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Monday, July 6, 2009

Cashing In On America’s Wars: Waste, Fraud, and a Cast of Thousands

Cashing In On America’s Wars: Waste, Fraud, and a Cast of Thousands
Jul 1, 2009
By: Stephen Glain

Ah, for the Victorian era of empire, when a Western power could subdue an entire country with little more than a regiment of grenadiers armed with breach-loaders and a sherpa or two to carry Colonel Blimp's brandy. Back then, "post-conflict resolution" meant jobs for the freshly occupied at rubber plantations and in tin mines. Roads, ports, and railways were laid down by the engineering corps to graft the conquered territory onto the mother stem and provide the illusion of modernity for its great unwashed.

Today, empire building is a different proposition entirely. It is not enough to account for more than half the world's defense spending, as does the United States. Invading foreign countries and transforming them into viable proxy states requires an overhaul or replacement of existing infrastructure. And because the private sector is considered more efficient than the public one - or so it seemed before it collapsed under the weight of its own gluttony about eighteen months ago - you must create a hierarchy of contractors. Mandates are doled out to the KBRs, the Bechtels, Dyncorps and Fluors, which in turn whelp a litter of squealing sub-contractors that could elude even the most Leviathan of oversight regimes. And that's when empire building becomes the highest expression of the free market: an untrammeled frenzy of corruption and greed.

It's all there in an interim report of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, which was launched by Congress in 2008 to investigate abundant cases of fraud associated with war-related contracts. The 110-page expose, titled "At What Cost?" illustrates how much of the $830 billion Congress has appropriated to meet America's wartime commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan has simply disappeared. More than $13 billion in spending on post-war "stability operations" - everything from food preparation to laundry services and base security - is under scrutiny by lawmakers due to lax oversight, shoddy accounting and outright theft. For Americans old enough to remember the Pentagon's "$5,000 ashtrays" of the Reagan era, the Commissions findings offer a tinge of nostalgia. During a field trip to Kabul in April, Commission members toured the new US forces headquarters in Afghanistan. "We observed cracks, improper plumbing (and thus unusable bathrooms), an incorrectly sized sewage system, broken and leaking pipes, sinking sidewalks, and other construction defects," according to the report. In Iraq, meanwhile, the government approved millions of dollars to build a mess hall that was no longer needed after US troops began to withdraw from the country.

Some $3 billion to $5 billion of the king's ransom Washington distributed among the big contractors for Iraqi reconstruction is unaccounted for and much of the work they were hired to do - largely through those notorious "no-bid" contracts - have been dogged by delays and cost over-runs. The Baghdad electricity grid, for example, has yet to achieve pre-war levels of service.

Oversight has been lacking or non-existent. It was not until April 2007, for example, that agencies began identifying detailed costs from two mandates totaling $600 million awarded to Research Triangle Institute between 2003 and 2005 to develop local governance in Iraq. And that was for a general contractor. Sub-contractors - a quarter million of them now support the Pentagon in America's two Middle East wars and most are run by foreign nationals - operate with no oversight at all.

The report dresses down the Department of Defense for allocating too much of its resources for the war-fighting end of its campaigns - overkill, if you will - while neglecting the need for oversight of the rebuilding phase. Even now, according to the study, "the Department of Defense cannot provide a complete accounting of all the contracted support it relies upon....Inadequate oversight, poorly written statements of work, lack of competition, and contractor inefficiencies have contributed to billions of dollars in wasteful spending." Despite an abundance of various civilian and Pentagon agencies, in addition to private firms and non-governmental organizations, converging for reconstruction work, the report notes, "there is no locus of planning, coordination, and information [and] the government still lacks clear standards and policy on inherently governmental functions."

None of this should surprise anyone who witnessed first hand, as this columnist did, the chaos and incompetence that subverted the US occupation of Baghdad in those seminal first few months after US tanks rolled into the city. The circle of complicity is huge, with civilian leaders like then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his neocon hangers-on at its center. The current Secretary, Robert Gates, has worked heroically to clean up the mess Rumsfeld left behind. In addition to promoting larger budgets for civilian agencies like the United States Agency for International Development, which has been allowed to slip into near-oblivion while Pentagon outlays have achieved elephantine proportions, Gates has also set aside funds to hire 20,000 procurement officers to bring order to the anarchy of post-war spending in Iraq and Afghanistan. In effect, Gates is reversing the trend, which began under the Clinton administration and intensified in the Bush White House, to outsource core US government obligations and commitments to private firms such as Halliburton and the dreaded Blackwater.

Now, all Gates has to do is acknowledge what is by now obvious to everyone outside the Washington biosphere: the best way to reduce the costs of unnecessary wars like the one Washington waged so disastrously on Iraq is to make sure they don't happen again.

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