New York Times Editorial - Blinding Americans on Iraq

New York Times Editorial - Blinding Americans on Iraq
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: November 5, 2006


Talk about arbitrary deadlines. Iraq is still an open- ended tragedy, and there is mounting evidence that without vigilant, independent monitoring, reconstruction contracts will waste American tax dollars without delivering the results that Iraqis have been promised. Still, America's Republican-controlled Congress has voted to close down, as of next October 1, the one effective oversight agency that has shown it could produce results.

The deadline for ending the work of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction was included in the conference report on a huge military authorization bill - inserted at the last minute in the back room by the staff of Duncan Hunter, the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. It should be promptly lifted by the new Congress to be elected next week.

That ought to be possible even if the Republicans stay in charge, since neither the House nor the Senate included such a deadline in its original legislation. But if the Republicans do lose their House majority, Hunter will no longer be able to carry out such mischief.

The special inspector general's office, run by Stuart Bowen, a Republican lawyer who had worked for George W. Bush both in Texas and in Washington, is widely respected by Democrats and Republicans for the quality of its investigations and reports. As a result of its work, contracting and supervision failures in the Pentagon were brought to Congressional and public attention, unsatisfactory performance was uncovered on the part of contractors like Halliburton, and corrupt U.S. occupation officials were sent to jail.

That is exactly the way a democracy is supposed to hold the people who work for it accountable. The special inspector general enjoys a sweeping authority and institutional independence that the investigative branches of the Defense and State Department do not. Yet it is those in- house investigators who are now set to take over the job next fall.

Hunter, who is exploring a 2008 presidential run, insists that neither the Bush administration nor the huge defense contractors who have been criticized in the inspector general's reports played any role in inspiring him to cut off the office's work. If this is only the bad judgment of one ambitious lawmaker, it should be easy enough to reverse it.