James Glanz’ recent NY Times story on the rebuilding of an oil pipeline in the Tigris River is another grim tale of post-war planning gone wrong. The article’s thrust is to this point. Says Glanz,

...the pipeline at Al Fatah has a wider significance as a metaphor for the entire $45 billion rebuilding effort in Iraq. Although the failures of that effort are routinely attributed to insurgent attacks, an examination of this project shows that troubled decision-making and execution have played equally important roles.

The story details the warnings that KBR, which held the construction contract, received about the problems with the project, the project’s breakdown and the subsequent failure to respond to that breakdown. All this to the tune of $75.7 million and counting, and loss of Iraqi oil revenue. Of course, KBR denies the “bad management” characterization of what happened.

This type of story is frightening in the context of the $320 billion cost projected in the most recent emergency spending bill before the Senate, reflecting a 17% increase in the war’s cost this year, according to the Washington Post. The story goes on to say that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will consume nearly as much money as the departments of Education, Justice and Homeland Security combined, a total that is more than a quarter of this year's projected budget deficit.”

According to the Times article, the no-bid KBR contract “allowed crews to charge as much as $100,000 a day as they waited on standby.”

Look, I don’t know what it takes to rebuild a pipeline in a war zone, but to have news about this type of incompetence in the same week that the war cost leaps forward by another huge margin makes me sort of freak out. What’s going on here, people? The Tigris project is out of the hands of KBR and into the hands of a joint venture between Parsons Corporation and an Australian company, but this doesn’t seem to solve the fundamental problems of the way we planned for this war and the way we expect to pay for it.