Rebuilding Iraq the very expensive way

'... at a maternity and children's hospital in Irbil a sophisticated oxygen distribution system was not used because staff did not trust it.
In the same hospital needles and bandages were tossed into the sewer system, which frequently blocked, because an incinerator installed to deal with such waste was not in use.According to the report, this was "because those initially trained to operate the incinerator were no longer employed at the hospital" and because the door to the incinerator was padlocked and no-one knew who had the key.'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6607039.stm

When reading this, an experience of my own flashed into my mind. I was doing some work in Kuwait, and I showed up one week-day to find that the only person in the building other than me was a janitor. Nobody had mentioned to me the day before that they weren't going to be coming to work, and the following day nobody seemed inclined to explain their absence. The fact that I had flown to Kuwait to do work that was costing them many hundreds of pounds a day didn't seem to register with them at all. And the guy who was supposed to be managing my work while I was on site spent 99% of his time playing a very noisy racing game on his PC. Three months after my visit, a colleague of mine went to the site and found everything exactly as I had left it, completely un-used and neglected.

I very quickly got acclimitised to the middle eastern attitudes to work. This was mainly that the higher you were in an organisation, the less time you would spend thinking about work, let alone doing any. I'm not sure why the US is transferring great quantities of expensive hardware to Iraq when the track record for this kind of technology transfer is so godawful. The infrastructure that should get fixed first is the oldest. Mend the roads, mend the bridges, make sure the hospitals have beds and mops. Putting in multi-million pound generators that no Iraqi has any idea how to run or maintain seems hopeful at best, doltish at worst.

I think of it as the AK-47 theory of existence. The best infantry weapon is not the most accurate or the most expensive one. Its the one that a 17-year-old recruit can shoot reasonably well with from day one, even after he drags it though a swamp and doesn't bother to clean it. The best technology is the one that yields decent results when used by an average person in that particular place. If that is a shovel rather than a backhoe, go with the shovel. Trying to turn Iraq into California in two or three years is plain dumb. A lot of US taxpayers money is being wasted trying to do it, and its not clever.