Raiding Iraq’s piggy bank
By ANDREW COCKBURN
Special to the Los Angeles Times
Cockburn is the coauthor of Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein.
Now that Iraqi insurgents have discovered precisely where to aim their body blows at oil export facilities, Iraq is going to need all the money it can find. So it seems a pity that in its final days, the U.S.-dominated Coalition Provision Authority (CPA) has gone on a shopping spree, gaily spending the hoard of Iraqi cash it controls.
Like everyone else in Iraq, the insurgents have long recognized that oil, almost the country’s only revenue resource, is the key to power. Since the beginning of the occupation, there have been no less than 125 sabotage attacks against oil pipelines. Until recently, most were in the northern oil fields, where little production goes for export, but lately, attacks have shifted to the southern fields, whence come 85 percent of Iraqi exports. Such gloomy realities appear to have little effect inside the CPA, where, reportedly, an “end of school” atmosphere has taken hold. This was most vividly expressed at a meeting last month at which it was decided to hand out almost $2 billion in Iraqi assets -- not American dollars but Iraqi money over which the U.S. authorities have assumed responsibility -- to a host of “deserving” causes.
The meeting was one of the regular get-togethers of the Program Review Board, a body operating under the auspices of the CPA that oversees spending by what is known as the Development Fund for Iraq, or DFI. The fund, created early in the occupation by the United Nations, has been receiving all the money earned by Iraqi oil exports plus all the money left over from the Saddam-era “oil for food” program, as well as any and all assets left behind by Saddam Hussein in Iraq and in foreign bank accounts. All in all, the fund has received more than $19 billion and has functioned as a piggy bank for the occupation authority, which has displayed a marked reluctance to account for money spent. Last November, for example, Congress -- with Halliburton in mind -- banned the use of taxpayers’ money for any more large noncompetitive contracts. So the CPA simply dipped into the DFI to pay Halliburton.
Those happy days are due to come to an end on June 30, which may be why the Program Review Board at its May 15 meeting cheerfully agreed to dole out $2 billion of the $10 billion remaining in the fund to what Iraq Revenue Watch, a George Soros-funded group, describes as “hastily conceived projects.” For example, the board members voted to approve $180 million for the CPA-controlled Iraq Property Claims Commission to deal with anyone whose property had been unjustly expropriated by Saddam. The commission representative, Duncan Gilchrist, conceded to the meeting that he could not provide details of how this vast sum was to be spent, or examples of similar programs elsewhere.Nor were there details provided on where $125 million for “revenue stabilization” was going to end up, although an Iraq Revenue Watch briefing dryly notes that such funds tend to turn into “easily raided slush funds.” The $460 million allocated for “oil-sector reconstruction” might be easier to justify, except for the fact that Congress has already appropriated $1.7 billion for Iraqi oil infrastructure reconstruction. Most of the contracts under that appropriation for a total of 226 projects went to Halliburton, which has not managed to finish a single project and has only started work on 119 of them.
http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/NewsStory.aspx?section=Opinion&OID=53694
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