Plunder in Iraq

"Now, many years and many wars later, there is hunger aplenty. Were he alive today, al-Sayyab would have expressed nothing short of horror at the massive hunger in the “new” Iraq, especially when considering the obscene wealth that has been and is still being plundered and squandered by its rulers.  One in six Iraqis live in poverty. This is in a nation with the second highest oil reserves in the world and a budget surplus of more than fifty billion US dollars in 2011. According to Transparency International, Iraq has one of the most corrupt governments in the world. Some of the wealth stays inside the country and is spread among the beneficiaries and clients of the new political elite. Much of it, however, is transferred outside and translated into real estate or other assets, or is often hard to trace. Not a year has passed without plunder in Iraq.  The villains are not only or always Iraqis and the stolen money is not US taxpayer money. At least eighteen billion US dollars from Iraq’s frozen assets in the United States and from the surplus of the United Nations (UN) Oil-for-Food Program was sent from the Federal Reserve Currency Repository in New Jersey to Iraq right after the war. It was slated for the so-called Iraq Development Fund (IDF) during L. Paul Bremmer’s reign. All of that is now missing and there is not a single piece of paper to account for it or explain its whereabouts. Aside from the monstrous US embassy in Baghdad, the Iraq Reconstruction has nothing to show." (thanks Aseel)