Source:
Australian Associated PressIraq holding onto rebuilding funds: US
Iraq's government is sitting on about $US12.5 billion ($A15.46 billion) in rebuilding funds from its own 2006 budget because it lacks the tools and expertise to spend the money, a senior US official says.
~snip~
(Satterfield)He said Iraq had held onto the funds because it lacked the "capacity" to execute its budget, but he argued that a recent request to the US Congress for an additional $US4 billion ($A4.95 billion) would help address this problem.
Legislators from the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs subcommittee rejected Satterfield's suggestion the Iraqis did not have the know-how to execute their own budget.
~snip~
Exactly four years ago, then Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who now heads the World Bank, predicted to Congress that Iraq would "soon" be able to pay for its own reconstruction via oil funds.
"Well, four years and $US21 billion ($A26 billion) into US assistance later, reality seems more like not relatively soon but relatively never," said Ackerman. "The government of Iraq is apparently either unable or unwilling to assume the burden of its own reconstruction."
Read more:
http://au.news.yahoo.com/070327/2/12wls.html
27 March 2007
Iraq Making Political, Economic Progress, U.S. Official Says
State’s Satterfield cites Iraq's advances in reconciliation, development
By David McKeeby
USINFO Staff Writer
Washington – Iraq’s elected leaders are making progress toward political reconciliation, economic development and improved relations with neighbors, says a top U.S. official.
In a March 27 speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, David Satterfield, senior adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and coordinator for Iraq, said Iraqi officials are making a “vigorous and comprehensive” effort to seek compromise and bridge differences among the Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish communities to create “a new national basis for a common future.”
The most important example of the reconciliation agenda’s progress, Satterfield said, was Iraq’s recently completed draft hydrocarbon law, a key benchmark recently approved by the Council of Ministers that will be submitted to the Iraqi Council of Representatives in a few weeks.
The law, which outlines foreign investment and the national and local government’s roles in developing the country’s estimated 115 billion barrels of oil reserves, was the result of intensive negotiation. Satterfield said this demonstrates that internal differences exacerbated by decades of political repression are not irreconcilable and can be resolved through the democratic process.
more:
http://usinfo.state.gov/utils/printpage.htmlinteresting the order in which the emphasis is in this speech. :eyes: