Rightwing Meltdown Continues: 'American Conservative' Mag Blisters Bush Admin, Contractors on Iraq Corruption

Rats overboard: There seems to be new evidence every day that the American Right has awakened to the fraud of the Bush Presidency. Now comes a scathing indictment of Bush’s management of post-war Iraq in American Conservative magazine, which was founded by the gentlemanly wingnut, Pat Buchanan. The author of the article, Philip Giraldi, details how the Administration, and especially the civilian Pentagon leadership and their contractors, squandered or stole billions of dollars from the Iraqi and United States treasuries:

An estimated 363 tons of $100 bills were shipped to Iraq in C-130 cargo planes.
When the final page is written on America’s catastrophic imperial venture, one word will dominate the explanation of U.S. failure—corruption. Large-scale and pervasive corruption meant that available resources could not be used to stabilize and secure Iraq in the early days of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), when it was still possible to do so. Continuing corruption meant that the reconstruction of infrastructure never got underway, giving the Iraqi people little incentive to co-operate with the occupation. Ongoing corruption in arms procurement and defense spending means that Baghdad will never control a viable army while the Shi’ite and Kurdish militias will grow stronger and produce a divided Iraq in which constitutional guarantees will be irrelevant.

How corrupt was it?

The American-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority could well prove to be the most corrupt administration in history, almost certainly surpassing the widespread fraud of the much-maligned UN Oil for Food Program. At least $20 billion that belonged to the Iraqi people has been wasted, together with hundreds of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars. Exactly how many billions of additional dollars were squandered, stolen, given away, or simply lost will never be known because the deliberate decision by the CPA not to meter oil exports means that no one will ever know how much revenue was generated during 2003 and 2004.

The level of corruption is so monumental that it literally involves tons of cash. Millions in currency "was flown into Iraq on C-130s in huge plastic shrink-wrapped pallets holding 40 'cashpaks,' each cashpak having $1.6 million in $100 bills." An estimated 363 tons of $100 bills were shipped to Iraq in C-130’s.

Here are hightlights of the Amcon article's bill of indictments: