By Dave Anderson:
Dump $9 billion dollars in cold hard cash in Switzerland, and you'll expect to see a couple hundred million disappear or at least not be accounted for as even the Swiss want to buy chocolates, watches and beach front villas on the Riveria.
Dump $9 billion dollars into a conflict zone with no functional bureaucracy, multiple competing actors, multiple gray and black programs, shifting alliances and you're lucky if the accountants can track a couple hundred million dollars of it for more than a few months. And that is exactly what happened with Iraqi oil revenues that were supposed to be used for reconstruction. MSNBC has more:
The U.S. Defense Department is unable to properly account
for over 95 percent of $9.1 billion in Iraqi oil money tapped by the
U.S. for rebuilding the war ravaged nation, according to an audit
released Tuesday.The report by the U.S. Special Investigator for Iraq Reconstruction
offers a compelling look at continued laxness in how such funds are
being spent in a country where people complain basic services like
electricity and clean water are sharply lacking seven years after the
U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.
$2.6 billion dollars of Iraqi oil revenue has no documentation on what
it was spent on. The rest of the money that is in question has limited
documentation or was spent inappropriately but is at least somewhat
trackable.
Unaccountability was a feature not a bug of this system. It allowed US officials to pad their own salaries, weapons and cash to go to friendly militant groups, and plenty of payola for new elites to pay off their militias. We know that the reconstruction contracts in Anbar province were almost never monitored and that the insurgencies siphoned off between a third and half of the dollars spent through a web of kick-backs, sub-contractors and smuggling fees.
Everyone made money on the gravy train even as nothing got done.
Well, quite a few bank accounts in Switzerland, the Grand Caymans and Dubai most likely got built up over this time period, but that was not the objective of the oil revenue distribution system.
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