Thursday, 04 December 2003

19:20 – Baghdad. Hard to believe that it’s been eight weeks since I left Minnesota. Time flies when you’re working eighty-hour weeks.

The tour’s about a third done, and I’m tired, but not yet tired of it. We’ve just completed the first part of the programming process, the identification and prioritization of the (literally) thousands of individual projects that we wish to accomplish with the seemingly unlimited, but actually incredibly limited funds available. Really, it’s only eighteen billion. Take away our administrative and other costs, and we’ll spend less - around fourteen billion on actual construction. But even that has it’s share of non-tangibles, like additional project security, housing for expatriate staff, property acquisition, escalation due to local conditions and the expected increases in materials costs and the like and it’s more on the order of twelve billion in physical improvements over the next three years.

Sure, this still seems like a large chunk of change to those of us complaining that a pint of Guinness is six bucks, but it’s really nothing to the Congress that’s spending a billion a week just to propagate the war. Seems we could have just raised the bounty on Saddam and got away from here for much less.

We’ll never really be done with the prioritized program lists. Even now, the Ministries are fine tuning them and arguing about the overlarge construction estimates that they developed themselves, always trying to get more projects out of a limited pot of cash. However and regardless of any strong desire from the Ministry, for this phase, the final word on water resource projects in Iraq comes from me.

Then Jeff. Then Craig. Then Dave. Then Paul.

And when Paul (Ambassador Bremer) gets done with his tweaks, the list goes to Congress.

Then to George. Then to Laura, who really wants a pediatric hospital. It’s “for the children.”

[duh]

But even then, the list is fluid, and can change quarterly, through a rather simple reporting practice. There was one point this last week when we were informed that any changes to the list would take an actual Act of Congress (which, as it turns out, is really, really difficult), but as usual, conditions have changed. Now it just takes and Act of Me and Jeff and Craig and Dave and Paul.

And maybe Laura, who really wants a pediatric hospital “for the children.”

[double duh]