Not that this is in any way surprising, but the first report to Congress from the Wartime Contracting Commission reportedly presents bleak asssessments of how taxpayers have been bilked out of billions of dollars — that’s in addition to the $23 billion that has already been reportedly lost, stolen or is unaccounted for in Iraq — that have recurringly been misused or lost due to fraud, poor management, weak or non-existent oversight and a failure to learn from past mistakes.
Private contractors account for practically half of the U.S. personnel involved in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Billions of dollars have been lost due to waste, fraud and abuse. If it sounds familiar, it’s because poor management and weak or non-existent oversight has been the modus operandi in Washington for the past eight plus years and corrupted cronyism has prevailed. The Bush administration’s illegal occupation of Iraq created quite a war profiteering racket for numerous Bush administration cronies. Cronyism is still big in U.S. politics — President Obama has used it regularly too.
The decision to build a $30 million dining hall at a U.S. base in Iraq, which is scheduled to be finished on Christmas of this year, was based on bad planning and botched paperwork. Construction on the dining hall can’t stop because the project is too far along to halt it.
In addition to the documented poor management and weak oversight, the 111-page Wartime Contracting Commission report details how tens of billions of dollars have been misspent since 2001. That’s not at all surprising since the U.S. reliance on contractors to support two illegal wars has grown to ‘unprecedented proportions.’