The twelve Army Captains who wrote today’s op-ed on The Real Iraq We Knew will certainly be lauded by the ‘liberal’ press and left-leaning blogsphere. They call for retreat from Iraq (alternativly the draft) and that is fine.
Few will notice a falsehood the Captains are spreading with either willfull ignorance or out of slightly camouflaged racism.
They write:
The inability to govern is exacerbated at all levels by widespread corruption. Transparency International ranks Iraq as one of the most corrupt countries in the world. And, indeed, many of us witnessed the exploitation of U.S. tax dollars by Iraqi officials and military officers. Sabotage and graft have had a particularly deleterious impact on Iraq’s oil industry, which still fails to produce the revenue that Pentagon war planners hoped would pay for Iraq’s reconstruction. Yet holding people accountable has proved difficult.
That’s a ‘blame the victim’ argument if I’ve ever seen such. The ‘inability to govern’ was certainly demonstrated when the Prime Minister tried to kick out Blackwater. The U.S. just would not let him govern. But the corruption charge is even worse.
The U.S. Congress allocated some billions for reconstruction of Iraqi infrastructure. Only fair one could say as it was the U.S. that destroyed the Iraqi infrastructure in 1991, through a decade of sanctions and during its illegal war of aggression and occupation since 2002.
But of those billions of U.S. tax payer dollars most was squandered by U.S. companies with no-bid contracts which delivered little usable on the ground.
Even more money was taken from the Iraqi people, put under U.S. control and embezzled. The Development Fund for Iraq was financed with $23 billion of Iraqi oil money, held in custody by the UN and then put under control of the Coalition Provisional Authority.
Subsequent audits conducted by the Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction (SIGIR) have found that, of the US$23 billion of Iraqi money held in the DFI, US$8.8 billion remains unaccounted for.
Of the money that was spend a lot went indeed to Corruption, Fraud and Gross Malfeasance:
Auditors later found that of major contracts awarded with DFI monies in 2003, 74% went to US firms, 11% went to UK firms, and just 2% went to Iraqi firms. No less than 60% went to US construction firm Halliburton, under abusive no-bid contracts. Financial records were sloppy or non-existent.
While this was called ‘reconstruction’ money:
From the beginning, US authorities blurred the distinction between spending for the reconstruction of Iraq ‘s infrastructure and spending for military programs.
Certainly Iraq today is a quite corrupt country – especially in the oil business. But the seeds for this corruption were willfully sown by the U.S.:
“It’s like a supermarket without a cashier,” comments Mike Morris, an oil industry expert who used to work for the State Department in Baghdad . “There is no metering [at the export terminal]. And there’s no metering at the well heads either. There is no metering at any of the major pipeline junctions.” Morris estimates that “between 200,000 and 500,000 barrels a day” are unaccounted for.
The CPA could have installed metering promptly, but strangely did not. Bremer and his team were advised of the metering problem, but they repeatedly postponed action. When the IAMB pointed to the lapse, neither the Iraqi State Oil Marketing Organization nor US authorities could give a satisfactory explanation.
The accusation of continuing ‘exploitation of U.S. tax dollars’ by Iraqis is totally without basis. As the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction reports (pdf):
By the end of October 2006, all of the Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund (IRRF) had been obligated.
What the Iraqis have been spending throughout the last years and are spending today are not U.S. tax dollars, but those Iraqi funds the U.S. did not embazzle for itself. Whatever share of that goes to corruption is their, and only their problem.
The twelve captains helped to run an illegal war on a country that was in no way a threat to the U.S.. This is how it went:
From the first days, the US and its occupation partners built a wasteful, unaccountable and corrupt system in Iraq . Massive theft, fraud, bribery, and malfeasance of every kind have infected the reconstruction, procurement and governance process. There are hundreds of fraudulent, incomplete, failed or useless projects that have drained Iraq ‘s revenues of tens of billions of dollars. Judging from end-results, the projects have produced astoundingly little of lasting benefit to Iraqis. These corrupt acts are in clear violation of the occupiers’ responsibilities under the Geneva Conventions, the UN Convention Against Corruption (2003) and Security Council Resolutions.
Now, as the ‘fun part’ is over, the Captains want to get out and they blame Iraq and Iraqis for the results or their misadventures.
Hubris? Chutzpa? Racism? I don’t know. But it is outrageous to blame the Iraqis.