in contracting projects and inexperience in delegating tasks — when a project manager is away, others are often afraid to make decisions, and work stops.
“People need to feel the value of peace,” said Mr. Hashemi, a Sunni Arab, describing the government’s intention to increase capital spending. “There needs to be quick improvement in electricity, in water, in health care.”
“The destruction of Baghdad has not been just a matter of its infrastructure, the damage to streets and buildings,” he added. “It is the social fabric that has been damaged.”
But he said that even though the social fabric could not be patched overnight, reconstruction could be a sort of peace dividend giving people hope for better times and encouraging them to eschew the violence that has traumatized the capital.
Mr. Hashemi’s presence at the forum was itself a signal of the efforts at rapprochement. The bloc he leads in Parliament had been boycotting cabinet sessions, but it appeared that an end to the boycott was under negotiation. His fellow vice president, Mr. Abdul-Mehdi, a Shiite, said that bringing back the Sunnis would “give strength to reconstruction nationwide.”
Separately, the cabinet has forwarded to Parliament for debate a draft overhaul of the way the de-Baathification rules work. The rules have discouraged many Sunnis from seeking government jobs. The draft has been agreed to by the five most powerful political leaders, representing the Shiite parties Dawa and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, the two largest Kurdish parties and Tawafiq, the Sunni Arab bloc.
Changing the de-Baathification law is important in helping to reconcile those in the former government of Saddam Hussein, many of whom were Sunni Arabs, and the Shiite majority.
The conference about the budget was well attended despite the explosion of a roadside bomb just outside the gates of the city’s heavily protected Green Zone about 90 minutes before the session was to begin inside. The bomb killed two civilians, wounded three more and threw two police officers from their guard towers 150 feet away, the police said.
The explosion raised immediate questions about how such a device could have been planted in such a closely watched area.
Elsewhere in Baghdad, armed Iraqi guards seized a mosque that houses the headquarters of the Association of Muslim Scholars, a Sunni group that fiercely opposes the American occupation, the group and witnesses said. The group’s Web site said that shortly after 9 a.m., guards acting on orders of the Sunni Endowment, which oversees the country’s Sunni mosques, surrounded and entered the mosque, Umm al Qura, and ordered its immediate evacuation.
The motive behind the seizure was not clear, and calls to leaders of the Sunni Endowment were not immediately returned. The Association of Muslim Scholars has long opposed Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government, and it called for a boycott of elections last year.
In Turkey on Wednesday, Gen. Aydogan Babaoglu, the Air Force commander, denied that Turkish fighter jets engaged in cross-border operations on Tuesday, the day the Turks were reported to have bombed deserted Kurdish villages. Iraqi Kurdish officials, police officers and at least one witness said that there were loud booms in the area and that aircraft dropped either bombs or flares over the villages.
“I don’t know how the press comes up with such news,” General Babaoglu said, speaking to the state-run Anatolian News Agency in northern Cyprus. “I was on duty at that time, and not a single plane of the Turkish Air Force was engaged in any kind of operation. There’s nothing like that. Such news absolutely has no grounds.”
The American military announced the deaths of four soldiers in Iraq. A roadside bomb killed two soldiers and wounded four more in Diyala Province, and an additional soldier was fatally shot in Mosul. In Baghdad, a soldier on patrol was killed and six were wounded by a bomb of the type called an explosively formed penetrator.
Reporting was contributed by Cara Buckley, Khalid al-Ansary and Wisam A. Habeeb from Baghdad, and Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul.
November 15, 2007 By Alissa J. Rubin
BAGHDAD, Nov. 14 — Iraq will spend an unprecedented $19 billion on capital projects across the country in 2008, including $900 million in Baghdad, senior Iraqi officials said Wednesday, even as they warned that the fight against insurgencies, gangs and militias was far from over.
“We must confront the terrorism and extremism that hampers the building of a country of citizenship and law and that provides opportunity, water, electricity and fuel,” Barham Salih, the deputy prime minister, said in a speech to a gathering of senior Iraqi government and local Baghdad officials.
But Mr. Salih, who is also in charge of economic development for the Baghdad security plan, which began in February, added, “We still have a lot of security challenges.”
The government reached agreement late Tuesday on a $40 billion budget for 2008, including capital and operating costs, and sent it to the Parliament for review, said Mr. Salih, who made the announcement at the gathering. Those present included the two vice presidents, Adel Abdul-Mehdi and Tariq al-Hashemi; Gen. Aboud Qanbar, the military commander overseeing the security plan; and the United States ambassador, Ryan C. Crocker.
Although the city would get more money than ever for capital projects, as well as at least $300 million for its operating budget, it is not clear whether it could spend the capital funds. American development experts say that, at best, only 60 to 65 percent of the $450 million in capital funds allocated for 2007, half as much as for 2008, has actually been spent. Spending has been slowed by security problems, a lack of expertise in contracting projects and inexperience in delegating tasks — when a project manager is away, others are often afraid to make decisions, and work stops.
“People need to feel the value of peace,” said Mr. Hashemi, a Sunni Arab, describing the government’s intention to increase capital spending. “There needs to be quick improvement in electricity, in water, in health care.”
“The destruction of Baghdad has not been just a matter of its infrastructure, the damage to streets and buildings,” he added. “It is the social fabric that has been damaged.”
But he said that even though the social fabric could not be patched overnight, reconstruction could be a sort of peace dividend giving people hope for better times and encouraging them to eschew the violence that has traumatized the capital.
Mr. Hashemi’s presence at the forum was itself a signal of the efforts at rapprochement. The bloc he leads in Parliament had been boycotting cabinet sessions, but it appeared that an end to the boycott was under negotiation. His fellow vice president, Mr. Abdul-Mehdi, a Shiite, said that bringing back the Sunnis would “give strength to reconstruction nationwide.”
Separately, the cabinet has forwarded to Parliament for debate a draft overhaul of the way the de-Baathification rules work. The rules have discouraged many Sunnis from seeking government jobs. The draft has been agreed to by the five most powerful political leaders, representing the Shiite parties Dawa and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, the two largest Kurdish parties and Tawafiq, the Sunni Arab bloc.
Changing the de-Baathification law is important in helping to reconcile those in the former government of Saddam Hussein, many of whom were Sunni Arabs, and the Shiite majority.
The conference about the budget was well attended despite the explosion of a roadside bomb just outside the gates of the city’s heavily protected Green Zone about 90 minutes before the session was to begin inside. The bomb killed two civilians, wounded three more and threw two police officers from their guard towers 150 feet away, the police said.
The explosion raised immediate questions about how such a device could have been planted in such a closely watched area.
Elsewhere in Baghdad, armed Iraqi guards seized a mosque that houses the headquarters of the Association of Muslim Scholars, a Sunni group that fiercely opposes the American occupation, the group and witnesses said. The group’s Web site said that shortly after 9 a.m., guards acting on orders of the Sunni Endowment, which oversees the country’s Sunni mosques, surrounded and entered the mosque, Umm al Qura, and ordered its immediate evacuation.
The motive behind the seizure was not clear, and calls to leaders of the Sunni Endowment were not immediately returned. The Association of Muslim Scholars has long opposed Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government, and it called for a boycott of elections last year.
In Turkey on Wednesday, Gen. Aydogan Babaoglu, the Air Force commander, denied that Turkish fighter jets engaged in cross-border operations on Tuesday, the day the Turks were reported to have bombed deserted Kurdish villages. Iraqi Kurdish officials, police officers and at least one witness said that there were loud booms in the area and that aircraft dropped either bombs or flares over the villages.
“I don’t know how the press comes up with such news,” General Babaoglu said, speaking to the state-run Anatolian News Agency in northern Cyprus. “I was on duty at that time, and not a single plane of the Turkish Air Force was engaged in any kind of operation. There’s nothing like that. Such news absolutely has no grounds.”
The American military announced the deaths of four soldiers in Iraq. A roadside bomb killed two soldiers and wounded four more in Diyala Province, and an additional soldier was fatally shot in Mosul. In Baghdad, a soldier on patrol was killed and six were wounded by a bomb of the type called an explosively formed penetrator.
Reporting was contributed by Cara Buckley, Khalid al-Ansary and Wisam A. Habeeb from Baghdad, and Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul.