What Do You Get for $12 Billion?

The statistics on the costs of the Iraq war are mind-boggling. Economists Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes say in a new book, “The Three Trillion Dollar War” that the Bush administration is pouring $12 billion a month into Iraq and the war’s ultimate financial cost could reach $2.7 trillion by 2017 (Columbia University Publishers are rumored to have rejected the book’s original title: “The $2.7 Trillion, Or About $12 Billion A Month War”).

But what might be even more difficult to comprehend is that the U.S. government has no idea how much money Iraq needs and what, if  any,  money the Iraq government is spending. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Ranking Republican John Warner (R-Va.) are now requesting that the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s auditing arm, get to the bottom of how the Iraqi’s are spending U.S. money- and their own oil revenue (John McCain, former chair of the committee, did not join Levin and Warner in signing the letter to GAO).

In January, GAO estimated that 4.4 percent of the Iraqi’s $10 billion reconstruction budget had actually been spent. The reason is not that the Iraqi government is wanting for money, as along with the billions given by America, the country’s oil revenue is projected to hit $56 billion in 2008. Rather, the New York Times reports that the government cannot spend money when Iraqi  workers, contractors and construction companies are fleeing the country and afraid to take jobs.

But the Times admits that why Iraq is not spending its money is largely speculative as nobody knows who in Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki’s government decides on how to spend the money and how much is being spent.  The Bush Administration said last July that about 25 percent of the Iraqi reconstruction budget had been spent. A senior Iraqi official, though, told the Times that 63 percent of the money had been used for such necessities as electricity and clean water.

One thing the GAO, the Bush government and the Maliki government have in common is that one is quite sure where the money is going.