US in Iraq: Eight years of fraud and money laundering?

A US audit has confirmed that billions of dollars delivered to the Iraqi authorities in 2003 for reconstruction projects have gone missing. It seems Washington has wasted cash earmarked to build democracy in the country.

State Department Foreign Service Officer Peter Van Buren headed an Iraqi reconstruction team a few years ago. After returning home he wrote a book which has, he says, provoked the ire of the State Department, which now wants him fired. In his view, the State Department is a lot like the mafia. “You don’t talk about the family outside the family, and the State Department was bothered by the fact that I told the true story of what happened in Iraq, which contradicts what they’ve been putting out through the media for almost eight years now,” he explained.  He told RT that in around 2007, a number of State Department officials were sent to Iraq with a large amount of cash to spend on rebuilding the country and hopefully creating a new ally for America. Instead, what was delivered were short-term efforts which had no real direction and which were consequently doomed to fail. “Some of my teammates tried to talk me into spending $25,000 to buy a few sheep to give away to a few widows, and that was going to be our contribution to democracy. You could buy a Toyota for what we were going to spend on sheep,” he recollected. According to Van Buren, America entered the Iraqi war on the pretext of hunting down weapons of mass destruction.“As a result, Americans killed over 100,000 Iraqi citizens; some of them were killed directly by the US, some in sectarian violence that the US set loose. Iraq today is not a place that represents the investment of US $63 billion in reconstruction funds. The US failed in its efforts to bring freedom to Iraq,” he stated.