The shipment of laptop computers that arrived in Iraq’s main seaport in February was a small but important part of the U.S. military’s mission to win hearts and minds. What happened afterward is a tale of good intentions mugged by Iraqi reality.
The computers — 8,080 in all, worth $1.8 million — were bought for schoolchildren in Babil, modern-day Babylon, a gift of the U.S. taxpayers. Only they became mired for months in customs at the port, Umm Qasr, stalled by bureaucracy or venality, or some combination of the two. And then they were gone.
Corruption is so rampant in Iraq — and U.S. reconstruction efforts so replete with their own mismanagement — that the fate of the computers could have ended as an anecdote in a familiar, if disturbing trend. Iraq, after all, ranks above only Sudan, Myanmar, Afghanistan and Somalia on Transparency International’s annual corruption index.
But the U.S. military commander in southern Iraq, Maj. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, was clearly furious. Even if the culprits are not exactly known, the victims are: Iraqi children and U.S. taxpayers. He issued a rare and stinging public rebuke of a government that the United States hopes to treat as an equal, strategic partner — flawed, perhaps, but getting better.
In a statement, he demanded an investigation into the actions of “a senior Umm Qasr official,” who, even now, has not been identified.
The disclosure embarrassed the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who, in the middle of a protracted political fight to win a second term, could hardly have welcomed the headlines.
“They are stealing the computers of students,” the newspaper Al Nasiriya declared, voicing a populist outrage at the Iraqi government that is becoming fairly common.
It also put the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad in a bind.
Diplomats in Iraq, like their counterparts in Afghanistan, have…