Our civilian spending in Iraq was wasted. If this isn't damning, I don't know what is:
“For all of the good intentions, it was a program replete with challenges, over-promises, setbacks, and shortcomings,” the Republican chairman of the House Middle East subcommittee, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, noted in the hearing Thursday.
These efforts have been plagued by waste, too, of much of the $60 billion in US taxpayer money used to fund the rebuilding of Iraq, agreed Rep. Ted Deutch (D) of Florida in a rare moment of robust bipartisan unity.
Damning about the comment, that is. You couldn't get an accurate consensus in Congress about how to pour water out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel. So this is a flashing warning light about error in analysis.
I've made this point before on this pending report and I'll make it again. Money was ammunition in Iraq (and Afghanistan) and trying to judge those programs the way you'd judge domestic programs (which we don't do, anyway--hello Stimulus 2009!) is just wrong.
Let's have an example of supposed waste:
The widely hailed Sons of Iraq (SOI) program, which paid former Sunni insurgents to lay down their arms beginning in 2007, was one of the Pentagon's most widely funded programs. The US military used what were known as Commanders’ Emergency Response Program (CERP) funds to pay chiefs to keep their people off the battlefields.
The CERP contracts amounted to 780 separate agreements calling for the stationing of 100,000 Sunnis across Iraq, for a total of $370 million in CERP funds. The workers were supposed to take jobs “providing security for buildings, checkpoints and battlefield.”
Yet the contracting process “was far from transparent,” SIGIR noted. “Program managers could not tell whether SOI members received their US-funded salaries, and Defense was unable to provide any evaluations of the program’s outcomes.”
Financial controls were weak, the report concludes!
Who cares? The purpose of the program was to get Sunni Arabs to stop fighting us and instead fight al Qaeda. Remember? The program worked and was a key to battlefield victory over al Qaeda and Baathist resistance.
Complaining about inefficiency is like ripping the military for using too much ammunition to kill an enemy.
I despair of getting anything useful about the war--or military matters, generally--from our press. With rare exceptions, they are clueless.
