Reconstruction In Iraq at a Crawl, Auditor Reports: "Provincial reconstruction teams, the civilian centerpiece of the Bush administration's strategy in Iraq, are making 'incremental' progress in some areas and very little in others, a government auditor told Congress yesterday. 'Improvement . . . is likely to be slow and will require years of steady engagement,' Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction , told a House panel. The teams are designed to help Iraqis build and maintain democratic institutions, provide basic services and create jobs at a local level. There are about two dozen teams spread across Iraq, each staffed with a handful to several dozen U.S. civilian and military subject experts."
Broken Spring? : Information Clearing House This is a sequel to my June 2011 article, ‘After the spring’, on the upheavals in the Arab world. It is an article that has been painful to write, because it brings bad tidings and offers a pessimistic analysis of the upheavals, at least in the short term, in a number of Arab countries. The outcomes and potential outcomes of these uprisings have also acquired new, very significant dimensions. These include a complex entanglement with the accelerated preparations for a possible attack on Iran, and a poisonous, sectarian aspect that could have the consequence of ripping Syria and the Middle East apart.
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