Why U.S. Military Occupation Corrupts

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Why U.S. Military Occupation Corrupts
Gareth Porter
Posted October 4, 2007 | 04:45 PM (EST)


Only two days after holding a hearing on Blackwater's atrocities, Rep. Henry Waxman is on the warpath against the Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the State Department for attempting to cover up the unwillingness of the al-Maliki government to do anything about massive and systematic corruption in Iraq.

Waxman's attacks on Blackwater and the official U.S. cover-up on Iraqi official corruption are laudable, but they fail to go to the root of the problem, which is the nature of military occupation itself.

At the hearing of Waxman's Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held today, which I heard this morning on radio, Waxman railed against Rice for the State Department's failure to take corruption in the Iraqi government seriously and for classifying a previously unclassified draft the U.S. Embassy staff study leaked to the news media last week. The draft concluded that the al-Maliki government "is not capable of even rudimentary enforcement of anti-corruption laws," and that the prime minister's office has rendered his own government's independent anti-corruption agency impotent.

Waxman questioned whether al-Maliki could be an effective prime minister, given his undermining of his own government's Commission on Public Integrity. He took Rice to task for the anemic to non-existent State Department effort on the corruption issue, noting that most members of the Department committee responsible for the issue fail to even show at its meetings.

It is obvious that the Bush administration has adopted a policy of trying to minimize the issue of Iraqi government corruption, just as it has tried to minimize the issue of Blackwater's unregulated terrorism against Iraqi civilians. But if Waxman and the Democrats are suggesting that the fix is to get the administration to tighten up its oversight in Iraq, they are essentially proposing a fresh coat of lipstick on the very big and very dirty pig of U.S. occupation.

Saddam Hussein's regime was extremely corrupt, with the oil riches of the country providing vast opportunities for graft that enriched his family and cronies. But the U.S. occupation creates a system in Iraq in which the level of graft and corruption achieved has unquestionably dwarfed that of the pre-occupation regime.


Rest of article at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-gareth-porter/why-us-military-occupat_b_67185.html