The Iraq Defense Ministry’s corruption problem

August 12, 2005

According to nearly everyone, the key to success in Iraq is the development of an effective Iraqi security force, as prepared by the Iraq Defense Ministry. Last week we learned the Ministry can’t pay, feed, equip, supply, recruit, or properly train security forces. This week there’s word that corruption in the Ministry has reached staggering depths.

Iraqi investigators have uncovered widespread fraud and waste in more than $1 billion worth of weapons deals arranged by middlemen who reneged or took huge kickbacks on contracts to arm Iraq’s fledgling military, according to a confidential report and interviews with U.S. and Iraqi officials.

The Iraqi Board of Supreme Audit, in a report reviewed by Knight Ridder, describes transactions suggesting that senior U.S.-appointed Iraqi officials in the Defense Ministry used three intermediary companies to hide the kickbacks they received from contracts involving unnecessary, overpriced or outdated equipment. […]

“There’s no rebuilding, no weapons, nothing,” said retired Iraqi Lt. Gen. Abdul Aziz al-Yaseri, who worked in the Defense Ministry at the height of the alleged corruption. “There are no real contracts, even. They just signed papers and took the money.”

How bad a system are we talking about? The total budget for the Defense Ministry is $1.3 billion. The audit found suspicious, potentially fraudulent, contracts totaling $1.27 billion.

Iraqi Defense Minister Saadoun al-Dulaimi confirmed most of audit’s conclusions, but blamed Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority, because the CPA forced the Ministry to hire previously unknown Iraqi officials (i.e, former exiles) who were untrustworthy. al-Dulaimi added that the now-missing money could have helped save lives by fighting insurgents.

And all of this comes just a few weeks after we learned that the Defense Ministry’s forces are not quite a powerful army — only 3 of the 107 military and paramilitary Iraqi battalions are capable of planning, executing, and sustaining independent counterinsurgency operations.

Have I mentioned lately that we’re going to be in Iraq for a long, long time?

No we won’t. The insurgents will roll over this potemkin force at the first opportunity, and the U.S. military can’t afford to stay for years on its own. They’re soon going to have to send people through a third rotation, and recruitment is in the toilet. Unless there’s a draft, there won’t be a usable U.S. military to keep there, and the Iraqi military is a joke.

Bush has one choice: get the occupation army out now, or watch it disintegrate in place. Staying in Iraq forever isn’t on the menu.

What color is an orange? Same color as a carrot.

  • Iraq may be in chaos for a long, long time, but doesn’t it appear that we’re in store for a “declare victory and pull out” move?

  • Is this the “good news about the rebuilding going on in Iraq” that the Neocons and the Freepers wail about, that the public doesn’t hear because of our “liberal media’? Riiggghhhhttttt.

    Speaking of the Freepers, what ever happened to the radio show hosts that were going to Iraq to actually bring us “the good news” of what is actually going on in Iraq? I heard an awful lot about the build-up before they went, and Drudge and all the other right-wing bloggerbats were all yapping about it. I think by now they were to have gone and returned. Yet, not a peep that I have seen. Any one here have information, or did the “good news” IED’s and snipers keep them away? I suspect I know why the silence, but I’m looking for something with a little more substance than my brain cells.

  • Makes one question administration claims that police and military forces being trained in Iraq are well on their way to being able to defend Iraq enabling US forces to begin withdrawing.

  • According to the 7/26/05, WSJ, Stuart Bowen, Bush’s special inspector general for Iraq, found that the U.S. failed to keep track of nearly $9 billion it transferred to the new Iraqi government, much of which appears to have been embezzled.

    Where the hell did that money go? I refuse to believe that Bush administration is so inept that it lost track of $9 billion. Obviously, the plan to transfer $9 billion was made before the war started. You can bet that five minutes after the plan to transfer the money was confirmed, there was a plan to steal it.

    The depraved indifference to corruption from this administration is criminal. Did you ever think that US troops would be dying to make gangsters like Ahmed Chalabi rich?

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