Many left bloggers in America and in the UK wrote about the blatant theft of billions of dollars in cash and antiquities by US contractors and others in Iraq while it was happeniing; we also wrote about the fact that the looting was only made possible by the incompetence and collusion of the fundy-staffed, Paul Bremer-led Coalition Provincial Authority (aka ‘What Liberty U students did on their gap year“).
But, as has become usual in Bush’s America, it’s taken years for big media to actually notice ( or to be more accurate, to have the guts to write about it) and to get the story to Mrs and Mrs Average Glossy Mag Buyer.
Vanity Fair’s account of the mercenary free-for-all following the illegal invasion of a sovereign nation (however odious its regime), Billions Over Baghdad, although it’s a day late and a dollar short will, I hope, deeply shock those American voters who still have residual faith in the probity of their politicians and government officials and in the good intentions and morals of the senior ranks of their military. These are not the Good Guys.
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Over the next year, a compliant Congress gave $1.6 billion to Bremer to administer the C.P.A. This was over and above the $12 billion in cash that the C.P.A. had been given to disburse from Iraqi oil revenues and unfrozen Iraqi funds. Few in Congress actually had any idea about the true nature of the C.P.A. as an institution. Lawmakers had never discussed the establishment of the C.P.A., much less authorized it—odd, given that the agency would be receiving taxpayer dollars. Confused members of Congress believed that the C.P.A. was a U.S. government agency, which it was not, or that at the very least it had been authorized by the United Nations, which it had not. One congressional funding measure makes reference to the C.P.A. as “an entity of the United States Government”—highly inaccurate. The same congressional measure states that the C.P.A. was “established pursuant to United Nations Security Council resolutions”—just as inaccurate. The bizarre truth, as a U.S. District Court judge would point out in an opinion, is that “no formal document … plainly establishes the C.P.A. or provides for its formation.”
This isn’t just about the criminality and greed of the Bush administration but also about the incompetence of Congress and the corruption of the civil service and the military.
Not only did the institutions of government fail to stop the criminality, they allowed it to happen.
Even if individual congresspersons, civil servants or army officers didn’t personally benefit from the smash and grab they didn’t speak out, except in very rare cases: Bunnatine Greenhouse, for example, should be a national hero but instead she’s demoted and vilified.
Those who knew what was happening and failed to speak out failed in their duty and are therefore in it up to their necks, as much as any apparatchik or noncom with a handy cash sum stashed in the Cayman Islands.
Accountable really to no one, its finances “off the books” for U.S. government purposes, the C.P.A. provided an unprecedented opportunity for fraud, waste, and corruption involving American government officials, American contractors, renegade Iraqis, and many others. In its short life more than $23 billion would pass through its hands. And that didn’t include potentially billions more in oil shipments the C.P.A. neglected to meter. At stake was an ocean of cash that would evaporate whenever the C.P.A. did. All parties understood that there was a sell-by date, and that it was everyone for himself. An Iraqi hospital administrator told The Guardian of England that, when he arrived to sign a contract, the army officer representing the C.P.A. had crossed out the original price and doubled it. “The American officer explained that the increase (more than $1 million) was his retirement package.” Alan Grayson, a Washington, D.C., lawyer for whistle-blowers who have worked for American contractors in Iraq, says simply that during that first year under the C.P.A. the country was turned into “a free-fraud zone.”
Iraq has been the biggest home invasion of all time. Murder, rape, torture, looting; Genghis Khan would be proud. But it’s not just Iraqi money that these slime are stealing, though, it’s yours too, if yoiu’re a US or UK taxpayer – Bush has just asked Congress for another 50 billion dollars more and the UK has spent 6.6 billionpounds so far. Who knows into whose pockets it goes?
America may not be the Good Guys their self-image tells them they are, but then neither are we British and there is another, untold story here.
What was the role of the British military and diplomats in the CPA? They were as deeply involved as the Americans in the invasion – what were they doing while this as happening, sitting on their hands and going ‘Oh, dear”?
Take Basra: who handled the money for Basra province? Where’s it gone and to whom and for what? Has there even been an accounting?
I note that British diplomats, in concert with the US, pressured the UN for the CPA to be accepted as a valid interim government. They worked hand in hand with the Pentagon: do we really think our diplomatic staff and senior military had no inkling of the wholesale theft that was going on? Can we believe that if they did know, that they were so morally spotless as not to have been tempted to have a dip themselves? Of course it may not have been necessary to be quite as crude as that: there are other ways to benefit from criminality. Turning a blind eye can be quite rewarding, as our country’s record on rendition has shown.
But surely, if there are any malefactors, heaven forbid, in the ranks of our government, diplomatic corps or military, good old British justice will sort it out. Won’t it?
I mean, just look at the way George Galloway has been hounded by New Labour for being a bit equivocal reporting a donor in his paperwork for the Mariam Fund (total value 1.4 million) – that’s how punctilious New Labour is. They’d never do something sio venal as to take cash for honours or anything like that, oh no.
Shorter Uk government – criminals and war profiteers? What criminals and war profiteers? We’re British! We’re honourable!
Hardly. Some of our recently retired generals and diplomats are now issuing their own revisionist versions of recent history – what they say, in short, is that they were against the invasion all long, really, and it was all the fault of those naughty Americans. They didn’t want to do it – a big boy made them do it and ran away, wasn’t us, guv, we said it was a bad idea.
Unfortunately for untold thousands of dead Iraqis they weren’t so honourable as to say so at the time. Only now, when there’s autobiographies to be sold and the information is of no earthly use do they come forward. There’s the honour of our glorious military.
Meanwhile the Iraq war continues to be highly profitable – for some.
Aegis turnover soared from £554,000 in 2003 to £62m last year – three quarters through work in Iraq, including its role coordinating all private military and security firms operating in the country. Aegis is led by Lieutenant-Colonel Tim Spicer, who broke a UN arms embargo on Sierra Leone with his former company Sandline International, and was jailed in Papua New Guinea for earlier activities. The firm DSC, now part of British company ArmorGroup, was implicated in providing intelligence that helped Colombian death squads identify groups opposed to a BP oil pipeline project. ArmorGroup, which trebled its turnover from $71m in 2001 to $233.2m last year, typifies the private military sector in hiring former government officials and officers to wield political influence. Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the former UK defence and foreign secretary, is a non-executive director of ArmorGroup. In 2005 the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development awarded the firm armed security contracts in the Afghan capital Kabul, as well as in the Iraqi cities Baghdad and Basra, together with control of the Iraqi police monitoring programme.
Aegis’s non-executive directors include ex-UK defence minister Nicholas Soames, as well as Lord Inge, former chief of defence staff, and Roger Wheeler, earlier professional head of the British army as chief of the general staff.
That’s the kind of moneymaking from war that goes on all the time, but no-one complains and if they do well, they’re just whiny peacenik hippies who want to curb free trade.
The difference in Iraq is that war profiteering, instead of being a covert operation, has been carried out in the open with actual cash money and a blatancy that takes the breath away.
The big question, to my mind, is if, when those alleged to be the ‘good guys’ commit crimes of such magnitude, who, if anyone, is to step in and enforce the law? The Democrats don’t seem to have the bottle for it and neither do either of the British opposition parties.
This is a question that no-one seems to want to answer, because it would mean questioning the fundamental bases of our entire political systems, on both sides of the Atlantic. That way lies revolution – and that would never do.
