With the third-largest proven oil reserves in the world, Iraq has been raking it in from oil sales since 2005 – earning at least $156 billion, according to a new Government Accountability Office report. Oil accounts for better than 90 percent of Iraqi revenue and with the stratospheric prices the commodity is commanding these days between $67 billion and $79 billion are expected to flow into the country’s coffers in 2008 and the Iraqi government could end up with a budget surplus between $38 billion and $79 billion, depending on when the government actually passes the stalled $22 billion supplemental budget.

On top of that, Baghdad has some $30 billion stashed in the Development Fund for Iraq at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and another $21 billion sitting in reserve at the Iraqi Central Bank under an agreement with the International Monetary Fund to support Iraq’s monetary policy, and back the Iraqi dinar and control inflation. And get this: The U.S. had paid $435.6 million in interest payments to Iraq through the end of last year on the Federal Reserve Bank deposit.

Since the start of the war in 2003, American taxpayers have been spending $48 billion per year to rebuilding the country’s infrastructure but Iraq has been loath to dip into its own piggy bank.

For instance, according to the GAO report - requested by Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) and John Warner (R-VA), the committee’s second-ranking Republican member - the U.S. has spent $23.2 billion on security, oil, electricity and water over the past five years, whereas Baghdad shelled out only $3.9 billion in these critical areas since 2005 when the Iraqi government began managing its budget.

Levin and Warner issued a joint statement on the report:

Levin: “The Iraqi government now has tens of billions of dollars at its disposal to fund large-scale reconstruction projects. It is inexcusable for U.S. taxpayers to continue to foot the bill for projects the Iraqis are fully capable of funding themselves. We should not be paying for Iraqi projects, while Iraqi oil revenues continue to pile up in the bank. We should not be paying for Iraqi projects, while Iraqi oil revenues continue to pile up in the bank including outrageous profits from $4 a gallon gas prices in the U.S. We should require that U.S. taxpayers be reimbursed for the cost of large projects.”

Warner: “Despite Iraq earning billions of dollars in oil revenue in the past five years, U.S. taxpayer money has been the overwhelming source of Iraq reconstruction funds. It is time for the sovereign government of Iraq, using its revenues, expenditures and surpluses, to fully assume the responsibility to provide essential services and improve the quality of life for the Iraqi people.”

As The New York Times notes:  

From the beginning of the conflict, American officials assured taxpayers and the world that Iraq would use oil money to pay for reconstruction. But that has not happened. …

Senators Levin and Warner pointed out that in 2007, for example, Iraq actually spent only 28 percent of its $12 billion reconstruction budget, according to the accountability office. But even that number could overstate the success rate in most of Iraq, because $2 billion of the spending took place in the relatively peaceful confines of the northern Kurdish region.

And in another troubling sign, the report said that from 2005 to 2007, Iraq devoted only 1 percent of the operating expenses in its budget to maintaining reconstruction projects that had been built with either American or Iraqi money. That finding raised fresh questions over whether the huge investment in some of those projects would have any long-term impact.

In an editorial, “Time for Iraq to Pay the Bill,” The Times points out that “Iraqis have had little incentive to spend their own money given the willingness of the United States Congress to keep writing blank checks” and that “Congress is finally losing patience with the indefensible image of Americans paying historic high gasoline prices while Iraq pockets huge profits and Americans underwrite Iraq’s rebuilding.”

If Congress has its way, the U.S. taxpayer-funded gravy train will leave Baghdad Central Railway Station: The Washington Post reports that Levin and Warner sent a letter to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates last week “question[ing] the approval of $33 million from the Commander's Emergency Response Program to finance a new hotel, office and retail complex at Baghdad International Airport.”

But getting Iraq to start paying for its own reconstruction isn’t good enough. Congress should demand that some of the Iraqi money sitting in the Federal Reserve Bank be given back to the U.S. taxpayer.

Instead of Barack Obama’s economically senseless plan to levy a “windfall profit” tax on oil companies to give American families a $1,000 “energy rebate” – which we will end up spending at the pump when oil companies raise prices to recoup the dent in their profits, which are actually modest on a percentage basis compared to companies in other industries – some of that money should be used to give the beleaguered American taxpayer an “Iraq war rebate” of $500, which should cover what each taxpayer kicked in to rebuild Iraq over the last three years.

As with Bush’s tax rebate and Obama’s proposed energy rebate, this one-time payment won’t do much to stimulate the economy but it will be emotionally satisfying – and without coming back to bite us in the wallet.

Hamdan Verdict In The Eye Of The Beholder

An officer who served on the Guantánamo Bay military jury that convicted Salim Hamdan of providing material support for terrorism and sentenced to five months imprisonment on top of 61 months he has already spent in confinement at the military base awaiting trial tells The Wall Street Journal that the evidence against Osama bin Laden's former driver “simply didn't support prosecutors' depiction of a hard-core al Qaeda terrorist who hates America and its way of life” and that “along the spectrum” of terrorist activity, Hamdan fell on the “less significant end.”

According to The Journal, this juror also insisted that the sentence was not meant as a “message to the Bush administration or comment on its military commission system,” but instead reflected American principles on “the sanctity of human rights."

Even as it termed the verdict and sentence as “thoughtful and fair - or as fair as a hopelessly flawed system could hope to produce,” The Washington Post characterized it as “both vindication and defeat for the administration” and calls for his release “before President Bush leaves office”:

The matter emerged as vindication, in the sense that the commission in this case proved not to be the kangaroo court many critics once feared and predicted; defeat, in that even military jurors and a military judge in no way bought the administration's assertion that Mr. Hamdan was a hardened al-Qaeda operative deserving of life imprisonment. …

That Mr. Hamdan obtained such a measured and appropriate result is testament to the integrity of the participants in this matter, particularly the jurors and the judge.

But The New York Times didn’t see it that way at all. An editorial, “Guilty as Ordered,” sarcastically begins, “Now that was a real nail-biter” and complains that the court was “designed by the White House and its Congressional enablers to guarantee convictions … using evidence obtained by torture and secret evidence as desired”:  

The rules of justice on Guantánamo are so stacked against defendants that the only surprise was that Mr. Hamdan was actually acquitted on the more serious count of conspiring (it was unclear with whom) to kill Americans during the invasion of Afghanistan after Sept. 11, 2001. …

We are not arguing that the United States should condone terrorism or those who support it, or that the guilty should not be punished severely. But in a democracy, trials must be governed by fair rules, and judges must be guided by the law and the evidence, not pressure from the government. The military commission system, which falls far short of these standards, is a stain on the United States.

For its part, The Journal took exception to The Times’ reaction to the trial’s outcome, and posited the rhetorical question, “Could anything happen at Guantanamo that isn't ‘a stunning rebuke’ or ‘an embarrassing blow’ to the Bush Administration?”:

If anything, Hamdan's sentence again validates the fairness and due-process safeguards embedded in the system. The jury was independent and conscientious in its deliberations  to a fault, perhaps. Hamdan, after all, was far from the hapless chauffeur his white-shoe lawyers portrayed. During his trial, the prosecution played a 1998 video that showed Hamdan guarding bin Laden with a machine gun. Presumably al Qaeda's leader didn't hang around with armed personnel he didn't trust.

Hamdan could be held indefinitely as an enemy combatant, but the political explosion that option would touch off makes it all but untenable. In five months, he is likely to be repatriated to Yemen. What's bizarre is that even the release of a member of al Qaeda won't convince the anti-antiterror movement of the legitimacy of military commissions.

And in a second editorial about the Hamdan trial, The Times retorted that “we have found ourselves scratching our heads in anguished confusion about what, exactly, President Bush is trying to achieve by trashing the Constitution at Guantánamo Bay”:

For years, Mr. Bush and his supporters have been telling the world that it is necessary to hold prisoners without charges, to abuse them in ways most civilized nations consider torture, and to deny them basic human rights because of the serious threat they pose to America. …

The administration considered Mr. Hamdan such a priority that it took his case all the way to the Supreme Court, insisting Mr. Bush had the power to hold anyone he deemed an enemy combatant for as long as he wanted under any conditions he wanted. Mr. Hamdan’s trial was the first by a military commission in Guantánamo. …

Mr. Hamdan, however, is hardly a high value target. The comedian Stephen Colbert captured the absurdity of the proceedings perfectly on Thursday night when he called the trial “the most historic session of traffic court ever.” [video link added by The Stiletto.]

These enemy combatants and terrorists are being represented pro bono by some of the top white shoe firms in the US, so it is patently dishonest for The Times to portray the military tribunal as a kangaroo court. If you’ve ever been to traffic court – everyone’s presumed guilty and no one is proven innocent, because the judge always accepts the police officer’s testimony while dismissing the defendant’s – you know what a kangaroo court is really like. The Stiletto is sure Hamdan would have gotten a stiffer sentence in traffic court, so let’s dispense with this whole military tribunal rigmarole and just move the remaining proceedings to traffic court.