Waste, fraud, and abuse have been rampant in Iraq in recent years, but somehow, this example seems slightly more breathtaking than most.
An $833 million Iraqi arms deal secretly negotiated with Serbia has underscored Iraq’s continuing problems equipping its armed forces, a process that has long been plagued by corruption and inefficiency.
The deal was struck in September without competitive bidding and it sidestepped anticorruption safeguards, including the approval of senior uniformed Iraqi Army officers and an Iraqi contract approval committee. Instead, it was negotiated by a delegation of 22 high-ranking Iraqi officials, without the knowledge of American commanders or many senior Iraqi leaders.
The deal drew enough criticism that Iraqi officials later limited the purchase to $236 million. And much of that equipment, American commanders said, turned out to be either shoddy or inappropriate for the military’s mission.
An anatomy of the purchase highlights how the Iraqi Army’s administrative abilities — already hampered by sectarian rifts and corruption — are woefully underdeveloped, hindering it in procuring weapons and other essentials in a systematic way. It also shows how an American procurement process set up to help foreign countries navigate the complexity of buying weapons was too slow and unwieldy for wartime needs like Iraq’s, prompting the Iraqis to strike out on their own.
Such weaknesses mean that five years after the American invasion, the 170,000-strong Iraqi military remains under-equipped, spottily supplied and largely reliant on the United States for such basics as communications equipment, weapons and ammunition, raising fresh questions about the Iraqi military’s ability to stand on its own.
If the standard for success in Iraq is the creation of a government that can sustain, govern, and defend itself, a story like this one highlights just how far the Iraqis are from achieving any of these three goals.
It’s hard to overstate what a mess this was.
Under the sales program, used by more than 100 allied nations, Pentagon officials serve as intermediaries for government-to-government defense procurements, handling administrative issues, logistics, delivery, maintenance and training. Clients sometimes get the benefit of American economies of scale, American expertise regarding weapons systems and quality control and built-in transparency and corruption safeguards. Defense contractors also benefit to some extent, because the program often channels clients to American companies that produce arms and other equipment.
American officials hoped the program would help Iraq spend more of its own money on defense. Last year, for the first time, Iraqi military expenditures of $7.5 billion surpassed the $5.5 billion in American financing for Iraq’s military. But the program is intended for peacetime, and with protocols spanning hundreds of pages, it is built more for transparency and standardization than for speed.
Beginning in late 2006, the Iraqi government deposited $2.6 billion in an account for Foreign Military Sales procurements. But by September 2007, less than $200 million worth of badly needed equipment had been delivered, and many of those items were stockpiled because of poor distribution and accountability systems. And that, the officials pointed out, was during one of the most violent periods on record.
“The problem with F.M.S. is that it didn’t deliver on time,” a senior Iraqi official said, “and this was used by some in government to say, ‘Look, this is deliberate. The U.S. is trying to keep us unarmed so that we’ll always be in need of the Americans.’ ”
General Dubik, in an interview in his office in the Green Zone, acknowledged, “There was an issue of credibility in our system.”
But there were problems on the Iraqi side as well, American military officers said. A bureaucracy used to functioning under a command economy during the reign of Saddam Hussein had little use for formal procurement protocols and was unaccustomed to such basic practices as writing detailed specifications.
“I mean literally, the Iraqis had some letters of request that said, ‘We want to buy 1,000 trucks,’ ” said Joe Benkert, an assistant defense secretary for global affairs who manages the Foreign Military Sales program.
Some critics, all of them high-ranking Iraqi and American military officials, made the more serious charge that senior Iraqi officials intentionally obstructed American-sponsored procurements because they feared the sales program would prevent them from siphoning off a share of the money. But they offered no independent corroboration.
One Western official said, “You can only explain it in two ways: a desire to avoid oversight and a desire to offer opportunities for graft and corruption.”
A high-ranking Iraqi government official added, “We have no confidence in the Iraqi contracting process.”