WASHINGTON – As the United States advances into its third war in Iraq in a quarter-century, it’s important to have a mental checklist to assess whether U.S. strategy there can succeed. Right now, because of Iraq’s continuing corruption and sectarianism, it’s hard to be optimistic.
President Obama’s basic strategic framework seems right, in theory. Obama reiterated Monday in Beijing: “It’s not our folks who are going to be doing the fighting. Iraqis ultimately have to fight [the Islamic State] and they have to determine their own security.”
How can the U.S. avoid repeating the mistakes of the past? Looking for answers, I spoke this week with Stuart Bowen, former U.S. special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, whose office audited the chronic waste and mismanagement in the last Iraq fiasco.
To understand how bad things went in Iraq after the U.S. invasion in March 2003, read Bowen’s 2013 final report, titled “Learning from Iraq.” He estimates that almost 40 percent of the U.S.-sponsored projects he audited had major deficiencies.
Here’s an eerie reminder of how out of control Iraq spending was: Bowen writes that in 2003 and 2004, the U.S. delivered more than $10 billion in cash, drawn from Iraq’s frozen oil revenues, sending it in “massive shrink-wrapped bundles of $100 bills.” Bowen pointedly observes: “This money was not managed particularly well.” In fact, much of it was probably looted.