Two truths have emerged from Iraq in recent months. First, corruption is so pervasive in Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's government that political progress in Iraq may be impossible. Second, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and our embassy in Baghdad are inexplicably neglecting this corrosive threat.
Confronting these facts is difficult. Nearly 4,000 American soldiers have been killed and another 28,000 wounded in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. No one wants to believe that these sacrifices were made to establish and support a regime riddled with fraud and graft. But as President Bush asks for an additional $153 billion for the war, we can't shrink from this reality.
Hearings in the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, of which I am chairman, have revealed a devastating cycle of corruption. Rampant theft in Iraqi ministries undermines political reconciliation and diverts billions of dollars from the rebuilding effort. Even worse, the stolen money funds terrorists who attack our troops.
Yet no one in our government is holding Iraqi ministers to account.
The faltering efforts to restore integrity to the Iraqi government suffered a major blow when the chief anticorruption official, Judge Radhi Hamza Radhi, was driven out of Iraq in August and replaced by a Maliki crony. In graphic testimony, Radhi told the oversight committee that 31 of his investigators were assassinated after implicating Iraqi officials in the theft and diversion of $18 billion. The father of one investigator was found hanging from a meat hook. Radhi's own family was targeted in two rocket attacks.
Radhi showed the committee secret orders signed by Maliki's chief of staff that prohibited probes into misdeeds by top Iraqi officials, including the prime minister. He described evidence implicating the ministers of defense, electricity and labor in schemes to steal hundreds of millions of dollars. The oil ministry, he said, is now "effectively funding terrorism." He also reported that Maliki personally blocked an investigation of his cousin, the transportation minister.
Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, shares Radhi's alarm. The rising tide of corruption in Iraq is, in Bowen's words, a "second insurgency."
