The timing of this report isn’t at all good for the Bush administration. Just as the president is asking Congress to approve billions of additional reconstruction dollars for the war in Iraq, lawmakers (and the rest of us) are learning about how the last reconstruction package was spent. Here’s a hint: not well.
The U.S. government wasted tens of millions of dollars in Iraq reconstruction aid, including scores of unaccounted-for weapons and a never-used camp for housing police trainers with an Olympic-size swimming pool, investigators say.
The quarterly audit by Stuart Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, is the latest to paint a grim picture of waste, fraud and frustration in an Iraq war and reconstruction effort that has cost taxpayers more than $300 billion and left the region near civil war.
“The security situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate, hindering progress in all reconstruction sectors and threatening the overall reconstruction effort,” according to the 579-page report, which was being released Wednesday.
It’s a bit like the security situation. Bowen told the AP that “reconstruction now will fall largely on Iraqis to manage — and they’re nowhere ready for the task.” We’ve already spent lavishly, but to “limited” effect.
Iraqi officials are either not spending their money or not spending it wisely, and U.S. officials have played a little too fast-and-loose for quite a while — Bowen’s office “opened 27 new criminal probes in the last quarter, bringing the total number of active cases to 78. Twenty-three are awaiting prosecutorial action by the Justice Department, most of them centering on charges of bribery and kickbacks.”
It’s also worth noting that, if the administration and congressional Republicans had their way, Bowen’s report wouldn’t even exist and we wouldn’t know anything about this waste, fraud, and abuse.
From a NYT article in November:
Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq have sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces.
And tucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago is what some of Mr. Bowen’s supporters believe is his reward for repeatedly embarrassing the administration: a pink slip.
The order comes in the form of an obscure provision that terminates his federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, on Oct. 1, 2007. The clause was inserted by the Republican side of the House Armed Services Committee over the objections of Democratic counterparts during a closed-door conference, and it has generated surprise and some outrage among lawmakers who say they had no idea it was in the final legislation.
It’s an almost perfect example of how the GOP has approached the war and legislating. Identify the one guy who’s been doing his job perfectly, fire him, but keep it secret because of how utterly shameful the decision truly is.
Now, as it turns out, Dems were able to save Bowen’s job, and keep these discouraging quarterly reports coming. But in case you hear any Republicans expressing dismay about the latest findings, remember, if it were up to them, Bowen would have been fired and these reports wouldn’t have been written.
As a rule, it’s easier to bury the bad news than to deal with it.