by Deb Cupples | Based on more than 500 interviews and 600 audits, an unpublished report is circulating in Washington about our nation's reconstruction efforts in Iraq. It doesn't reflect well on the people involved.
There was waste, there was bureaucratic squabbling, there was even deception. The New York Times reports:
"In one passage, for example, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is quoted as saying that in the months after the 2003 invasion, the Defense Department 'kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces — the number would jump 20,000 a week! "We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000."’
"Mr. Powell’s assertion that the Pentagon inflated the number of competent Iraqi security forces is backed up by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former commander of ground troops in Iraq, and L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator until an Iraqi government took over in June 2004." (NYT)
I cannot help remembering the 190,000 U.S. weapons that went missing in Iraq back in 2004-05: weapons that we taxpayers sent to Iraq to arm security forces. The higher the number of security forces, the more weapons that would be sent to Iraq. Certainly, some weapons manufacturers made out like bandits, but we taxpayers lost big.
While I'm thinking of it, there still has been no satisfactory explanation of how the weapons got lost since the story broke in 2007.
Back to the report:
This paragraph and the New York Times article seem to suggest that the major problems boiled down to bureaucratic squabbling and incompetence.
Given how much money government contractors have made on the Iraq endeavor (whether legitimately or via waste, fraud or abuse), I cannot help suspecting that there may be more to the story than mere bureaucratic bumbling. I can't wait to read the actual report.
For more about that, see the links below. Memeorandum has commentary.
Related Buck Naked Politics Posts:
* Contractor Gets $142 Million for Iraq Construction, Failed to Finish Jobs
* Iraq Contractor Got $32 Million but Didn't Build Anything
* Contractor Made Troops Sick via Tainted Water, Food...
* "Billions over Baghdad": Poor Accounting Enabled Contractor Waste & Fraud
* Contractor Supplies Bad Ammo, Gets Hundreds of Millions
* Private Contractors: Driving up War's Costs
* High Cost of Private Contractors
* Contractor Gets $1 Billion in "Noncredible" Costs
* Justice Dept. Official Turned Blind Eye to Contractor Fraud?
* Inspector General Blocked Investigations re: Waste & Fraud?
* Time for Pentagon to Get Serious About Contractor Fraud
* Iraq War Funding: How Much Goes to the Troops?
* U.S. Embassies: Still More Examples of Problems with Contractors
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