How's Bush going to get out of this?

It's called "piling on."

Now a 70-page report put together by officials at the US Embassy in Baghdad cronicles the full extent of corruption in the Iraqi government, Spencer Ackerman reports at Muckraker.  David Corn of the Nation managed to get his hands on the report.

"Corruption investigations in Ministry of Defense are judged to be ineffectual." The study reports that the Ministry of Trade is "widely recognized as a troubled ministry" and that of 196 corruption complaints involving this ministry merely eight have made it to court, with only one person convicted.

The Ministry of Health, according to the report, "is a sore point; corruption is actually affecting its ability to deliver services and threatens the support of the government." Investigations involving the Ministry of Oil have been manipulated, the study says, and the "CPI and the [Inspector General of the ministry] are completely ill-equipped to handle oil theft cases." There is no accurate accounting of oil production and transportation within the ministry, the report explains, because organized crime groups are stealing oil "for the benefit of militias/insurgents, corrupt public officials and foreign buyers."

And it gets worse as it goes on.  As Ackerman suggests, this report can't make comfortable reading for one of Bush's optimists-in-chief, Ambassador Crocker.  But as more and more officials untainted by the White House come forward, the worse it gets for the Bush-Crocker-Petraeus-Odierno team.  Will they just forge ahead, insisting everything can be fixed by a few more billion and an untold number of deaths?

Comments

[Steve J.]

FYI,

The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) reached the same conclusion in his July report:

"The Embassy made progress on several fronts to address the endemic corruption in Iraq, which SIGIR views as a “second insurgency.” "

http://radamisto.blogspot.com/2007/07/op-ed-ecstasy.html