The simple answer for why “no effective controls” exist is that there is a Republican Congress in the US, therefore there is no true official investigative authority. Impunity is the result.

Well, we do have an Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. The IG has issued some interesting reports and at one point wind of indictments were in the air (eg. Custer-Battles), but not much has come of it. After these IG reports, the Democrats held some hearings (led by Henry Waxman, find transcripts referenced in some of the links to this post), but not having any power they couldn’t make the hearings official or even find rooms in the Capitol Building.

Meanwhile, the UN had demanded an internationsl oversight board for the DFI (the Iraqi oil slush fund the Americans raped), as embodied in UNSCR 1483 and continued recently in UNSCR 1637. Now we begin to see possible motivations for keeping the UN on the ropes over the Saddam-era Oil-for-Food program and media well misdirected.

The fact that we know the problem exists implies that someone is monitoring the situation and measuring the degree of theft, but if theft was detectable, why were (are?) there no effective controls in place to stop it? And why did it take so long to detect the problem?

If there is one Iraqi asset that the US took pains to secure after the invasion, it is oil. And that implies that, before the war, the Bush administration was concerned about the loss of production capability, and that it had a plan to secure Iraq’s oil production infrastructure.

But despite the administration’s efforts, the siphoning of immense amounts of oil revenue has occurred.

There are only two possible explanations for this. Either corruption exists at the highest levels of the US government (where plans to secure Iraqi oil assets originated), or the administration is unimaginably incompetant.

Or more likely, a mix of both - after all, if one wanted to create an environment conducive to large-scale theft, then the Bush administration’s post-war policy of installing unqualified cronies and young Republicans would be just the ticket.

http://www.juancole.com/2005/12/iraq-petroleum-production-suffocating.html
“An official of the Oil Ministry in Baghdad told ISN Security Watch, on condition of anonymity: `We do not know the exact quantity of oil we are exporting, we do not exactly know the prices we are selling it for, and we do not know where the oil revenue is going to.”’

“`Production in the north, centre and south is about to suffocate,’ he said.”