US Construction Giant Pulls Out of Iraq

The Bush administration was accused of "cutting and running" from the Iraqi reconstruction effort after it emerged that Bechtel Corp, one of the biggest construction firms in the world, was leaving the country after coming to the end of its last government contract.

Over three years Bechtel was paid $2.3bn (£1.21bn) for work repairing infrastructure, mostly electricity supply and sewage systems. Much of the work was carried out by local sub-contractors. In that time 52 workers were killed and 49 wounded. No new reconstruction funding has been allocated by Congress, and the company said it had completed its last contract, claiming to have completed 97 out of 99 projects it was assigned.

However, it is unclear how much of the infrastructure it repaired is still operating.

"As Bechtel goes, so goes the whole reconstruction effort," argued Paul Krugman, an economist and critic of the administration, in a New York Times commentary. He said the electricity supply in Baghdad remained sporadic and much of Iraq was without a clean water supply.

"Whatever our leaders may say about their determination to ... complete the mission, when it comes to rebuilding Iraq they've already cut and run," he wrote.

Cliff Mumm, who ran Bechtel's Iraq operation, told Congress: "We were told it would be a permissive environment. But to the horror of everyone, it never stabilised." He added: "I'm proud of what we did, but had law and order prevailed, it would be a different situation."

Yesterday the Baghdad police said they had found 56 bullet-ridden bodies in the course of 24 hours.

Pratrap Chatterjee, managing editor of a watchdog group, CorpWatch.org, and the author of Iraq Inc., said that $30bn had been spent on reconstruction and there was little to show for it. "There's practically nothing. That's partly because a lot of the money was spent on big companies with enormous overheads."

It was reported yesterday that the office of the special auditor assigned to monitor reconstruction spending would be closed next October under a little noticed clause in a military spending bill.

Meanwhile, the army intervened yesterday to stop Sergeant Santos Cardona, a military police dog handler convicted of abuses in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, being sent back to Iraq after it was reported he was being deployed with his unit to help train the Iraqi police.