A Dream for a Better World

In what could turn out to be the greatest fraud in US history, American authorities have started to investigate the alleged role of senior military officers in the misuse of $125bn in a US -directed effort to reconstruct Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The exact sum missing may never be clear, but a report by the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction suggests it may exceed $50bn, making it an even bigger theft than Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.  Iraqi leaders are convinced that the theft or waste of huge sums of US and Iraqi government money could have happened only if senior US officials were themselves involved in the corruption. American federal investigators are now starting an inquiry into the actions of senior US officers involved in the program to rebuild Iraq.

According to a government report, the United States this year will have spent at least $100 billion on contractors in Iraq since the invasion in 2003, a milestone that reflects the Bush administration’s unprecedented level of dependence on private firms for help in the war. The report, by the Congressional Budget Office says that one out of every five dollars spent on the war in Iraq has gone to contractors for the United States military and other government agencies.  The Pentagon’s reliance on outside contractors in Iraq is proportionately far larger than in any previous conflict, and it has fueled charges that this outsourcing has led to overbilling, fraud and shoddy and unsafe work that has endangered and even killed American troops.

The case of a freelance photographer in Iraq who was barred from covering the Marines after he posted photos on the Internet of several of them dead has underscored what some journalists say is a growing effort by the American military to control graphic images from the war. Zoriah Miller, the photographer who took images of marines killed in a June 26 suicide attack and posted them on his Web site, was subsequently forbidden to work in Marine Corps-controlled areas of the country.  Opponents of the war, civil liberties advocates and journalists argue that the public portrayal of the war is being sanitized and that Americans who choose to do so have the right to see the human cost of a war that polls consistently show is unpopular with Americans.  

It is a mistaken idea that Iraqis want us to stay in Iraq.  They do not.  Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki has publicly said that he wants to negotiate a withdrawal date for U.S. forces and if not an exact date, a timetable for their withdrawal. Maliki made this statement trying to fend off his young firebrand Shiite rival, Muqtada al-Sadr, who wants the U.S. out yesterday.  It appears that at least 70 percent of Iraqis want Americans to leave either immediately or expeditiously.  Here at home, about 60 percent of Americans want U.S. forces to be withdrawn within the next year.

Rafid Ahmed Alwan was the Iraqi informant who peddled discredited intelligence that helped spur an invasion of his native country.  It was intelligence attributed to Alwan - whose code-name was Curveball – that the White House used in making its case that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.  He described what turned out to be fictional mobile germ factories.  The CIA belatedly branded him a liar. Since his discredited role in the lead-up to war nine years ago, Alwan has moved to Germany hoping for an easier life. He also hoped for a reward for his cooperation with German intelligence officers.  He stated that for what he has done, he should be treated like a king.  However, he has faced withering international scorn for peddling the discredited intelligence and has survived living with his family in a cramped, low-rent apartment flipping burgers or washing dishes at various fast food restaurants. 

Charles M. Smith, the Army official who managed the Pentagon’s largest contract in Iraq, said that he was ousted from his job when he refused to approve paying more than $1 billion in questionable charges to KBR, the Houston-based company that has provided food, housing and other services to American troops.  Army auditors had determined that KBR lacked credible data or records for more than $1 billion in spending, so Mr. Smith refused to sign off on the payments to the company.  But he was suddenly replaced, he said, and his successors — after taking the unusual step of hiring an outside contractor to consider KBR’s claims — approved most of the payments he had tried to block.  

A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election in November. The terms of the impending deal are likely to have an explosive political effect in Iraq. Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which US troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, will destabilize Iraq’s position in the Middle East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country.  U.S. President Bush wants to push it through by the end of next month so he can declare a military victory and claim his 2003 invasion has been vindicated.

A recent BBC investigation estimates that around $23bn may have been lost, stolen or just not properly accounted for in Iraq.  The program has used US and Iraqi government sources to research how much some private contractors have profited from the conflict and rebuilding.  To date, no major U.S. contractor faces trial for fraud or mismanagement in Iraq.  The search for the missing billions also led to a house in west London where Hazem Shalaan lived until he was appointed to the new Iraqi government as minister of defense in 2004. He and his associates siphoned an estimated $1.2bn out of the ministry. They bought old military equipment from Poland but claimed for top-class weapons. Meanwhile they diverted money into their own accounts.

In former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, he said the national news media neglected their watchdog role in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, calling reporters “complicit enablers” of the Bush administration’s push for war. Surprisingly, some prominent journalists have agreed. Katie Couric, the anchor of “CBS Evening News,” said that she had felt pressure from government officials and corporate executives to cast the war in a positive light. She also said that she thought the lack of skepticism shown by journalists about the Bush administration’s case for war amounted to one of the most embarrassing chapters in American journalism.  For five years, antiwar activists and media critics have claimed that the national news media failed to keep the White House accountable before the invasion.

The oil economist Dr Mamdouh Salameh, a leading authority on Iraq Oil and also advises both the World Bank and the UN Industrial Development Organization (Unido), said that the price of oil would now be no more than $40 a barrel if it had not been for the Iraq war. Oil prices have now multiplied sixfold since 2002. Goldman Sachs predicted that the price could rise to an unprecedented $200 a barrel over the next year.  Dr Salameh revealed that Iraq had offered the United States a deal, three years before the war, that would have opened up 10 new giant oil fields on generous terms in return for the lifting of sanctions.  He said that this would certainly have prevented the steep rise of the oil price but the U.S. had a different idea.  It planned to occupy Iraq and annex its oil.

According to two former State Department employees, the Bush administration repeatedly ignored corruption at the highest levels within the Iraqi government and kept secret potentially embarrassing information so as not to undermine its relationship with Baghdad.  Arthur Brennan, who briefly served in Baghdad as head of the department’s Office of Accountability and Transparency last year, and James Mattil, who worked as the chief of staff, told Senate Democrats that the State Department’s policies not only contradicted the anti-corruption mission but indirectly contributed to and has allowed corruption to fester at the highest levels of the Iraqi government.  The U.S. embassy effort against corruption was little more than window dressing and that the U.S. remained silent in the face of an unrelenting campaign by senior Iraqi officials to subvert Baghdad’s Commission on Public Integrity.

An audit of US-funded reconstruction projects for Iraq has found millions of dollars have been wasted because many projects have never been completed. The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction blamed delays, costs, poor performance and violence for failure to finish some 855 projects. Many other projects had been falsely described as complete in an audit of 47,321 reconstruction projects. Iraq reconstruction has cost US taxpayers more than $100bn so far. USAID, the body responsible for overseeing Iraqi reconstruction, has responded that the database used for the review was incomplete. The audit by Senator Stuart Bowen found US officials had terminated at least 855 projects before completion. Of this number, 112 were ended because of the contractors’ poor performance.

The new US Embassy in Baghdad is a mammoth development that is overbudget, overdue, and casts a whiff of corruption.  For many Iraqis, though, the sand-and-ochre-colored compound peering out across the city from a reedy stretch of riverfront within the fortified Green Zone is an unsettling symbol of occupation.  The 104-acre, 21-building enclave – the largest US Embassy in the world, similar in size to Vatican City in Rome – is often described as a ‘castle’ by Iraqis.  The US government cleared the new Baghdad Embassy for occupancy last May, with the embassy’s 700 employees and up to 250 military personnel all moved in over the course of the month.  Embassy personnel was eager to move in to gain some refuge from the constant mortar fire at the Green Zone.

More than 120 veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq commit suicide every week while the government stalls in granting returning troops the mental health treatment and benefits to which they are entitled, veterans advocates told a federal judge. They insist that the rights of hundreds of thousands of veterans are being violated by the Department of Veterans Affairs.  Specifically, veterans are committing suicide at the rate of 18 a day – a number reportedly acknowledged by a VA official and the agency’s backlog of disability claims now exceeds 650,000, a increase of 200,000 since the Iraq war started in 2003.  Thousands of veterans, if not more, are suffering grievous injuries as the result of their inability to procure desperately needed and obviously deserved health care. 

The types of war-for-oil conflicts that we will likely see are as follows:

There may be conflicts between oil-importing nations and oil-exporting nations when a powerful oil-importing nation deems an oil-exporting nation to have an “unacceptable” political regime.  For examples, the current conflicts in Iraq and to a lesser extent, Afghanistan.  Iran and Venezuela are potential targets for future US oil wars. Note the never-ending US rhetoric against both countries. 

Conflicts between consuming nations are a great possibility.  Using their large piles of US dollars, China has been locking up long-term oil contracts in Central Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere. Saudi Arabia, interestingly, has given almost all of their recent long-term oil contracts to China rather than the US. As you can imagine, this has bothered some US-based oil companies.

Civil wars will occur within oil-producing nations to gain control of power and resources. This was the case in Venezuela several years ago and more recently in Nigeria and Iraq. It is increasingly likely to occur in other Middle Eastern nations in the future, as the totalitarian governments supported by the West (in exchange for favorable treatment on oil supplies) begin to lose control over those they rule.