Highly promising figures that the administration cited to demonstrate economic progress in Iraq last fall, when Congress was considering whether to continue financing the war, cannot be substantiated by official Iraqi budget records, the Government Accountability Office reported Tuesday.
[...]
By July 2007, the administration said, Iraq had spent some 24 percent of $10 billion set aside for reconstruction that year.
Oops. Not so fast. Make that 4.4 percent.
But in its report on Tuesday, the accountability office said official Iraqi Finance Ministry records showed that Iraq had spent only 4.4 percent of the reconstruction budget by August 2007. It also said that the rate of spending had substantially slowed from the previous year.
[...]
The reason for the difference, said Joseph A. Christoff, the G.A.O.’s director of international affairs and trade, was that few official Iraqi figures for 2007 were available when General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker went to Congress.
So, in the absence of actual figures, we just make shit up? Who would imagine such a thing.
So the administration, with the help of the Finance Ministry in Baghdad, appears to have relied on a combination of indicators, including real expenditures, ministries’ suggestions of projects they intended to carry out, and contracts that were still under negotiation, Mr. Christoff said. But actual spending does not seem to have lived up to those estimates for spending on reconstruction, a budget item sometimes called capital or investment expenditures, he added.
“So it looked like an improvement, but it wasn’t an improvement,” he said.
Actually, it never looked like an improvement. It looked like a potential for improvement assuming a best case scenario. Big difference.
A spokeswoman for the United States Embassy in Baghdad said Tuesday that she could not comment. The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment.
Of course not.
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