Written by Joshua Patton,

The days after the fall of Iraq, while Saddam was still stuck in his spider-hole and the insurgency was still an “unknown, unknown,” Civilian officials charged with overseeing the reconstruction of Iraq after the shock-and-awe destruction during the war, were panicked and stricken by a shortage of cash.  The Bush Administration is responsible for a number of bungled opportunities in the months following the initial invasion, and one of the most costly is the loss of an unknown amount of funds – estimated to be up to $18 billion – shipped to the war-torn nation in the form of shrink-wrapped cash on pallets. 

In 2003, a C-130 Hercules cargo plane transported almost $3 billion in cash to Iraq.  This money was doled out with little oversight to contractors, most of them locals, with little oversight.  A CNN story from as early as January of 2005 reported that $9 billion had gone missing.  The Guardian reported just two years later that the missing money total was now up to about $12 billion.  CBS News and 60 Minutes covered 50 billion mismanaged dollars in February of 2009, but this didn’t just focus on the stolen money, but also revealed that a spreadsheet left at a meeting showed that a civilian company billed the Coalition Authority for more than double their costs.  In the same report, Stuart Bowen – the special inspector general in Iraq in 2004 – said that money may not have been lost or stolen but merely paid out without adequate oversight or at least receipts. 

Although recent reports in the LA Times and other news outlets have said that while the official figure of money lost is $6.6 billion, Al Jazeera reports that Iraqis on the ground think that the number is three times that amount.  Yet, while Americans seem almost disinterested in this story now, it is the Iraqi government that is curious about where this money has gone.  However, even if the amount of money missing is just $6.6 billion this represents the largest theft of government funds in history. 

Yet, the Iraqis are not satisfied with the Pentagon closing the books on the program that was responsible for the money.  The Chief Auditor of Iraq, Abdul Basit Turki Saeed, said that the Iraqi government would be willing to go to court to recoup the lost cash.  Whether or not these are empty threats or political posturing on the part of the Iraqi government, who face harsh criticisms from their people where power outages and access to government services are still intermittent at best, remains to be seen.  Colin Powell famously said of Iraq that if we break it we buy it, but the question still remains about what the final tally of that bill will be.