Training Scam

Editorial

24 October 2007

Another scandal has hit the US occupation of Iraq. A report issued yesterday in Washington says a $1.2 billion program to train Iraqi policemen was so badly managed that auditors have given up trying to work out how the money was spent. A private company, DynCorp, was hired to help rebuild the Iraqi police force from scratch after the triumphant Bush swept Saddam’s old police and army away. That is now seen as a colossal blunder which resulted in much of the bloody violence that has come to characterize Iraq.

DynCorp insists there has been no intentional fraud even though its financial records have been so badly kept that it has been virtually impossible to trace where much of the vast sum went. Where a record has been found, the data have not been encouraging. For instance, some $4 million allocated for the construction of a police compound was spent on 20 VIP trailers and an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

What is significant about this further botched program ostensibly designed to set Iraq back on its feet is that it was run by the State Department whose specialists are popularly supposed to have had a more informed and realistic appreciation of the problems the blinkered neocon Iraqi strategy was creating. State also hired Blackwater’s trigger-happy mercenaries to guard its people in Iraq. They thus permitted behavior by the company’s employees that could not have been better calculated to lose the Iraqi hearts and minds that the department’s Arabists were reportedly so keen on winning from the outset.

The US military has been overcharged many hundreds of millions on contracts let to American private companies, not least by Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney’s old firm. Of course, the really big payola to be made on the major reconstruction projects won by US companies has not rolled in, as undertaking after undertaking has been abandoned or “suspended” for lack of security. Nevertheless, as this latest scandal makes clear, there is still a sizeable amount of money to be made, properly or improperly, from servicing the US occupation. The State Department, which had warned DynCorp on two previous occasions about its implementation of the training program and its abysmal accounting procedures, says it will demand the return of some of the immense sum. However, it could take up to five years to investigate any wrongdoing. By that time will anyone care?

What is interesting about the political reaction in Washington so far into the report on DynCorp by the Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart Bowen is that it has concentrated on the cost to the US taxpayer. There has been no protest at the cost to Iraqis on whose behalf this money was supposed to have been spent. You ought to get a lot of police training for $1.2 billion. You might even get a police force that understands that its overriding job is to uphold the law and protect and assist all Iraqis, regardless of who they are or to which group they belong.