“Anticorruption cases concerning the Ministry of Education have been particularly ineffectiveâ¦.[T]he Ministry of Water Resourcesâ¦is effectively out of the anticorruption fight with little to no apparent effort in trying to combat fraudâ¦.”
That’s not the assessment of some goo-goo liberal watchdog. It’s the judgment of a team of officials in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, surveying what it considers endemic corruption throughout the Iraqi government. The Nation‘s David Corn obtained a copy of the team’s 70-plus page report, which finds that militias and criminal gangs have turned government ministries into private sectarian fiefdoms.
The report, which was drafted by a team of U.S. embassy officials, surveys the various Iraqi ministries. “The Ministry of Interior is seen by Iraqis as untouchable by the anticorruption enforcement infrastructure of Iraq,” it says. “Corruption investigations in Ministry of Defense are judged to be ineffectual.” The study reports that the Ministry of Trade is “widely recognized as a troubled ministry” and that of 196 corruption complaints involving this ministry merely eight have made it to court, with only one person convicted.
The Ministry of Health, according to the report, “is a sore point; corruption is actually affecting its ability to deliver services and threatens the support of the government.” Investigations involving the Ministry of Oil have been manipulated, the study says, and the “CPI and the [Inspector General of the ministry] are completely ill-equipped to handle oil theft cases.” There is no accurate accounting of oil production and transportation within the ministry, the report explains, because organized crime groups are stealing oil “for the benefit of militias/insurgents, corrupt public officials and foreign buyers.”
Some of the biggest offenders are, unsurprisingly, in the ministries controlling the Iraqi security forces. The Ministry of Interior, in charge of the Iraqi police, “has been co-opted by organized criminals who act through the ‘legal enterprise’ to commit crimes such as kidnapping, extortion, bribery, etc.” At the Ministry of Defense, there’s “a shocking lack of concern” over disappearance of over $850 million from the Iraqi Army’s procurement budget in an apparent theft. (That about rivals the alleged theft by Ayad Allawi’s defense minister, Hazem Shaalan.)
Corn writes that “you can practically see the authors pulling out their hair” over the damage documented in the report. Visitors to Baghdad familiar with the U.S.’s diplomatic attempts to stanch the official illegality won’t be surprised. In March, I attended a briefing in Baghdad with Boots Poliquin, the U.S. embassy’s deadly-earnest top anti-corruption official, who explained with evident disappointment that an Iraqi public law called Article 136B allows any ministry to “essentially stop” a corruption investigation. The report Corn obtained is most likely authored by Poliquin’s shop, the Office of Accountability and Transparency, and it promises to cast a long shadow over any upbeat assessment given by Ambassador Ryan Crocker next month about the ability of the Iraqi government to actually, well, govern.
