'Vicious circle' taking heavy toll on Iraq

The blood of Fallujah, the thunder of Baghdad and the daily struggles of life have been distilled in columns of numbers and pages of dry prose. The experts have taken a hard look at Iraq, and they don't like what they see.

Recent in-depth studies — by official auditors and unofficial watchdogs, by economists and lawyers, by pollsters, political scientists and ex-Pentagon aides — find a few good economic signs and some cause for hope in January's planned elections. Even more, however, they find dashed expectations and rising fears, missed deadlines, mismanaged money and grand schemes lost in the smoke of car bombs and airstrikes.

With Iraq so unstable, "there are questions about what options and contingency plans are being developed to address these ongoing and future challenges," the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) observes in a report to Congress.

Anthony H. Cordesman is more blunt. In many ways the U.S. occupation has been "a dismal failure," this veteran national security analyst says.

His colleagues at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) — in a separate 102-page analysis — note that "failure" and "success" are sensitive words as the U.S. presidential election nears. Nonetheless, they conclude, Iraq "will not be a 'success' for a long time."

The Associated Press reviewed a dozen such status reports against the backdrop of nonstop violence in Baghdad and sharpening rhetoric in Washington. The studies were conducted by U.S. government agencies and private international and U.S. research organizations, in some cases drawn from months of work and hundreds of interviews inside Iraq.

Again and again, their focus falls on what the authoritative International Crisis Group calls Iraq's "vicious circle."

"Lack of security leads to lack of reconstruction, which leads to lack of jobs, which leads back to lack of security," the European-based ICG finds.

Perhaps 60 percent of Iraq doesn't have work. With no jobs, more Iraqis turn to armed resistance, out of resentment of the occupiers and sometimes for money. Insurgents will pay a man up to $100 to attack a U.S. patrol, the CSIS says.

Security has spiraled downward since the U.S.-British invasion of March 2003. Iraqis see and hear it around them — in the car bombings, kidnappings, highway banditry and in the unrelenting mortar, rocket and roadside bomb attacks on the U.S. military. From a handful a day in mid-2003, those anti-U.S. assaults have exploded — to more than 70 on average every day last month.