Greed without end, spasmodic lust; Murderers' hands, usurers' hands, hands of prayer; Exhales in foetid breath the human swarm
Whipped on by fear and lust, blood raw, blood war,
Breathing blessedness and savage heats,
Eating itself and spewing what it eats,
Hatching war...
-"The Immortals", Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf
It began long before the Iraq invasion.
As George Monbiot reported back in 2005- The government of the US, though it had been informed about a smuggling operation which brought Saddam Hussein's regime some $4.6bn, decided to let it continue. It did so because it deemed the smuggling to be in its national interest, as it helped friendly countries (Turkey and Jordan) evade the sanctions on Iraq... But this isn't the half of it.
Four days before Volcker reported his findings about Saddam Hussein, the US inspector general for Iraq reconstruction published a report about the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) - the US agency which governed Iraq between April 2003 and June 2004. The inspector general's job is to make sure that the money the authority spent was properly accounted for. It wasn't. In just 14 months, $8.8bn went absent without leave. This is more than Mobutu Sese Seko managed to steal in 32 years of looting Zaire."
It appears that the moment U.S. boots hit Iraqi ground the army brass was preparing to arrange its kickbacks. Though the CPA's inspector general claimed that the agency was "burdened by severe inefficiencies and poor management", more serious investigations now reveal that it was actually "burdened" by endemic fraud, corruption and false accounting-- the "Enron model".
From as early as 2004 officials in the CPA were demanding bribes of up to $300,000 in return for awarding contracts. Iraqi money seized by US forces simply disappeared. Some $800m was handed out to US commanders without being counted or even weighed. $1.4billion was secreted out of Baghdad and somehow ended up with the Kurdish regional government in the town of Irbil. The Iraq invasion had given the military and its co-dependents a license to steal.
As the Guardian reports: "Contracts to US companies were awarded by the CPA without any financial safeguards. They were issued without competition, in the form of "cost-plus" deals. This means that the companies were paid for the expenses they incurred, plus a percentage of those expenses in the form of profit. They had a powerful incentive, in other words, to spend as much money as possible."
They shoot reporters, don't they?
Imagine you are a young journalist, say with the NYTimes and you've been shipped to Baghdad to cover a war that half the world and the U.S. military already know is an all out lie. There you discover that your new army buddies, the very men you may need to rely on should you be forced to leave the Green Zone and report from a "free fire zone" are getting a cut of the loot. Just how deeply would you dig to get that story? In hindsight, not that far...
"Until now, the investigations have never reached the people at the top," The London Independent's Patrick Cockburn told Radio National's Fran Kelly.
"One scandal in 2004-05 saw the entire military procurement budget for Iraq's Ministry of Defence, $US1.3 billion, disappear.
"Disappear in the sense that contracts were signed with small companies in Poland and Pakistan and a few bits of some ancient Soviet helicopters were purchased and never delivered. At that time the ministry was being run by American officers. Either they were incredibly negligent or they were in on it, and most of the Iraqis believe they were in on it."
For the NYTimes the scandal apparently comes as a grand surprise. Despite having reported on the conviction of a former Coalition Provisional Authority official for money laundering, bribery and conspiracy. In fact although little of the U.S. military's role in the widespread corruption was reported on in the paper itself both the Sydney Herald and the Christian Scientist Monitor quote the NYTimes International edition as saying that the probe was certain to expand to include US Army Reserve officers.
Of course, now that there is a new Obama administration it is safe for the mind-boggling breadth of the scandal to be exposed, but for all the good intentions of Justice officials as Cockburn notes: "[The corruption] was pervasive. There were very large sums of money to be made and the guys in charge realized that [having been given what amounts to blanket immunity by the Bush regime] there wasn't going to be any comeback."
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