US:Former US civilian administrator in Iraq Paul Bremer has admitted that he made mistakes in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion but defended the decision to drive former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party out of public service as "a good plan poorly implemented".
Mr Bremer, who left Iraq in June 2004, was testifying before a congressional committee investigating waste, fraud and abuse in the reconstruction of Iraq. Democrats suggested that some of the billions of dollars shipped from the US could have found its way into the hands of insurgents who then targeted American troops.
Stuart Bowen, an inspector general who audited the reconstruction effort, told the committee that Mr Bremer's officials distributed almost $9 billion in Iraqi oil revenues without proper controls to determine where it was going. Most of the money was shipped in cash from the US, shrink-wrapped and loaded on to wooden palettes aboard military aircraft.
House oversight committee chairman said that 363 tonnes of cash were flown to Iraq in the largest shipments of cash ever authorised by the federal reserve. "Who in their right mind would send 363 tonnes of cash into a war zone? But that's exactly what our government did," Mr Waxman said.
Mr Bremer said the cash was shipped over at the request of the Iraqi finance minister in advance of the US handover of sovereignty to an Iraqi government.
"He said: 'I am concerned that I will not have the money to support the Iraqi government expenses for the first couple of months after we are sovereign. We won't have the mechanisms in place, I won't know how to get the money here'. So these shipments were made at the explicit request of the Iraqi minister of finance to forward-fund government expenses, a perfectly, seems to me, legitimate use of his money," Mr Bremer said.
He said he was not aware of any money being diverted to insurgents but said in a country with no functioning banking system, normal accounting practices were impossible.
His administration never had enough funding, materials or employees to do its job properly as the interim government of Iraq, he said, but he defended his decision to disband the Iraqi military and to remove former members of the Baath party from government jobs. The Iraqi army had effectively ceased to exist after the invasion, he said, adding that Iraq's Kurds would have seceded had the Iraqi army stayed intact.
Mr Bremer said he intended to remove only the top 1 per cent of Baath Party members but Iraqi officials implemented the policy in a way that saw many lower-level government employees losing their jobs.