US spent $60bn in reconstruction grants to help Iraq

The U.S. has spent more than $60 Billion in reconstruction grants to help Iraq get back on its feet after the country that has been broken by more than two decades of war, sanctions and dictatorship. And yet Iraq’s government is rife with corruption and infighting. Baghdad’s streets are still cowed by near-daily deadly bombings. A quarter of the country’s 31 million population lives in poverty, and few have reliable electricity and clean water, according to a report prepared by the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction . Ten years and $60 billion in American taxpayer funds later, Iraq is still so unstable and broken that even its leaders question whether U.S. efforts to rebuild the war-torn nation were worth the cost, said Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction in his report aired over Radio Sawa on Thursday. In his final report to Congress earlier Wednesday, Stuart Bowen’s conclusion was all too clear: Since the invasion a decade ago this month, the U.S. has spent too much money in Iraq for too few results. The reconstruction effort “grew to a size much larger than was ever anticipated,” Bowen said in a preview of his last audit of U.S. funds spent in Iraq. “Not enough was accomplished for the size of the funds expended,” he said. In interviews with Bowen, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said the U.S. funding “could have brought great change in Iraq” but fell short too often. “There was misspending of money,” said al-Maliki, whose Shiite sect makes up about 60 % of Iraq’s population. For his part, Iraqi Parliament Speaker Osama al-Nujaifi, the country’s top Sunni Muslim official, told auditors that the rebuilding efforts “had unfavorable outcomes in general.” Overall, including all military and diplomatic costs and other aid, the U.S. has spent at least $767 billion since the American-led invasion against iraq in 2003, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Meanwhile US Army Chief of Staff Ray Odierno, who was the top U.S. military commander in Iraq from 2008 to 2010, said “it would have been better to hold off spending large sums of money” until the country stabilized. About a third of the $60 billion was spent to train and equip Iraqi security forces, which had to be rebuilt after the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority disbanded Saddam’s army in 2003.