Negotiator, as far as I know, USAID doesn't give out money directly for infrastructure building. Money is given through grants or contracts and USAID manages those. You might give a contract to an international organization to deliver grants for small scale infrastructure development or a large contract to an international firm (bechtel, for example) to do larger scale infrastructure development.

At the same time, I don't think USAID is funding this kind of infrastructure development. Instead, they're focusing on institution building, NGO strengthening, socio-economic development, etc.

I agree that the rules and requirements make it very difficult to get things done in a place like Iraq. Even the rules for grants for NGOs are written for US NGOs and have to be applied and interpreted for non-US NGOs.