"Anticorruption cases concerning the Ministry of Education have been particularly ineffective….[T]he Ministry of Water Resources…is effectively out of the anticorruption fight with little to no apparent effort in trying to combat fraud…."

That's not the assessment of some goo-goo liberal watchdog. It's the judgment of a team of officials in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, surveying what it considers endemic corruption throughout the Iraqi government. The Nation's David Corn obtained a copy of the team's 70-plus page report, which finds that militias and criminal gangs have turned government ministries into private sectarian fiefdoms.

The report, which was drafted by a team of U.S. embassy officials, surveys the various Iraqi ministries. "The Ministry of Interior is seen by Iraqis as untouchable by the anticorruption enforcement infrastructure of Iraq," it says. "Corruption investigations in Ministry of Defense are judged to be ineffectual." The study reports that the Ministry of Trade is "widely recognized as a troubled ministry" and that of 196 corruption complaints involving this ministry merely eight have made it to court, with only one person convicted.

The Ministry of Health, according to the report, "is a sore point; corruption is actually affecting its ability to deliver services and threatens the support of the government." Investigations involving the Ministry of Oil have been manipulated, the study says, and the "CPI and the [Inspector General of the ministry] are completely ill-equipped to handle oil theft cases." There is no accurate accounting of oil production and transportation within the ministry, the report explains, because organized crime groups are stealing oil "for the benefit of militias/insurgents, corrupt public officials and foreign buyers."

Some of the biggest offenders are, unsurprisingly, in the ministries controlling the Iraqi security forces. The Ministry of Interior, in charge of the Iraqi police, "has been co-opted by organized criminals who act through the 'legal enterprise' to commit crimes such as kidnapping, extortion, bribery, etc." At the Ministry of Defense, there's "a shocking lack of concern" over disappearance of over $850 million from the Iraqi Army's procurement budget in an apparent theft. (That about rivals the alleged theft by Ayad Allawi's defense minister, Hazem Shaalan.)

Corn writes that "you can practically see the authors pulling out their hair" over the damage documented in the report. Visitors to Baghdad familiar with the U.S.'s diplomatic attempts to stanch the official illegality won't be surprised. In March, I attended a briefing in Baghdad with Boots Poliquin, the U.S. embassy's deadly-earnest top anti-corruption official, who explained with evident disappointment that an Iraqi public law called Article 136B allows any ministry to "essentially stop" a corruption investigation. The report Corn obtained is most likely authored by Poliquin's shop, the Office of Accountability and Transparency, and it promises to cast a long shadow over any upbeat assessment given by Ambassador Ryan Crocker next month about the ability of the Iraqi government to actually, well, govern.

"The country is not a one-size-fits-all, a one-description-fits-all. It's much more a mosaic," the U.S. official in charge of training Iraqi security forces, Lieutenant General James Dubik, told military analysts today on a conference call. And he's got a point. So maybe it's fitting that the Pentagon's last two quarterly reports show all sorts of unexplained shifts -- even on the exact same pieces of data.

Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, told reporters at a National Security Network briefing today that the Pentagon reports can't keep their stories straight when it comes to the incidences of sectarian attacks and murders. Take two most recent reports, from March (pdf) and June (pdf).

On page 17 of both reports is a graph entitled "Sectarian Murders and Incidents" that tallies sectarian attacks by month. The March report lists that, for instance, December 2006 hosted over 900 sectarian "incidents" resulting in just under 1300 murders. But in the June report, the numbers shade up: December 2006 hosted over 1000 incidents yielding over 1600 murders.

Similarly, the March report listed a decline of about 150 sectarian murders from September to October 2006. But the June report changes that to an increase of nearly 400 murders during that same time period. Speaking generally, the June report makes 2006 look like a more deadly, sectarian year than did its March predecessor, but there are exceptions: April 2006 had 700 sectarian murders in the March report, but somehow, that figure drops to under 400 murders in the June report.

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Hot on the heels of the GAO report today suggesting the Bush administration is playing fast and loose with the Iraq benchmarks comes a letter to Congress urging scrutiny over how the administration is quantifying allegedly-improving security in Iraq. The liberal National Security Network writes today that "US officials have recently claimed that violence is down and specifically civilian deaths in Iraq have decreased. No evidence has been provided to the public that supports this claim."

The letter -- signed by former Clinton Defense Secretary Bill Perry, Princeton's Anne-Marie Slaughter, former Clinton and Bush 43 counterterrorism aide Rand Beers, and six other security wonks -- urges disclosure of statistics underlying the claim. "Not only is accurate reporting the key to sound policy, it is also the responsibility of government to those who have lost loved ones to this horrific conflict."

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First was the war over the benchmarks. Now there's the war for whose benchmarks really mark the benches.

In May, Congress mandated that the Government Accountability Office produce an assessment of whether the U.S. and the Iraqi government are meeting eighteen indicators of political, economic and military progress in Iraq. Unlike the analysis produced by the Bush administration -- preliminarily delivered in July, and to be finalized by September 15 -- the GAO study has to give a stark yes-or-no answer for the achievement of each so-called benchmark. Sure enough, a draft of the study, leaked to The Washington Post, finds that only three of the eighteen benchmarks have been met -- while the July White House assessment said about half of them had been.

As the Post reports, the GAO report casts doubt on whether progress is being achieved in several of the areas the Bush administration has highlighted. July's White House report, for example, cited "an overall decrease in sectarian violence" in Baghdad. The GAO, by contrast, finds that "the average number of daily attacks against civilians remained about the same over the last six months; 25 in February versus 26 in July." The Iraqi security forces remain dysfunctional: the GAO cites pervasive sectarianism in the Iraqi Army units sent to Baghdad for the surge, while the White House called their performance "satisfactory."

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With the Pentagon's inspector general set to arrive in Iraq in a few weeks to personally investigate allegations of corruption in, among other places, the training of Iraqi security forces, it's worth remembering that suspicions of wrongdoing in the command led one officer to take his own life out of apparent shame. In a suicide note left on his bed in Baghdad, Lt. Colonel Ted Westhusing wrote, "I didn't volunteer to support corrupt, money grubbing contractors, nor work for commanders only interested in themselves." Westhusing, 44, killed himself on June 5, 2005.

Much about Westhusing's case remains a mystery. According to a definitive Los Angeles Times exploration of his death published in November 2005, the committed Christian and West Point graduate began working for the training command, known as MNTSC-I, in January of 2005. General David Petraeus, who now leads U.S. forces in Iraq, commanded MNTSC-I in 2004 and 2005. Westhusing's primary responsibility was to oversee a private company, USIS, which held a $79 million contract to train Iraqi special forces, and Petraeus told him he had exceeded "lofty expectations."

In May, however, someone -- apparently a USIS contractor -- slipped him an anonymous four-page letter contending widespread corruption within the company and the command. Journalist Robert Bryce obtained the letter (pdf) earlier this year for a piece in the Texas Observer:

Recently I was told that USIS... is only missing 4 weapons. Now, we just spent the last 9 months with almost 200 weapons missing so I wondered how we went from 200 to 4. The missing weapons are common knowledge within the camp and no one seems to be trying to hide it. The take on it is that the Iraqis are stealing them and it is not our problem. This is not true. A lot of weapons were signed out by instructors and never returned. ...

Our Log guys have lost total control over what is issued. If you try to match up what USIS is charging the government, the inventory on camp and what has been issued to Iraqis it will not even be close.

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Last week, after IraqSlogger's Christina Davidson broke the news that Iyad Allawi has hired a GOP lobbying powerhouse to persuade the U.S. to back his efforts at becoming Iraqi prime minister again, we took a look at which other Iraqis have taken out Washington-based representation.

What we found was an imbalance: Allawi and the Kurds have taken out the lion's share of Iraq lobbying contracts, while the leading Sunni organizations -- the Iraqi Islamic Party and the broader coalition of which it's a member, the Tawafuq -- have comparatively modest arrangements. The "lobbyist" for the Tawafuq, in fact, told us that he had stopped doing any work on his informal contract, which he had taken on a "volunteer basis." That's just as well: the Tawafuq's rep, Mohammed Alomary, is based in Michigan, a far cry from the corridors of power.

Now, we've just learned that the Iraqi Islamic Party canceled its contract months ago with the Focus on Advocacy & Advancement of International Relations.

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It looks like Major John Cockerham might have some competition for his title as most-crooked contracting official in Iraq.

The New York Times reports that a plethora of criminal investigations, all part of a new Pentagon anti-corruption push, are open into what exactly happened to "weapons, supplies and other materiel" dispensed in that country as part of over $40 billion in reconstruction aid. And one of the investigations -- though it's maddeningly unclear as to what the charge even is -- centers around a former aide to General David Petraeus, now the commanding general in Iraq.

Contracting fraud in the effort to supply and equip Iraqi security forces, Afghan soldiers and U.S. troops is suspected to be immense. Over 70 cases are currently under investigation in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan, according to the paper, for contracts worth more that $5 billion. So far, investigators have uncovered evidence of upwards of $15 million in bribes.

One such case involves Lieutenant Colonel Levonda Joey Selph, a master logistics officer who worked with Petraeus when he commanded the effort to train and equip Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005. Petraeus has already commented that he considered the rapid preparation of Iraqi soldiers and police to be a greater priority than scrupulous bookkeeping. As yet, Petraeus is not suspected of any wrongdoing -- and indeed, even what Selph is suspected of having done is unclear. But here's what is: Selph ran a massive logistics operation, and one that was ripe for abuse.

That operation moved everything from AK-47s, armored vehicles and plastic explosives to boots and Army uniforms, according to officials who were involved in it. Her former colleagues recall Colonel Selph as a courageous officer who was willing to take substantial personal risks to carry out her mission and was unfailingly loyal to General Petraeus and his directives to move quickly in setting up the logistics operation.

“She was kind of like the Pony Express of the Iraqi security forces,” said Victoria Wayne, who was then deputy director of logistics for the overall Iraqi reconstruction program.

Still, Colonel Selph also ran into serious problems with a company she oversaw that failed to live up to a contract it had signed to carry out part of that logistics mission.

It is not clear exactly what Colonel Selph is being investigated for. Colonel Selph, reached by telephone twice on Monday, said she would speak to reporters later but did not answer further messages left for her.

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It's not just Barbour Griffith & Rogers, and it's not just Ayad Allawi. Ten different U.S. firms are registered through the Department of Justice's Foreign Agents Registration Act database as having active contracts with various Iraqi factions.

BGR isn't even making most of its Iraq-related money off Allawi: for the six-month period between January 1 and May 31, the Kurdistan Regional Government -- the political entity ruling the three Kurdish provinces of Iraq -- paid the firm $381,487.71 for its various services, which, from its mandatory reporting, includes a lot of phone calls to BRG President Bob Blackwill's old friend at the National Security Council, Meghan O'Sullivan.

A BGR lobbyist described as the point person on the Iraq contract, Loren Monroe, did not return TPMmuckraker's phone calls.

BGR is by a large margin the powerhouse firm representing Iraqi clients. Holding a contract that will be worth $100,000 come September 9 is the much smaller Focus on Advocacy and Advancement of International Relations, run by a certain Muthanna al-Hanooti out of Dearborn and Washington D.C. Since September 13, 2006, Hanooti has represented the Iraqi Islamic Party, the largest constituent part of the larger Sunni parliamentary bloc, known as the Tawafuq. In its filing, the IIP lists its "suggestions for how to make Iraq a success story for democracy" -- which include not arbitrarily detaining Sunnis and negotiating with "the Iraqi Armed Resistance (not foreign fighters)" -- but the IIP is further away from power than ever. Last week, Nouri al-Maliki unveiled a new governing coalition that left the IIP, the rest of the Tawafuq and another Sunni faction in the cold. Attempts to contact Hanooti were unsuccessful.

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Alleged billion dollar thief Hazem Shaalan isn't Ayad Allawi's only infamous friend. Allawi is also a close ally of the head of Iraq's largest intelligence service -- a man who takes his billions from Washington, not Baghdad.

On the ground in Baghdad is a sprawling intelligence operation called the Iraqi National Intelligence Service, or INIS. Only INIS isn't really "National" at all. To the great chagrin of the Maliki government, it's financed and controlled by the CIA. And its boss is a longtime Allawi friend and CIA asset, Muhammed Shahwani.

Who's Muhammed Shahwani? He's a former Iraqi military officer who, along with Allawi, helped plot a botched coup against Saddam Hussein in 1996. Despite the failure, the CIA considered him a valuable asset, largely on the strength of his considerable knowledge of Saddam's military apparatus. In his memoir, ex-CIA Director George Tenet writes that when Shahwani returned to Iraq as part of "the Agency-sponsored Iraqi paramilitary group known as 'the Scorpions'" he became "key to developing a strong network inside Iraq for the Agency."

As a result, Shahwani, a member of Allawi's Iraqi National Accord party, was an obvious choice to lead the CIA-created INIS. Throughout the Coalition Provisional Authority era and the Allawi regime that followed it, Shahwani was a reliable fixture -- so much so that when the 2005 election saw Allawi's government replaced by a Shiite coalition known as the United Iraqi Alliance, the agency decided that INIS was too valuable to hand over to the less-reliable UIA. (Concerns about sovereignty have their exceptions.) INIS had control over extensive files on Iraqis tied to the insurgency -- and many others not suspected of crimes -- and the UIA bristled when unable to get access to what it considered the rightful spoils of its electoral victory. "I prefer to call it the American Intelligence of Iraq, not the Iraqi Intelligence Service," a Shiite parliamentarian and militia commander told reporters Hannah Allam and Warren Strobel.

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How does Allawi pay for his lucrative contract with GOP lobbying powerhouse Barbour Griffith & Rogers? The obvious guess is that his old buddies at the CIA pay for him. But he may not need the agency's cash. One member of his coterie is suspected of participating in what an Iraqi public-corruption judge calls "possibly the largest robbery in the world" -- the theft of approximately $1 billion from the Iraqi treasury.

In mid-2004, Hazem Shaalan had it all: he had risen from being a small businessman in London before the war to becoming Ayad Allawi's defense minister. (Shaalan had been a member of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, but the relationship between Shaalan and Chalabi became acrimonious, with the INC accusing Shaalan of being a Baathist spy.) The defense ministry was Allawi's single biggest priority, as he owed his appointment -- made jointly by the U.S. and the United Nations -- to his promise of restoring stability to the insurgency-wracked country. Shaalan came through for him, fully backing the joint U.S.-Allawi decision to fight the Mahdi Army in the Shiite holy city of Najaf in August 2004.

But that wasn't all Shaalan did at the defense ministry.

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Christina Davidson at IraqSlogger, who broke the story that influential GOP lobbying firm Barbour Griffith & Rogers are promoting Iraqi parliamentarian Ayad Allawi to be the new prime minister, has another scoop. On Monday, BGR president Robert Blackwill -- President Bush's former Iraq coordinator at the White House -- signed a contract with Allawi worth $300,000 over six months to provide "strategic counsel" for the would-be-premier "before the US Government, Congress, media and others."

Reports Davidson:

The filings stipulate that Allawi is not supervised by, owned by, directed by, controlled by, financed by, or subsidized by any foreign government, foreign political party, or other foreign principal.

While BGR registers him as an individual, rather than as a political party, they do identify him as head of the Iraq National Accord, and indicate they will not only represent Allawi, but also "his moderate Iraqi colleagues."

Coming up: who are Allawi's "moderate Iraqi colleagues" -- and how can they afford such a boutique lobbying firm?

Now he tells us.

General Peter Pace became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2005, the first ever Marine to become senior military adviser to the president. Known as "Perfect Pete" inside the Pentagon, Pace was a consistent and steadfast supporter of the Iraq war. Throughout 2006, now considered something of a "lost year" in Iraq by war supporters, Pace painted a rosy picture of the war -- even describing it as going "very, very well" just weeks after the destruction of a major Shiite mosque sparked a new wave of intense sectarian fighting. Pace's boosterism cost him his job in June, when Defense Secretary Robert Gates declined to renominate him to another two-year term rather than face a grueling reconfirmation hearing.

Now that Pace is on his way out, though, he's singing a much different tune. The Los Angeles Times reports that Pace, following a recent trip to Iraq, will call for nearly half of the roughly 160,000 U.S. troops in Iraq to come home by 2008.

Administration and military officials say Marine Gen. Peter Pace is likely to convey concerns by the Joint Chiefs that keeping well in excess of 100,000 troops in Iraq through 2008 will severely strain the military. This assessment could collide with one being prepared by the U.S. commander in Iraq, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, calling for the U.S. to maintain higher troop levels for 2008 and beyond.

Petraeus is expected to support a White House view that the absence of widespread political progress in Iraq requires several more months of the U.S. troop buildup before force levels are decreased to their pre-buildup numbers sometime next year.

Pace's recommendations reflect the views of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who initially expressed private skepticism about the strategy ordered by Bush and directed by Petraeus, before publicly backing it.

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Barbour Griffith & Rogers has long been a powerhouse GOP lobbying firm. Now, apparently, American politics are just too small-time. BGR, according to a report by IraqSlogger's Christina Davidson, is trying to influence Iraqi politics as well.

BGR, the firm started by Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, has been promoting Ayad Allawi, the one-time Iraqi interim prime minister who over the weekend published an op-ed in the Washington Post calling for the parliamentary overthrow of current PM Nouri al-Maliki. The piece amounted to a trial balloon for American support for a second Allawi-led government, promising non-sectarianism and stability. Allawi has decades-old ties to the CIA, making him a known quantity to U.S. officials during a time of extreme frustration with Maliki.

But frustration alone doesn't get governments to fall. That's where BGR comes in. On August 17, the firm purchased the domain name Allawi-For-Iraq.com (the site's not yet live). Following publication of the op-ed, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) called on the Iraqi parliament to hold a no-confidence vote on Maliki. BGR circulated Levin's comments around Washington -- and particularly to Congressional staffers -- using the e-mail address DrAyadAllawi@Allawi-for-Iraq.com.

Yet BGR hasn't registered any affiliation with the ex-premier:

Allawi's relationship with BGR apparently is relatively new, however, because official Justice Department and Senate lobbyist tracking records provide no indication of the BGR-Allawi relationship.

BGR's Web site, which identifies dozens of BGR clients by name, makes no mention of Allawi.

But the firm's ties with Allawi perhaps shouldn't be so surprising. Among BGR's executives is Ambassador Bob Blackwill, who in 2004 served as the White House's Iraq coordinator. In that role, Blackwill was an enthusiastic booster of Allawi, helping manage the process that led to Allawi's selection by the U.S. and the U.N. as interim prime minister in advance of the dissolution of the Coalition Provisional Authority. After the 2005 elections in Iraq, Blackwill wrote a laudatory op-ed in The Wall Street Journal praising Allawi's strategy for crushing the insurgency: "Mr. Allawi's message is simple: Join us in building the new Iraq and accept its benefits or, if you support the insurgency, get ready to die."

As it happened, the strategy didn't live up to its promises. The elections knocked Allawi out of power, as his tenure ended up alienating a large swath of the majority Shiite population. His attempts at enlisting American support to return to office -- a perennial rumor in Washington
over the past two years -- have all fallen short. Evidently, though, Blackwill and BGR evidently think that the time is right to get the old gang back together.

After initially granting tepid support to the current Iraqi government during the current fracas, President Bush clarified yesterday in his speech to the VFW convention that he supports Maliki, whom he called "a good guy." We'll see how long that lasts.

Some distortions are so massive and so deliberate as to constitute outright lies. See if you can spot the dishonesty in this line in President Bush's speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars' national convention today:

U.S. forces have killed or captured an average of more than 1,500 al Qaeda terrorists and other extremists every month since January.

That "and other extremists" line sure does a lot of work here. No order of battle for the insurgency is available, but all credible estimates peg al-Qaeda in Iraq as by far the smallest contingent. One rough assessment, cited byThe New York Times last month, put AQI at possessing perhaps 5,000 fighters. Yet Bush suggested this morning that the U.S. has captured as many as 12,000 members of AQI so far this year.

Since the surge began, the U.S. has had between 17,000 and 23,000 Iraqis in custody each month, according to the Brookings Institution's Iraq Index (pdf). Last month, Ned Parker of the Los Angeles Times reported that of the 19,000 detainees in U.S. custody in Iraq, only 135 were foreigners -- the most likely indicator of membership in al-Qaeda. Military and intelligence veterans of the Iraq war typically say that determining Iraqi membership in AQI is extraordinarily difficult, and not something that lends itself particularly well to flat, quantitative statements.

No wonder the president picked the artful qualifier "and other extremists" to lard his presentation of who the U.S. is capturing in Iraq. It's impossible to disprove the statement, since it conceals precisely how many of the 1,500 monthly captures are in fact AQI. But an inability to disprove a statement doesn't ever make that statement true -- rather, that makes it gibberish.

If Major John Cockerham had only known Thomas Kontogiannis, maybe the whole sordid story would have turned out differently.

Cockerham was an Army contracting officer in Kuwait who, a criminal complaint alleges, is at the center of the largest corruption case yet to emerge from the Iraq war. It's a picaresque story involving crooked Kuwaiti and Emirati businessmen with codenames like "Mr. and Mrs. Pastry." In 2004 and 2005, according to the complaint, Cockerham, his wife and his sister, took $9.6 million in bribes, kept in safe-deposit boxes in a number of Persian-Gulf cities, in exchange for contracts for things like drinking water.

According to the Washington Post, the Cockerham family could be formally indicted as early as today. While investigators have only been able to locate $415,000 of the nearly $10 million the money that the Cockerhams allegedly took from their business partners, they face charges for money-laundering, bribery and conspiracy.

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On the one hand, there are benchmarks for Iraq, which can be subject to political manipulation. On the other hand, there's how life in Baghdad is actually lived by Iraqis. And a new report by IraqSlogger gives a glimpse at how tenuous that life can be.

IraqSlogger, the most comprehensive web resource on Iraq, put together a 95-page overview of a topic as ignored in the U.S. as it is crucial to Iraqis: the conditions of Baghdad's bridges. As the sprawling city is bisected by the Tigris river and the Army Canal, and belted at its south by the Diyala River, it's these access routes that determine how habitable the city is. Control of the area around a certain bridge by an insurgent group or militia is an invaluable resource.

The report costs $495. But we've been able to get a peek at what it contains. And sure enough, the bridges and their surrounding neighborhoods are battlegrounds for Iraq's multifaceted sectarian war. The spillover effect of unsafe areas nearby the bridges deeply influences Baghdad -- something that demonstrates just how much of a long shot Gen. David Petraeus' "population protection" strategy is.

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It wasn't long ago that the White House couldn't find anyone to become its "war czar," a brand-new position created in the spring by President Bush to oversee interagency coordination for Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, the war czar has an apparent under-czar.

Crack TPMmuckraker intern Tanvir Vahora noticed that President Bush announced today that Brigadier General Terry Wolff, a veteran (pdf) of the not-going-so-great U.S. training effort for the Iraqi military, will become Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Iraq and Afghanistan Policy Implementation. This is apparently a deputy position to War Czar Douglas Lute, a low-key figure whose most prominent role so far came when he lobbied the Senate in July to defeat Democratic antiwar amendments to the defense authorization bill. Most recently, Lute went on NPR to muse that it might be time to look at reimplementing the draft.

The difference between the two posts? Lute's title is Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan, and he outranks Wolff by two stars. The substantive difference between the two jobs is anyone's guess: neither actually makes policy on the wars, but implementing decisions made by the White House on the wars is the key responsibility of both positions.

If it turns out that Wolff is in fact Lute's replacement -- we've got calls out to the White House to see what exactly the story is, and we'll update you when we hear something -- the war czar job is losing prestige after only two months in existence. If not, don't expect many people to understand what Wolff's actual responsibilities will be, as Lute's aren't entirely clear. In any case, the proliferation of czars will surely lead to a complete turnaround in the war's fortunes.

Update: Just heard from a National Security Council press aide (who wouldn't give his name). Wolff is one of Lute's deputies. Lute hasn't lost his job. And it's still unclear what exactly Wolff's brief is.

Late Update: NSC spokesman Gordon Johndroe explains that Wolff's job will be to make sure that sub-cabinet officials across the interagency process in Washington and Baghdad follow through on Lute's demands to get Gen. David Petraeus and Amb. Ryan Crocker the resources they need.

The Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki takes support where it can get it. Over 160,000 U.S. troops guarantee its existence. It's cultivating an ever-closer bond with its fellow Shiites in Iran. But Italian criminals have to rank as rather unexpected allies.

The Iraqi government, a very shady Iraqi company and a group of Italian arms smugglers found a potent business opportunity in Iraq's black market for weapons, according to Italian investigators cited by the Associated Press. And that's a thriving trade. Just last week, a Government Accountability Office report found that the U.S. military's training command in Iraq couldn't account for 190,000 pistols and AK-47s sent to the Iraqi army and police in 2004 and 2005. Those guns, in all likelihood, made their way from the Iraqi security forces to the thriving black market in weaponry, where they're sure to be joined by many more: Iraqi soldiers are set to receive 100,000 M-16s and M-4s from the U.S., making their old AK-47s a new source of quick cash.

Enter the Interior Ministry, by far the most powerful bureaucracy in Iraq, and one that exists as an instrument of Shiite power.

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