Flashback: 'Iraq was awash in cash. We played football with bricks of $100 bills'

[Javaman]

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/mar/20/usa.iraq

In a dilapidated maternity and paediatric hospital in Diwaniyah, 100 miles south of Baghdad, Zahara and Abbas, premature twins just two days old, lie desperately ill. The hospital has neither the equipment nor the drugs that could save their lives. On the other side of the world, in a federal courthouse in Virginia, US, two men - one a former CIA agent and Republican candidate for Congress, the other a former army ranger - are found guilty of fraudulently obtaining $3m (£1.7m) intended for the reconstruction of Iraq. These two events have no direct link, but they are none the less products of the same thing: a financial scandal that in terms of sheer scale must rank as one of the greatest in history.
At the start of the Iraq war, around $23bn-worth of Iraqi money was placed in the trusteeship of the US-led coalition by the UN. The money, known as the Development Fund for Iraq and consisting of the proceeds of oil sales, frozen Iraqi bank accounts and seized Iraqi assets, was to be used in a "transparent manner", specified the UN, for "purposes benefiting the people of Iraq".

For the past few months we have been working on a Guardian Films investigation into what happened to that money. What we discovered was that a great deal of it has been wasted, stolen or frittered away. For the coalition, it has been a catastrophe of its own making. For the Iraqi people, it has been a tragedy. But it is also a financial and political scandal that runs right to the heart of the nightmare that is engulfing Iraq today.

Diwaniyah is a sprawling and neglected city with just one small state paediatric and maternity hospital to serve its one million people. Years of war, corruption under Saddam and western sanctions have reduced the hospital to penury, so when last year the Americans promised total refurbishment, the staff were elated. But the renovation has been partial and the work often shoddy, and where it really matters - funding frontline health care - there appears to have been little change at all.

In the corridor, an anxious father who has been told his son may have meningitis is berating the staff. "I want a good hospital, not a terrible hospital that makes my child worse," he says. But then he calms down. "I'm not blaming you, we are the same class. I'm talking about important people. Those controlling all those millions and the oil. They didn't come here to save us from Saddam, they came here for the oil, and so now the oil is stolen and we got nothing from it." Beside him another parent, a woman, agrees: "If the people who run the country are stealing the money, what can we do?" For these ordinary Iraqis, it is clear that the country's wealth is being managed in much the same way as it ever was. How did it all go so wrong?

More at link...

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"How did it all go so wrong?" it was never meant to go right.

[packman]

1. The Iraq War

was either a grab and snatch for the oil OR a fucked up presidential son who wanted to prove something to his former presidential father. It was about money and ego from the offset. What could you expect with a half-wit being controlled by Cheney and his crowd of chicken hawks.

[Mnemosyne]

2. Agree Javaman, it was never intended to go 'right'. nt

[Demobrat]

3. It went exactly how it meant to go.

The American oil companies got control of the Iraqi oil, eliminated the competition, and proceeded to raise gas prices as far as they dared. Mission accomplished.

[4Q2u2]

4. With all that Honey lots of Ants to the Picnic

The Mayor Hit disappeared with a couple million and has never been heard of since.
Bremmer the bumbling idiot had a Provisional Government that appointed 22 yr recent Rebup College Grads as Mayors of entire cities.

[Maedhros]

5. Don't forget this:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1

The US flew nearly $12bn in shrink-wrapped $100 bills into Iraq, then distributed the cash with no proper control over who was receiving it and how it was being spent.

The staggering scale of the biggest transfer of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve has been graphically laid bare by a US congressional committee.

In the year after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 nearly 281 million notes, weighing 363 tonnes, were sent from New York to Baghdad for disbursement to Iraqi ministries and US contractors. Using C-130 planes, the deliveries took place once or twice a month with the biggest of $2,401,600,000 on June 22 2004, six days before the handover.

Details of the shipments have emerged in a memorandum prepared for the meeting of the House committee on oversight and government reform which is examining Iraqi reconstruction. Its chairman, Henry Waxman, a fierce critic of the war, said the way the cash had been handled was mind-boggling. "The numbers are so large that it doesn't seem possible that they're true. Who in their right mind would send 363 tonnes of cash into a war zone?"

WAR IS A RACKET.

[Javaman]

6. I bet someone with some insight and investigative resources could figure out who the...

new milliaires and billiaires that were created since then.

[Autumn]

7. If we didn't have this bloated military, these out of control spy programs

and all these wars and big tax breaks for corporations the US would be awash in cash. That's where it all went wrong.

[mountain grammy]

8. Business as usual. "It was never meant to go right."