GAO charts depressing picture in Iraq

The U.S. “Government Accountability Office” today released an intriguing new study titled Stabilizing Iraq: An Assessment of the Security Situation.
This report is described as a “Statement for the Record by David M. Walker, Comptroller General of the United States”. And it is indeed good to have this document on the record, even if none of the fairly pertinent questions that Walker asks in it gever gets satisfactorily answered. But heck, some of them might at least get asked, now that he has given the members of the US Congress some hints as to what some good questions might be.
On p.1 of the report (p.3 of the PDF file), he writes,

The Department of Defense (DOD) has reported obligations of about $227 billion for U.S. military operations in Iraq for fiscal years 2003 through June 2006. U.S. assistance appropriated for Iraqi security forces and law enforcement has grown from $3.24 billion in January 2004 to about $13.7 billion in June 2006.

So that’s around $5 billion we taxpayers are laying out each month to fund Cheney and Rumsfeld’s sick fantasies there… Almost beyond belief.
On p.3 of the report Walker lays out three of the key questions he thinks prudent members of Congress should be asking about the use of these generously obligated funds:

• What political, economic and security conditions must be achieved before the United States can draw down and withdraw military forces from Iraq?
• Why have security conditions continued to worsen even as Iraq has met political milestones, increased the number of trained and equipped forces, and increasingly assumed the lead for security?
• If existing U.S. political, economic, and security measures are not reducing violence in Iraq, what additional measures, if any, will the administration propose for stemming the violence?

It strikes me that, while those might be good questions to start with, there are also a whole class of much bigger questions that could and should be asked… Including,

“Actually, taken altogether, what have we achieved in Iraq with the outlay of all these funds?”
“How could those funds have been more effectively used to further the real interests of the US citizenry at home and abroad (i.e. What have been the opportunity costs of the decision to do these things in Iraq)?” and most of all,
“Who are the near-criminally incompetent nincompoops who got us all into this mess and why the heck are they still in office?”

Oh well, I suppose that’s not the kind of language a “Comptroller General” gets to use.
P.6 has a sobering graphic, showing how the number of aattacks against the US and its allies and civilians jumped in April 2004 from about 1,000/month to about 2,000/month– and how it has stayed at or much higher than that latter figure ever since then. (In July 2006, it was around 4,000.)
The report notes with an air of near-wonderment:

The security situation has deteriorated even as Iraq has made progress in meeting key political milestones and in developing its security forces… [A]ccording to the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the December 2005 elections appeared to heighten sectarian tensions and polarize sectarian divides. According to a U.S. Institute of Peace report, the focus on ethnic and sectarian identity has sharpened as a result of Iraq’s political process, while nationalism and a sense of Iraqi identity have weakened.

So much for elections as any kind of panacea.
If you want to see the US government’s multi-color map of the sectarian/ethnic breakdown (break-up?) of Iraq, you’ll find it on p.13.
On p.15 the report notes some of the problems with the data provided to the GAO regarding the preparation of new Iraqi security forces. (So who was the nincompoop who disbanded the old Iraqi security forces, anyway?)
On pp.19-21, the report lays out its recommendations for the questions that diligent Congressional overseers ought to be asking the DOD about Iraq. In addition to the ones already listed, these include a few other good ones, as well.
But as I noted above, the questions asked are still not pitched at anything like a broad enough strategic and political level.