Shaun Mullen’s powerful post, “Iraq Status Of Forces Agreement: No Time To Break Out The Party Hats,” brought back the flood of memories, the emotions, the pent-up anger and frustration Americans have experienced over the past six years as a result of, as Mullen puts it, “the evil that [Dick Cheney’s, Donald Rumsfeld’s and Richard Perle’s] little adventure in Iraq unleashed.” (Of course that list of adventure seekers is by no means complete, and we know all too well who is at the top of that list.)
Also on top of the list of emotions Americans have experienced, and continue to experience, over this “adventure” is the unfathomable sadness at the loss of so many American and Iraqi lives. None of these losses as cruel, heartwrenching and needless as those of innocent little children, the thousands of Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés “Little Iraqi Madonnas.”
Helping me recall some of the many missteps, promises, slogans, tragedies, deceptions, and just plain lies that were part-and-parcel of the Iraq “adventure,” were the “running-script-like” headlines in Mullen’s post.
For example:
. . . Haditha massacre . . . Ethnic cleanings . . . Missing billions . . . Militias rule . . . Morale never better . . . The Surge . . .
One “headline” in particular caught my attention: “Missing billions.”
It caught my attention because it encapsulates the rampant corruption that has been such an intrinsic part of the Iraq adventure—both on the U.S. administration’s side and on the Iraqi side.
And, the corruption continues.
Witness this morning’s headlines in the New York Times, “Premier of Iraq Is Quietly Firing Fraud Monitors.” Apparently, the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is getting rid of Iraqi oversight officials, who were appointed to fight corruption.
According to the Times:
The dismissals, which were confirmed by senior Iraqi and American government officials on Sunday and Monday, have come as estimates of official Iraqi corruption have soared. One Iraqi former chief investigator recently testified before Congress that $13 billion in reconstruction funds from the United States had been lost to fraud, embezzlement, theft and waste by Iraqi government officials.
And in today’s USA TODAYay a report that the Pentagon spent about $600 million on more than 1,200 Iraq construction contracts that were eventually canceled, nearly half of them for mismanagement or shoddy construction. Also, in the same newspaper, another report that a company that was suspended from U.S. government contracts for allegedly bribing Army officers was awarded a new contract from Iraq two days after the suspension was imposed. The Pentagon apparently paid the suspended company more than $1 million under the new contract.
And so the beat goes on.
Corruption was rampant under Saddam Hussein, albeit mostly benefitting a single family and a few select ones; corruption was and continues to be rampant under the U.S. occupation; and corruption will probably continue to be rampant after the last U.S. soldier leaves Iraq.
Perhaps the Iraqis (and the U.S.) can live with that. It is my hope, however, that the killings, the massacres, the sectarian violence will not return to the “Iraqi beat” when that last soldier leaves Iraq.
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.