Nine years in the making, a special Inspector General has released his final report, an “appalling” tally of the waste, fraud and mismanagement in the $60 billion U.S. reconstruction effort in Iraq after the initial war and throughout the Iraqi insurgency.
The report from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, Stuart Bowen, documents everything from a $40 million half-finished prison no one wants to expensive medical equipment no one was ever trained to use, according to The Hill.
How bad was it? The work by IG Bowen and dozens of U.S. auditors and investigators resulted in 82 criminal convictions for fraud or similar charges. We also suffered a death toll: 719 people were killed while working on reconstruction-related projects in areas plagued by snipers and explosives.
An estimated $8 billion of tax dollars was misspent and average Iraqis see no benefit from the American-funded projects. Many projects were delayed for years and were burdened by Iraqi corruption.
The top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said Wednesday that the report was “appalling.”
“The extent of waste and abuse in the $60 billion of Iraq reconstruction funds, coupled with the instability still evident in Iraq, is appalling and highlights real failures of planning and execution that must be corrected to make U.S. foreign assistance a more effective tool for advancing the national interests of our country,” Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee said.
The U.S. spent more than $100 million each on construction of three water treatment plants. The result? While the amount of drinking water available rose significantly, the quality of the water is still poor, failing to meet worldwide standards. The $195 million treatment plant in Falluja ran 457 percent over budget and will take 114 months to complete, in contrast to the original 18-month estimate.
A contractor who was awarded a $300 million contract to operate and maintain two warehouses could not sufficiently account for 40 percent of the costs billed to Uncle Sam. The government was charged $80 for a four-inch-long piece of PVC pipe that is typically priced at $1.41, a 5,574 percent mark-up. Many similar examples of the misuse of tax dollars were found.
While Corker blames the State Department and U.S. AID, the report repeatedly demonstrates how unprepared the Bush administration was for a lengthy occupation and reconstruction. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, suffers a big black eye from the inspector general’s conclusions.
The Hill wrote today that Iraqi officials interviewed for the report leveled three main criticisms, according to the report: insufficient U.S. consultation with Iraqi authorities when planning the reconstruction program; corruption and poor security fundamentally impeding progress throughout the program; and limited positive effects from the overall rebuilding effort.
“The Iraq reconstruction program," the report concludes, "provided a plethora of lessons about what happens when stabilization and reconstruction operations commence without sufficient systemic support in place."
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