http://arabnews.com/editorial/editorial-iraq-invasion-total-waste
Editorial: Iraq invasion: A total waste Arab News Friday 8 March 2013 THE final judgment on the US invasion of Iraq and its catastrophic consequences for the country and its people has very much been delivered in a US report just published. Though “Learning from Iraq” deals with the waste and ineffectiveness of US money spent on rebuilding the country, its conclusions can be applied to the whole US involvement in Iraq from the 2003 assault on Saddam Hussein. In his final report before his office is wound up, the Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, Stuart Bowen concluded that Washington’s $ 60 billion rebuilding effort had “achieved little.” Bowen had analyzed many hundreds of audits and site inspections conducted all over Iraq and visits to a large number of Iraqi and US officials and politicians. The bottom line of his findings was that at least $ 8 billion had simply disappeared through corruption, poor security and a breakdown in communications with Iraqi authorities. The remaining $ 52 billion had not been spent effectively. Nor is this by any means all that the United States wasted in its Iraq intervention. The war and subsequent occupation cost in the region of $ 800 billion and nearly 5,000 US lives. The butcher’s bill for Iraqis was considerably higher. No accurate figure is ever likely to be known, but 170,000 dead between 2003 and the end of last year seems to be a conservative estimate. To this must be added many more people who have been maimed for life, as well as tens of thousands of widows and orphans. And this year of course, as the three-year-old national unity government of Nuri Al-Maliki proves ever less national and ever-more incapable of unity, Al-Qaeda terrorists are taking an almost daily toll of lives, with bombings and shootings, designed to re-start inter-ethnic violence. For Iraq and its people, the decision by George W. Bush to topple Saddam Hussein was a calamity. It was also a disaster for US big business, which assumed blithely that once the dictator was ousted, a grateful Iraqi population would have welcomed US oil and construction companies into the country, awarding lucrative reconstruction contracts and generous new licenses for oil and gas exploration and production. Bush and his family were oil men. His Vice President Dick Cheney had been boss of the oil firm Halliburton. Many of the neocons who surrounded Bush were linked to some of the largest American corporations. It was even suggested that during the assault on Iraq by cruise missiles and bombers that besides military objectives, Pentagon war planners were given target lists of installations and infrastructure that needed to be damaged, so US contractors could go in and win contracts to rebuild them. Indeed in the early days of the occupation, there was something of an unseemly struggle among the US and its allies, to win contractual work. The British were particularly bitter that they were losing out regularly to US rivals on some of the biggest reconstruction jobs. In the event, a significant number of the contracts won by American firms never began or were ultimately abandoned, when security in the country spiraled out of control. Implicit in the “Learning from Iraq” title of Bowen’s hard-hitting report is that Washington will somehow take on board the lessons of its multiple and costly failures in Iraq. It seems clear that Bowen is also pointing to the US involvement in Afghanistan, where so far no less than $ 90 billion of US taxpayers’ dollars have been poured into reconstruction, billions of which are known to have found their way into the bank accounts of corrupt and venal officials in the Karzai government. Yet in Iraq, the disastrous waste of life and coin came about not because of a dearth of auditing and supervision. It occurred because of a total lack of understanding on the part of a White House hell-bent on achieving a few narrow objectives, without giving any consideration whatsoever to the likely cost of the unintended consequences of the invasion. Many of Washington’s friends and allies, including Saudi Arabia, warned of the catastrophe that the invasion would bring about. They tried to say that a different vision and a long-term plan for Iraq needed to be in place, beyond the destruction of a feared and hated dictatorial regime. In the event, as Bush himself might have said, none of this wise counsel mattered a hill of beans. The invasion went ahead. A decade later, Iraqis are paying the terrible for this madness, while George W. Bush, the president who would not listen, enjoys his distinguished retirement as a former US president. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
