Baghdad: Billions of dollars are being pledged in Madrid for future reconstruction projects in Iraq, but what the country's US-led administration really wants is some good publicity for its efforts so far.
Months of negative coverage of bomb blasts have left the Coalition Provisional Authority feeling it has lost the public relations battle, with large reconstruction projects going by largely unheralded.
Officials are determined that money from Madrid will both pay for and publicise the future achievements of the US-led occupation. A senior CPA official said: "We don't know where precisely the money from Madrid will be allocated.
"But how ever the new funds are spent we've got to get some good publicity."
CPA officials have been tacitly told by the White House that the current portrayal of Iraq in the media has got to change.
The impression that Iraq is being badly run is one of the reasons much of the money pledged in Madrid will go into special trust funds not directly under the control of the CPA.
US administrators hope that, with other countries now spending millions on the reconstruction effort, they will also be demanding good news for their investment.
The senior official said: "In the past we've just got on with the business of reconstruction, but now we've got to tell everyone that there is a lot more going on here than attacks against American troops."
In recent weeks the CPA has launched a campaign to highlight the positive aspects of Iraq's reconstruction, although this has been largely thwarted by continuing violence in the country.
Money has also been spent on a series of small but high-profile projects such as the creation of community centres across the country or the printing of secondary school textbooks without references to Saddam Hussein.
Mr Chris Milligan, CPA co-ordinator for Usaid, the US government agency which distributes the €20 billion of pledged American money, said: "It's the big projects such as the reconstruction of Umm Qasr port or the restoration of the electricity grid which are the milestones on the path to reconstruction. But it's the little things which remind Iraqis that things are getting better."
But whatever the facelift new funding strategies bring to Iraq, security will take a lion's share of the pledged money.
A fifth of Iraq's budget so far spent or awarded in contracts - over €286,000 million - has gone on protecting those trying to rebuild the country.
A defence contractor working with CPA said, "There's no disguising the fact that there is a lot of violence out there which isn't going away any time soon."
A mortar attack killed two US soldiers and wounded four others at an outpost north of Baghdad yesterday, and a third US trooper died in a gun-battle in the northern city of Mosul, the US military said.
The mortar attack occurred about noon at a 4th Infantry Division forward operating base near Samara, 70 miles north of Baghdad, the US Central Command said.