Buffalo News Editorial on Getting out of Iraq Due to Inaction on Corruption

It seems others are starting to see the cost to Americans of the US State Dept's continuous trend of accepting corruption in Iraq and not taking action. They say we should get out based upon this trend which is separate from whether the war is "right or not", or whether the cost of killed soldiers is too high. I agree - this is a new megatrend and another reason to leave Iraq, but it COULD be corrected if the State Dept. took action or was replaced by another, less diplomatic and action oriented agency. Maybe make the CIA in charge of ensuring anti-corruption efforts were serious?

AND, the CIA needs full authority to halt any foreign aid to any country found not to be active in reducing corruption.

Below is the Buffalo News editorial on the issue - I don't need to add anything to it...
vj

===================================================
from the Buffalo News (New York)
http://www.buffalonews.com/149/story/339234.html

Officials remain mum on corruption in Iraq
Douglas Turner
Updated: 05/05/08 6:37 AM

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration has resorted to a technique in buying stuff in corrupt Iraq that is reminiscent of the way the Soviet Empire worked.

The U. S. Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, used polite words in March to describe the government’s practice of covering the tracks of a crooked deal.

The GAO said our Defense Department negotiated an oil contract there “more than six months after the work commenced and most costs (were) incurred. DOD paid nearly all the $221 million in costs questioned by auditors.”

The Bush administration responded that the Iraq “government,” the hopelessly divided sick man of South Asia, should fix the problem.

Last week, the GAO said Iraqis are stealing and smuggling oil worth $15 million a day. That larceny

is peanuts in the overall picture. On-the-ground auditors, both U. S. and Iraqi, estimate that up to $18 billion in American taxpayer funds sent for rebuilding a land we disabled has been stolen.

Estimates of the total reconstruction money Congress has appropriated for Iraq range up to $47 billion.

For years the Bush administration and the Republican Congress did their best to frustrate attempts to create some oversight in American nonmilitary spending in that bottomless pit. The White House is still refusing to answer questions.

However, the Democrats retook Congress two years ago, and Rep. Henry Waxman, Calif., chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, has unearthed a number of points of darkness:

• Blackwater, which employs the private security guards who were involved in a murderous shooting episode in Baghdad, may have evaded up to $50 million in income taxes.

• A $277 million water treatment plant, funded by the United States, operates at only 20 percent capacity because it can’t get power and trained workers.

• 112 reconstruction contracts have been canceled because of poor contractor performance and delays.

• A dozen service members have been electrocuted in facilities built by U. S. contractors.

• The newly opened U. S. Embassy in Baghdad was built on a no-bid contract by a Kuwaiti company, which allowed costs to balloon 50 percent over estimates to $736 million. Plagued by construction flaws, the facility was built in part by forced labor.

• Auditing agencies created by the Bush administration are dysfunctional because they almost never meet, or share information.

• The State Department has refused to discuss Iraqi corruption with Waxman. Anything like that, it said, “must occur in a classified setting and be withheld from the public.”

Waxman’s Senate counterpart, Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., has refused to investigate. Maybe this is pay-back for White House support the former Democrat got in his challenged 2006 re-election campaign. None of the presidential candidates are talking about it.

While it might be politically incorrect to discuss it here, it is lethal to ask questions about stealing over there.

Steve Kroft of CBS’s “60 Minutes” recently interviewed an Iraqi auditor who fled to suburban Virginia after 31 members of his staff were murdered and his family received death threats.

Iraq has become the most dangerous place in the world for journalists, with 79 unsolved killings. The Committee to Protect Journalists said on Wednesday that few died in combat, with most killed “for professional reasons.”

All of which says Bush was half right when he declared “Mission Accomplished” five years ago. He should have declared victory and brought our troops out of that ancient mazeway. Which is what the Democratic candidates say they will do starting Jan. 20.

Let’s just get out!

dturner@buffnews.com