Iraq is struggling with rule of law:
Shortly before Iraqi central bank governor Sinan al-Shabibi was fired on Oct. 16, his soon-to-be replacement charged, in essence, that Iraq's economy is among the most corrupt on the planet.
Abdul Basit Turki al-Sae'ed, now Iraq's acting central bank governor, is simultaneously the head of the country's Supreme Audit Board. In September, he led an audit of central bank currency auctions that convinced him that $800 million is "transferred illegally under false pretenses" outside of the country every week, according to the latest report from the US government's Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR).
Mr. Shabibi was fired by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki shortly afterward.
This problem was completely predictable.
In November 2005, I looked ahead to our mission in Iraq after we could suppress the insurgents and terrorists enough to hand off primary fighting responsibility to the Iraqis:
Even as the Iraqi army transitions to a conventional force able to fight off invaders and we draw down our conventional forces, we will need to stay in Iraq to nurture rule of law and democracy. ...
By the time military security is achieved, our main presence may be FBI teams and accountants able to find and ferret out corruption while teaching Iraqis the tools of the trade to do so on their own.
Right now we are in between fighting the counter-insurgency and turning over the fight to Iraqis. So we have a way to go. We will indeed be in Iraq for decades. But the nature won't remain static.
I wrote this before the winter 2006 Samarra mosque bombing that signalled the beginning of Syria's and Iran's last attempt to avoid defeat by sparking a civil war between Shias and Sunni Arabs. So we needed our surge and new offensive (along with the Awakening) to get to the point of turning over the fight and making our main effort elsewhere. But we got there. We defeated the enemy in 2007 and denied them victory.
Unfortunately, the Obama administration had no heart to finish the victory it inherited from George W. Bush. We should have stayed in Iraq after 2011. The Obama adminsitration said it wanted to, but made no real effort to get an agreement with iraq. So our military is not in Iraq and we rely on the State Department to provide security missions and other tasks that our military should be providing.
Iraq may yet succeed without the role I envisioned, but reports of rampant corruption are no indication that they will succeed without more help from us.
I can still hope that we will return to Iraq in order to help fight for rule of law and real democracy.
