In the three years since the fall of Baghdad, Iraq's postwar reconstruction efforts have suffered from lax oversight, endemic corruption, and reams of red tape. But the biggest threat to rebuilding the country, a new report suggests, remains poor security. "It's incomparably more problematic than either corruption or bureaucratic red tape," says Stuart Bowen Jr., who heads the independent office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), in an interview with cfr.org.

Other problems include a yawning reconstruction gap. Of 142 health-care clinics slated to be built as part of a $243 million Army Corps program, for example, only twenty have so far been completed (NYT). Meanwhile, a $592 million U.S. embassy, inside Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone, went up on schedule (USA Today). Projects involving sewage-treatment facilities and electricity plants have also been shelved or scaled back due to cost overruns and looting, according to this recent RAND report. Security requirements such as guards and surveillance cameras eat up an estimated 25 percent of Iraq's $21 billion reconstruction tab.

The New York Times reports that poor security and insurgent attacks are often the scapegoat for Iraq's reconstruction failures, but that bad decision-making and poor execution are equally to blame. This was the case with Halliburton subsidiary KBR's $75.7 million pipeline project at Al Fatah, part of the $2.4 billion no-bid contract handed to Halliburton back in 2003. Because of ill-advised holes drilled into the pipeline's underground terrain, the Fatah project was sidelined in the summer of 2004. The doomed pipeline has cost Iraq as much as $5 million a day in lost crude oil exports, estimates SIGIR.

Corruption, which Inspector General Bowen calls the "second insurgency," also remains problematic. The case of Philip Bloom and Robert Stein (Bloomberg)—businessmen who ran off with $8.6 million in reconstruction funds and pleaded guilty to conspiracy, bribery, and exchanging gifts for sexual favors—is just one of seventy cases of fraud being investigated by SIGIR. Corruption, Bowen adds, also permeates the ministries of defense, interior, and oil.

But the outlook is not entirely bleak. The State Department's quarterly report on reconstruction says a number of sewage and power-generated plants are slated to be finished in 2006, what the report calls the "year of transition." Also, under the supervision of U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, more reconstruction duties are being handed over to local Iraqis. And Khalilzad's implementation of provisional reconstruction teams (PRTs), local civil-military development units in rural areas that have had some success in Afghanistan, is also a positive sign (StrategyPage). Some U.S. military officials, however, have voiced concern about the security challenges posed by "nation-building" initiatives like PRTs (WashPost).