State of Iraq

[nicky g]

"1) USAID did not damage the wastewater facilities in Southern Iraq."

Of course not. It is however part of the US government that pushed sanctions and undertook a war that did. It also has a vested interest in making the facilities look as bad as possible before it intervened so that its work looks as good as possible.

"The wastewater facilities have been neglected over the years by Saddam"

The entire Iraqi national infrasturcture crumbled during the sanctions. Prior to those Iraq had probably the best infrastructure in the Arab world.

"On what do you base your claim that they're doing a rotten job repairing it (considering what they have to work with and terrorist attacks)"

Two years later and the country is full of open sewers, has little electricity capacity etc. They've handed out massive contracts to foreign companies instead of local engineers that repaired most of the damage following the first Gulf war much more cheaply and quicckly, and there have been recent reports on the work that's been done already faling apart. Much of the money allocated hasn't even been spent, while billions of dollars from teh early days of the post-war period is simply unaccounted for. The place is a shambles.

"Right...so the fact that Saddam chose to spend money bribing the UN and on arms from those countries has absolutely nothing to do with their neglect of their own infrastructure..."

There's no point going round in circles. ANy misspent money certainly would have helped but as I said it paled into insignificance in relation to the economic damage, and largely did not consist of funds being diverted (but rather of A. smuggled oil that generated additional funds, and B; giving contracts allegedly in return for influence - but those contracts would have been given anyway). THe amounts of money intended for humanitarian relief misspent through OFF corruption are a tiny fraction of the amount of revenue Iraq lost through the sanctions.

"Yes, it may be biased, but there just isn't a lot of journalistic interest in the progress on specific projects within Iraq. Who really wants to know how many mW an electricity plant in Baghdad is producing? "If it bleeds, it leads..." "

You can find a lot of stuff if you look for it. Part of the problem is that the authhorities didn;t bother to put out any serious statistics in thr two years after the war making any serious analysis difficult, preferring PR puff pieces about GIs building schools.

I'm off.

[BCPVP]

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Of course not. It is however part of the US government that pushed sanctions and undertook a war that did. It also has a vested interest in making the facilities look as bad as possible before it intervened so that its work looks as good as possible.

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I don't agree that every other government agency is equally (if at all) culpable for everything the Executive/Legislative branch does. Is the Dept. of the Interior guilty as well? And if USAID is fudging the numbers on how bad Iraq's infrastructure was, why were so many dying in southern Iraq pre-war?

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The entire Iraqi national infrasturcture crumbled during the sanctions. Prior to those Iraq had probably the best infrastructure in the Arab world.

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Now the infrastructure had crumbled. Which is it? It very well might have, but weren't the sanctions put in place to keep Saddam from rebuilding his wmd's? If so, then why didn't Saddam spend the money he would have been spending on wmds on the crumbled infrastructure? Is it conceivable that Saddam did not take very good care of his country?

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Two years later and the country is full of open sewers, has little electricity capacity etc.

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I'm assuming that you're getting this from the article you posted. While Iraq still has a long way to go, it is not as bad as the article claims and you would know that if you perused the weekly updates at USAID.gov.

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They've handed out massive contracts to foreign companies instead of local engineers that repaired most of the damage following the first Gulf war much more cheaply and quicckly, and there have been recent reports on the work that's been done already faling apart.

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Now you're really confusing me. Why was Iraq's infrastructure decimated if they had such skilled local engineers?

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Much of the money allocated hasn't even been spent...

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which is understandable considering how much money has been allocated.

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here's no point going round in circles. ANy misspent money certainly would have helped but as I said it paled into insignificance in relation to the economic damage...

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Perhaps. I'd love to hear your alternative that would keep Saddam from building more wmds that doesn't hurt the Iraqi economy. But I wasn't referring to the Iraqi economy. I'm talking specifically about the wastewater treatment facilities that were ignored during the 90's. I can't imagine that it would have taken billions and billions to keep those running.

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You can find a lot of stuff if you look for it.

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You might be able to find stuff mentioning reconstruction, but a newspiece doesn't really help when you're trying to analyze something like that. They're just not in-depth enough. You almost need a source that's fairly(if not entirely) dedicated to the topic of reconstruction.

[MMMMMM]

Nicky you may be underestimating the actual size of the oil-for-food scam. It was unquestionably the LARGEST scam in history, a sam besides which the Enron debacle pales in comparison as to sheer size.

Also, if it weren't for the EVIL INSURGENTS, the country might have been rebuilt by now. But those ASSHOLES would rather keep blowing things up, and keep murdering Iraqis and Americans, and keep Americans busy fighting, than help with the rebuilding themselves.

I think you really ought to shift a significant portion of your blame allocation away from the U.S. and towards the U.N. and the insurgents.

[sirio11]

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Nicky you may be underestimating the actual size of the oil-for-food scam. It was unquestionably the LARGEST scam in history, a sam besides which the Enron debacle pales in comparison as to sheer size.

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Is this true? Please, somebody elaborate, I want to know how the Oil for food progam affected the life and pockets of thousands of Americans.

[MMMMMM]

Well Sirio I don't have all the answers but this may help:

" The Journal Editorial Report

LEAD STORY

LEAD STORY

PAUL GIGOT: Welcome to THE JOURNAL EDITORIAL REPORT. According to a report by Senate investigators this week, it turns out that Saddam Hussein stole more than 21 billion dollars from the Oil for Food program and from oil smuggling -- more than twice as much as previously thought. And it becomes more and more clear that Saddam had a lot of help from the United Nations and from some of our supposed allies.

We depart from our usual format this week to call on the expertise of two journalists who reported and wrote extensively about this scandal, when hardly anyone else was. They are Claudia Rosett, a columnist for THE WALL STREET JOURNAL EUROPE and for OpinionJournal.com, and Rob Pollock, a senior editorial page writer for THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

Claudia, the Oil for Food program was designed in the middle 1990s to be able to provide food and medicine for Iraqis who, we thought, were suffering under sanctions. Now we know that didn't happen. Tell us how Saddam Hussein was able to fleece this program.

CLAUDIA ROSETT: He used scams so simple a 10-year-old familiar with markets could have spotted them. There were three basic ways. He undercharged for the oil he sold, which meant that the person buying the oil got a very fat profit, which he then kept part of and kicked back part to Saddam. Saddam over-paid for relief goods, say, baby food, which meant that the person selling him the baby food got a fat profit, kept some, kicked back part to Saddam, bank deposits into secret accounts where Saddam is getting it and the Iraqi people aren't. And he smuggled out billions worth of oil, which was all produced under what was supposed to be the supervision of this program.

PAUL GIGOT: That sounds like an old fashioned skimming operation.

CLAUDIA ROSETT: Oh, it was classic text book stuff. In fact, it's the kind of thing any remotely responsible manager setting up a program would look for ways to guard against.

PAUL GIGOT: And not only were the people of Iraq not getting the food and medicine in the quantities that they were supposed to, but they were getting rotten food in many cases, because they were shipping poor quality goods but charging as if they were high quality goods.

CLAUDIA ROSETT: Precisely. And substandard medicine. And in fact, given that the inspections company that Kofi Annan, the secretary, had hired -- the one that employed his son for awhile -- not only inspected, by general accounting office estimates, seven to 10 percent of the goods, we don't even know that the erstwhile shipments, that all of the erstwhile shipments, contained goods at all.

PAUL GIGOT: Wow. Rob, 21 billion dollars. Maybe there'll be more later, we don't know. The toll keeps rising. What did Saddam do with that money?

ROB POLLOCK: Well you know, a lot of people talk about this scandal, first of all, as if the size of the scandal is somehow equal to the size of the unmonitored revenues, whether that be the new estimate of 21 billion or the previous estimate of 10 billion. But the fact of the matter is, that Saddam was able to exploit every legitimate dollar within this program to reward his friends and allies. So we're talking about 97 billion dollars.

PAUL GIGOT: And he could do that how? By assigning -- by allocating contracts for oil and for food, is that it?

ROB POLLOCK: That's right. He gave those contracts to people he wanted to influence in one way or another.

PAUL GIGOT: Okay. But the net take of his was still 21 billion. And I grant you that the 97 billion was used to buy influence, and I want to talk about that. But the 21 billion went for something. What did it go for?

CLAUDIA ROSETT: It went for -- and by the way, that number may still be small. I think the estimates make it larger. It went for a number of outrageous things. It went to buy influence, including, we have from Charles Duelfer on the Iraq Survey Group, to bribe crucial members of the Security Council -- China, Russia, and France, among many others. It went to buy weapons, which Saddam was doing. Conventional weapons, but those are killing people right now in Iraq very likely. It went to fund terrorists. We now know for sure the Palestinian suicide bombers, but there are many other troubling terror links in this U.N. program. And it also went to buy things like palaces and Mercedes for Saddam's regime.

PAUL GIGOT: All in all, it went to sustain Saddam's rule for a decade after the Gulf War, when we had wanted to depose him. Right, Rob? Isn't that kind of the big picture here, that that's what this allowed him to accomplish?

ROB POLLOCK: That's right. He was buying influence abroad. He did about 23 billion dollars worth of business with the Russians. He did about seven billion dollars worth of business with the French. Now it's possible, we can imagine that maybe the French and the Russians aren't too worried about losing that business. But if nothing else, they certainly don't want that web of corruption exposed.

PAUL GIGOT: Who were some of the individuals involved here? We know Charles Pasqua, the former French Interior Minister, for example. Weren't there also people who were close to President Putin in Russia?

CLAUDIA ROSETT: Yes, one of his right-hand men. Well, people named in the list alleged to have --

PAUL GIGOT: This was on the list.

CLAUDIA ROSETT: Yeah, these are allegations, but interesting ones. Aleksander Voloshin, His right-hand man, a lively player in Russian politics for some time. Vladimir Jirinovski, who appears to have funneled money, according to the allegations. The President of Indonesia is on the list, but mostly going back to France, Charles Duelfer mentions aides to President Jacques Chirac, the former French ambassador to the United Nations. It's really an interesting roster. And then of course, the jewel in the crown, the alleged head -- the head of, he's not alleged -- alleged to received oil bribes from Saddam, the former head of the Oil for Food program, Benon Sevan.

PAUL GIGOT: All right. Let's talk about Kofi Annan's role in here, because you brought that up. He was not around as Secretary General when the program was created, but he came shortly thereafter. And he did have a big role, wide latitude, in creating -- or in developing the program. What is his role here, Rob?

ROB POLLOCK: Well, as you noted, the resolution creating the Oil for Food program gave the Secretary General a lot of discretion to design a program to insure what it called the "equitable distribution of foodstuffs and other goods" to the Iraqi people. It also gave the Secretary General the authority and responsibility to sign off on each six-month phase of the program and report back to the United Nations on how well it was working. It clearly doesn't seem that Kofi took his oversight role very seriously.

PAUL GIGOT: Willful ignorance here?

CLAUDIA ROSETT: Oh, signing off on things like the sports stadium for Saddam's son Uday toward the end of the program, broadcasting equipment from France and Russia.

PAUL GIGOT: Wait a minute. The U.N. actually knew that the money was going to build that kind of a stadium?

CLAUDIA ROSETT: Kofi Annan's personal signature is on the plan approving that. I cannot see any way you can think -- that anyone can think -- it was willful ignorance. There are only two possibilities. Either there was such astounding incompetence that Kofi Annan should never be let near running anything, let along the United Nations, or he knew what was going on, and what we are now dealing with is this amazing stonewall where he will not release records that would tell us more.

PAUL GIGOT: Wasn't there supposed to be some supervision here by the Security Council powers, the French, the Russians, and the United States? Weren't we supposed to be paying attention here?

ROB POLLOCK: We were, we were, and we tried a bit -- I believe it was 1999 was the first time that the U.S. and Britain held up some obviously corrupt contracts under Oil for Food. And that happened again a few times. And then, in 2000, when Saddam added the oil surcharge, the United States and Britain tried, and eventually succeeded, despite a lot of kicking and screaming from the French and Russians, to introduce a scheme called "retroactive pricing" so Saddam couldn't -- didn't know what he could charge for a barrel of oil, and build in the room for the kick-back.

PAUL GIGOT: Okay.

ROB POLLOCK: So ...

PAUL GIGOT: So they made some progress. But basically it went on right until Saddam was deposed.

CLAUDIA ROSETT: With the enthusiastic urging of Kofi Annan that it be expanded, that the range of its allowed so-called humanitarian imports grow. And he himself took over direct supervision from mid-2002 until the program ended because Saddam fell, for all the food, medicine, all the so-called sort of direct humanitarian supplies, which were the ones where the most was scammed out of the contract.

PAUL GIGOT: What does this tell us about, more broadly here, the future of the United Nations as a body, an institution? As a force for collective security in the world, and our ability to trust it as a partner?

ROB POLLOCK: How can you set up as the ostensible arbiter of the legitimate use of international force, an organization that is so obviously vulnerable to corruption and to blackmail?

PAUL GIGOT: How about you, Claudia?

CLAUDIA ROSETT: It tells us you should not trust the United Nations with anything involving serious responsibility. If you want to lock them all in a room and let them be a debating society, that's a great idea. But no budget, no power to -- nothing where we are depending on them to enforce things on which our lives depend.

PAUL GIGOT: All right. Short answers here from each of you. Knowing what we know now about how Oil for Food operated, do either of you think there was any chance that the U.N. Security Council was going to vote to topple Saddam Hussein?

ROB POLLOCK: Zero chance.

CLAUDIA ROSETT: Never.

ROB POLLOCK: Even if they weren't worried about losing the business, they didn't want it exposed. Zero chance.

CLAUDIA ROSETT: Sure, they were open to blackmail, even if they weren't in good faith enough to say "bought." It was never going to happen.

PAUL GIGOT: All right. Thank you very much. Next subject."

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/journaledito...leadstory.html

[sirio11]

Well, even if this is true, I'm yet to see how this scam affected the American people, at least in the same size as the Enron scandal affected them. You may be right that from a global perspective it was bigger than Enron, but wasn't from an American perspective, and that's all that counts right? Specially for you pro-war, your motto is f the world, America is all that matters. And most Americans and almost all conservatives could care less from this scam and how the Iraqis were affected, unless of course it serves the purpose to bash the UN, France and Russia.
Still I accept that the people responsible for the suffering of the Iraqi children, should be prosecuted and pay for it. All of them

[zaxx19]

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And most Americans and almost all conservatives could care less from this scam and how the Iraqis were affected, unless of course it serves the purpose to bash the UN, France and Russia.


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Wow, this is actually pretty true.

Sounds about right. Im a conservative, and it pretty much sums up how I feel. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]


Have a nice day.

[ACPlayer]

I remember seeing signs that it was Bush and America that are evil.

Of course EVIL is relative to the perspective of the person offering the opinion - a truism you find hard to accept as you only recognize your perspective and the underlying assumptions as correct.

The reasons for the insurgency are understandable. The tactics are abhorrent but not surprising and entirely predictable. In fact on this forum it was pointed out a couple of years ago that Iraq was not ready for Democracy to be imposed from outside and that there would be infighting between the ethnic groups.

Iraq to survive needs to be run by an iron fisted dictator and it will be, whether that dictator is Saddam or a Theocratic govt or an occupying force. The dictatorship is liable to have all the attendant problems (like prisoner abuse, devastation of towns and cities in search of criminals, the suppression of human rights -- it has been happening in the last two years of "freedom" as well). When the Iraqi is ready for democracy, then they will start down the route of Iran and slowly but surely move towards a lasting democracy.

The entire experiment is an exercise in futility until it is lead from within.

[nicky g]

"I don't agree that every other government agency is equally (if at all) culpable for everything the Executive/Legislative branch does. Is the Dept. of the Interior guilty as well?"

It's not a question of culpability, it's a question of bias. As a government agency USAID is unlikely to give out information that puts itself or the US government as a whole in an unfavourable light, such as information that points to the sanctions, the war and incompetent reconstruction efforts as some of the main casues of the poor state of Iraq.

"And if USAID is fudging the numbers on how bad Iraq's infrastructure was, why were so many dying in southern Iraq pre-war?"

Many did indeed die; the point is that the article you posetd completely ignores that the sanctions were the main driver of the crumbling infrastructure.

"Now the infrastructure had crumbled. Which is it?"

The infrastructure did indeed crumble. The point is that the statement completely ignores the effect of the sanctions on this, and it's in their interest to exaggerate the difficulty of repairing it. They crumbled because of a lack of money; now that money is allegedly there, yet everything is still a mess.

"I'm assuming that you're getting this from the article you posted. While Iraq still has a long way to go, it is not as bad as the article claims and you would know that if you perused the weekly updates at USAID.gov."

More circles. The USAID statement you posted shows clear bias in their reporting and they clearly have a vested interest in talking up the work they do. They are not a remotely impartial source and the piece you posted is basically out and out propaganda.

"Now you're really confusing me. Why was Iraq's infrastructure decimated if they had such skilled local engineers?"

Because of a lack of money. You're confusing two different things; the long term effects of the sanctions and the immediate effects of the war. In the immediate aftermath of the first Gulf War, Iraqi engineers did a very good job of getting power back very quickly. They did a pretty good job of maintaining it in the face of the effects of the sanctions, although it clearly deteriorated. The second war damaged it further and now, despite the end of the sanctions and loads of money being thown at US corporations to rebuild it, the power is still not back on properly or even back at pre-war levels in many places.

"It very well might have, but weren't the sanctions put in place to keep Saddam from rebuilding his wmd's? If so, then why didn't Saddam spend the money he would have been spending on wmds on the crumbled infrastructure? Is it conceivable that Saddam did not take very good care of his country?"

This is a completely ridiculous point in an otherwise well argued post. The sanctions weren't simply designed to deduct from Saddam of the money he wanted to spend on WMDs. They were designed as a punishment to utterly cripple the Iraqi economy; the amount of economic damage done dwarfed the costs of the abandonned WMD programmes.

"Perhaps. I'd love to hear your alternative that would keep Saddam from building more wmds that doesn't hurt the Iraqi economy. But I wasn't referring to the Iraqi economy. "

Targetted diplomatic and military sanctions, and some economic ones targetted at teh regime's elite, not ones that impoverished the entire country. By the end of the sanctions period they had become much better targetted in fact, although there was still some way to go; in the first half or so they utterly devestated the country.

"But I wasn't referring to the Iraqi economy. I'm talking specifically about the wastewater treatment facilities that were ignored during the 90's. I can't imagine that it would have taken billions and billions to keep those running."

Well that's your issue as I'm talking about the country as a whole, and I have no specific knowledge of the history of these plants or if what USAID claims is true. But it doesn't need to take billions and billions if the country is short of money for everything; if something only costs one dollar to fix but you there are a thousand other things that also need fixing and you only have 100 dollars, it's probably not going to get properly fixed.

[nicky g]

Biggest scam or not, the simple fact remains that the amounts involved in the OFF scandal did not come close to the amout of damage done by the sanctions. Was the abuse of the programme wrong? Of course? Would the people of Iraq have been fine and dandy if only there had been so OFF fraud? Not even close.

The point also remains that by far the biggest element of the scandal was the oil smuggling, which brought additional revenues in, rather than diverting OFF revenues; the bulk of the figures quoted did not deprive the Iraqis of anything.