Editorial: Draining Iraq

Tuesday, May 15, 2007 | 7:32 a.m.

B etween 100,000 and 300,000 barrels of Iraq's daily crude oil production over the past four years are unaccounted for, according to a draft report by the Government Accountability Office that was obtained by The New York Times. At $50 a barrel, that means $5 million to $15 million each day, a cumulative total of billions of dollars, has been lost to the fledgling Iraqi economy.

The Times in its Saturday story reports that the discrepancy could be a sign of what is believed to be widespread corruption and smuggling in Iraq's primary industry. It also could be that the oil production numbers are inflated or incorrectly calculated.

No one, the newspaper says, can specifically cite a reason for the discrepancy, but it is clear that the country's pervasive corruption and the Bush administration's continued bungling is a frightening tonic. Already Iraq's tenuous economy has been hobbled, officials say, by the smuggling of gasoline and kerosene at the cost of billions of dollars, and it is believed that a large part of the revenue from smuggling goes to support insurgents. While it is not certain that crude oil is being smuggled, much less sold to support insurgents, experts note that there is a market for crude oil and there is a history of smuggling it.

The GAO has previously reported to Congress that before the 2003 invasion smugglers were taking 325,000 to 480,000 barrels of Iraqi oil a day. Most of that was being taken out of Iraq via a pipeline to Syria. Such corruption may have been expected under Saddam Hussein's regime, but one would hardly expect it after the U.S. pledge to give Iraqis a better way of life after overthrowing Saddam.

The draft GAO report that is expected to be released soon also notes that despite spending $5.1 billion of taxpayer money and $3.8 billion of Iraqi money to rebuild the country's oil and electricity sectors, both oil and electric production have dropped in the past year.

The failure to adequately account for Iraqi oil production is one more example of the Bush administration's continued failure to produce results. It is also one more reason why we support the Democratic-controlled Congress' attempts to do what has yet to happen: hold the Bush administration and the Iraqi government accountable for their actions.