How well are the State Department’s anti-corruption efforts in Iraq managed? Don’t ask Condoleezza Rice.
Rep. John Tierney (D-MA) laid it all out. Not only are there duplicative U.S. offices in Baghdad to oversee anti-corruption efforts — the Anti-corruption Working Group and the Office of Accountability and Transparency, to name two — but coordination is so bad that the OAT for months boycotted the meetings of the AWG. Rice said she was “not aware” of that.
Another point she wasn’t aware of: OAT has had, according to Rep. Tierney, four acting or permanent directors in the past ten months alone. The most recent one isn’t a diplomat or a trained anti-corruption official at all, but rather a “paralegal” who works at the U.S. embassy. “I should get back to you with a sense of how we manage these programs,” she replied.
