Thursday, October 23, 2003

15:45 – Baghdad. Ran out of work this afternoon. I saw it coming, but there was nothing I could do to stop it. So much of this portion of the work is data collection and, since there is little in the way of an Iraqi communications system, collection of the necessary and required data is difficult at best.

This gives me an opportunity to try and explain our reason for being.

I’ll skim through the basics: We’re an evil empire. In our ceaseless push towards global conquest and domination we invaded a sovereign nation. Now, to assuage our guilt, we are going to rebuild what we broke.

I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. Really, our reasons for invasion don’t really matter at this point, nor do our motivations for reconstruction. What is almost fact is that there will be approximately $20 Billion spent here within the next four years on major construction projects, plus whatever loans and grants can be raised from the world at large (the Donor’s Conference in Madrid raised $13-19 Billion, plus a promise of tea from Sri Lanka). How this money gets spent is my concern.

As conquerors, the United States set up her own government in Iraq. Since the stated intent is to give the nation back to the Iraqi people, the new government is provisional and, since we’re trying to appear less like empire builders, we tack on the word “Coalition”, to add the global spin. Hence, the Coalition Provisional Authority, or CPA.

Under the CPA is the Iraqi Infrastructure Reconstruction Office (IIRO), charged with the reconstruction of the Iraqi Infrastructure. Within the IIRO is the Program Management Office (PMO) charged with management of the program for reconstruction. This is where the sixteen of us work (twelve hour a day is still only half a day, so it’s a pretty light gig). Our work falls into three major phases. At this point, we are coordinating with all of the actual de-Baathified Iraqi ministries, as well as their mirror organizations within the CPA, to develop wish lists for physical improvements. These lists are about $100B long, and we are tasked with paring this down to the most viable, practicable, and suitable $20B. And for this there is little data, so our prioritization exercise will be based upon our best estimates.

The second step to this process is to find a few qualified contractors to do the work. The current plan is to select only seventeen of them, one or two for each sector, and then negotiate each project as a work task in an undefined deliverable with fixed ceiling format contract. Simple. Except that we will need to scope each work task prior to negotiation, and there could be a couple of thousand separate projects in this $20 Billion, and we have no data.

The third step is to manage the construction contracts. Piece of cake. By this time, though, we should have been replaced by a more long-term organization, with a few hundred assigned employees, instead of sixteen.

The most influential factor in this process is time. If there was more time, we could perform some system analyses to ensure that our infrastructure improvements were suitably incorporated into the existing national scheme, be it electricity, potable water, or transportation. If there was more time, we could make sure that we had all of our data wielding ducks in smart feathered rows. If there was more time, we could establish an internal organizational structure designed to meet the challenges of the assignment. If there was more time, we could select the proper personnel, instead of just throwing resources at the problem (our PMO people are fine, it’s the others in the CPA who were poorly selected).

Throw people they have, and the palace population probably grows by a couple of hundred a week. We aren’t the only group crammed into small quarters.

If only there was more time, but time works against the average Iraqi, who suffers from not only the affects of war, but the after affects of decades of neglect. In fact, much of the work we will be specifying is to rehabilitate facilities that fell into disrepair under Saddam’s reign. However, another large portion of the PMO pie is to repair facilities looted by the Iraqis during the chaos that followed our invasion. This may be a good chart just because – war damage vs. neglect vs. looting. Maybe I can add a column showing the U.S. taxpayer’s cost to propagate the war.

Anyway, the entire purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate to the Iraqis that Americans are swell, so please stop hating us. I’m sure they’ll like us better once we move out of their presidential palace.