March 10, 2003
The US government has plans ready to award contracts worth up to $900 million for immediate reconstruction needs in post-war Iraq, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
The United States Agency for International Development is said to have discreetly sent out requests for proposals from at least five companies involved in infrastructure and engineering. The newspaper said the plan for rebuilding Iraq was detailed in a privately distributed USAID document, called "Vision for Post Conflict Iraq".
The Wall Street Journal said the plan would include rebuilding of roads, schools, bridges and parts of the electricity network.
Among the companies mentioned is the Texas-based Halliburton, where the American vice president Dick Cheney served as chief executive officer from 1995 to 2000. Halliburton has already been reported to have acquired a contract to oversee firefighting operations at Iraqi oilfields after any invasion. Many more contracts will have to be awarded after any possible war.
Unique economy
Estimates of the cost of rebuilding a post-war Iraq vary widely - unofficial figures from the UN suggest it could be as much as $30 billion.
"Iraq has a unique economy. Its people are among the poorest in the world yet it has a modern industrialised infrastructure," a United Nations Development Programme spokesman told BBC News Online. He said that comparisons with Afghanistan, which is costing some $2 billion to reconstruct following a US-led war to oust the Taleban regime, were "misleading". He noted that the amount of oil produced by Iraq had plummeted from 3.5 million barrels a day at the end of the 1980s to 2 million at present.
"It's the only source of foreign earnings, so any idea that Iraq can pay its own way without a substantial period of reinvestment is very wide of the mark," said the spokesman.
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