The World's Matthew Bell reports on a new government review of wartime spending. The review is focusing attention on how factors like poor planning and corruption have hampered U.S. reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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MARCO WERMAN: I'm Marco Werman, and this is The World. They're still counting the votes in Iraq, but Iraqi officials are calling this weekend's provincial elections a major achievement in Iraq's attempts to return to stability. Americans might be less impressed by what their billions in tax dollars have produced there, especially when it comes to Iraq reconstruction. A new commission examining waste and corruption in wartime contracts held its first public hearing in Washington today, and what it heard was grim. The World's Matthew Bell reports.
MATTHEW BELL: Stuart Bowen is the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. He's made 21 trips to Iraq since 2004 to see how more than $50 billion dollars in US reconstruction funds have been spent. His office is releasing a 450-page report today. The title says it all. It's called “Hard Lessons.â€
STUART BOWEN: How much fraud and waste was there? There was a lot of waste. Billions of dollars in waste.
BELL: Bowen first arrived in Baghdad five years ago, when the Coalition Provisional Authority was in charge of reconstruction.
BOWEN: What I saw troubled me right away. The CPA put my office -- unwittingly, I suppose--right next to the Controller's office, and there I saw duffle bags full of money being carted out the door. I knew this was a huge problem. And then, walking the halls that same day, I heard someone lean over to another and whisper, “We can't do that anymore. There's a new inspector general here.†Well, that's a sign that for a year in Iraq there had been no effective oversight, and there really wasn't.
BELL: Bowen gave examples of money wasted. $40 million dollars spent on a brand-new prison the Iraqis never wanted and now will never hold any prisoners. A new waste water treatment plant that didn't include plans to connect the facility to people's homes. New buildings handed over to the Iraqis, only to see them vandalized or ransacked. Bowen said the purpose of his latest report is to help avoid making the same mistakes in Afghanistan that the US made in Iraq.
BOWEN: The story of Iraq reconstruction is the story of a policy that's changed dramatically with respect to reconstruction in 2003, and then changed again. And then changed again.
BELL: Bowen said the early focus was on infrastructure projects. Then the insurgency exploded and security became the top priority. Things shifted from hiring US contractors to hiring Iraqi contractors, and from training Iraqi security forces to implementing a counter-insurgency strategy. All of this, Bowen said, was paid for through emergency supplemental funding requests, based on short-term goals instead of a long-term rebuilding plan. Bowen's testimony was part of the first day of hearings of the new Wartime Spending Commission. It was created by Congress a year ago. The commission is modeled after the Truman Commission, which was created to crack down on profiteering during World War Two. Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill is from Truman's home state of Missouri. Speaking before the members of the commission, she said today's hearings were just the beginning of the investigation into wartime spending in Iraq.
CLAIRE MCCASKILL: This has been a massive failure. We have failed our military and we have failed the American people. And a report is not going to be enough. You're going to need a two-by-four. I'm going to try to channel the plain speaking of Harry Truman today, because I think that's what he would want. You're going to have to do something other than just write out summaries of other reports that have been done, because what is missing in this failure is accountability.
BELL: The special inspector general's office is conducting dozens of criminal investigations into contract funding in Iraq, and it's just getting started with the task of looking at more than $30 billion dollars devoted to reconstruction for Afghanistan. For The World, I'm Matthew Bell.
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