DoD Report Spins Water Shortage in Iraq

Water is hardly a topic that holds one’s attention for long, until you don’t have any.

As it happens, Iraq is short on drinkable water. Although you might not pick up on that fact by reading the paltry two sentences on the topic in the Defense Department’s new report on the country, “Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq.”

“New projects have added capacity to provide access to potable water to approximately 5.2 million Iraqis—an increase of 1 million people since the August 2006 report,” the document reports in a somewhat boosterish tone, giving no benchmark to compare those numbers to. The report acknowledges that “direct measurement of water actually delivered to Iraqis is not available.”

A GAO document released Friday on the same topic tells a slightly different story. While reconstruction efforts are more than half-completed in areas like energy generation, oil production — even school rebuilding and train station renovations — the amount of potable water currently produced in Iraq is at less than half the target amount. Like the DoD report, GAO notes that such water statistics are inaccurate; unlike the DoD report, it says why: “U.S. officials estimate that 60 percent of water treatment output is lost due to leakage, contamination, and illegal connections.”

But didn’t the Pentagon state that rebuilding efforts are providing water to 5.2 million Iraqis now? Read it closer: DoD says efforts have boosted “capacity to provide access to potable water” to 5.2 million Iraqis. Can we assume that such “capacity” is what’s measured before 60 percent of the usable water is lost to the problems identified by GAO?

Update: A reader notes that elsewhere in its new report, the Pentagon notes that “New water projects have increased the supply of potable water by 35% since May 2006,” but that “availability of fresh water remained far short of the need.”

Late Update: The capacity/delivery debate has been going on for some time now, it appears. A reader sent in this clip from a February 2006 NPR broadcast in which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) spar over the issue.