Today’s hearing is one of the most important that we will have this year.

President Bush has made Iraq our nation’s top foreign policy priority. We all know that has meant extraordinary sacrifices for our troops and their families. Over 3,800 of our soldiers have made the ultimate sacrifice in Iraq and another 28,000 have been wounded. And we have already spent over $450 billion on the war, with hundreds of billions more still to come.

The Iraq war is the number one issue in all our congressional districts and the issue we have spent the most time debating here in Congress.

Most of our attention has been focused on military questions. Is the surge working? Can we reduce the number of troops? Should we set a redeployment date?

Those are all important questions but they aren’t the only ones that matter. As General Petraeus has observed: “there is no military solution to a problem like that in Iraq.”

Political reconciliation is the key to achieving lasting peace in Iraq. And one of the keys to political reconciliation is combating corruption.

That’s why we are holding today’s hearing. An honest assessment of corruption in Iraq will provide insight into whether political progress is possible.

We are very fortunate that David Walker, the Comptroller General of the General Accountability Office, and Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, will share their expertise with us this morning.

And I want to give special thanks to Judge Radhi Hamza al-Radhi for agreeing to testify.

Judge Radhi was the Commissioner of Iraq’s Commission on Public Integrity. He was appointed to this post by Ambassador Paul Bremer and his job was to identify and prosecute corruption in Iraq.

Judge Radhi knows too well the horrors of life under Saddam Hussein. He was one of Saddam’s torture victims. And he never hesitated when our government asked him to take the dangerous job of leading the fight against corruption in Iraq.

Christopher Griffith, the Senior Advisor to the U.S. Office of Accountability and Transparency, told our Committee that Judge Radhi is “the most honest Government of Iraq official that I have met in my 21 months in the country.”

Another senior Embassy official told us that Judge Radhi has a reputation as “courageous, honest, and effective.”

From everything I can tell, Judge Radhi did exactly what we asked the Iraqis to do. He stood up for freedom, he stood up for democracy, and he stood up for honest government.

And now he finds himself without a country. Judge Radhi is under attack by the Maliki government and he and his family are the targets of serious and persistent death threats. Thirty-one of Judge Radhi’s employees and 12 of their family members have been assassinated. He can’t return to Iraq and is seeking asylum in the United States.

Judge Radhi will tell us there is an epidemic of corruption in Iraq. While he served as the head of the Commission on Public Integrity, he opened 3,000 corruption cases. He found extensive corruption throughout the government, especially in the Ministries of Defense, Interior, and Oil.

In all, his efforts identified $18 billion dollars — a staggering sum — lost to corruption.

Judge Radhi will tell us that corruption is undermining political reconciliation, turning ordinary Iraqis against the government, and fueling the insurgency.

The Maliki government is our ally in Iraq. But we need to ask: Is the Maliki government too corrupt to succeed?

And if the Maliki government is corrupt, we need to ask whether we can in good conscience continue to sacrifice our blood and tax dollars to prop up his regime.

These are important questions, but they are questions that Secretary Rice and the State Department do not want us to raise.

For last several weeks, the Committee staff have been interviewing the State Department officials in charge of anticorruption efforts in Iraq. What we have learned is that these efforts appear to be in a state of complete disarray. The Committee’s investigation has revealed that the anticorruption efforts are dysfunctional, underfunded, and a low priority.

The officials we interviewed told us — on the record — that the State Department has no coordinated strategy for fighting corruption. At key meetings of the Embassy’s Anticorruption Working Group, almost no one shows up. One official told us: “I would like to be able to say that we’ve done quite a bit in this area, but unfortunately, we have not.”

Another official, Judge Arthur Brennan, the former Director of the Office of Accountability and Transparency at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, said: “I think Ambassador Crocker was serious about going forward on this, but I don’t think everybody is serious about it, and if they are serious about it, then somebody else should have been doing their job.”

Incredibly, Secretary Rice directed these officials not to answer any questions about the extent of corruption in Iraq and its effect on political reconciliation and the insurgency. Her position is that all information that reflects poorly on the Maliki government is classified.

At one point, my staff asked an official whether he agreed with a public statement of Secretary Rice praising the anticorruption efforts of the Iraqi Interior Ministry. The official told us: “I cannot discuss this in an open forum.”

The State Department even retroactively classified memos about corruption in Iraq after the Committee requested them.

These efforts to silence debate are an absolute embarrassment.

My staff prepared a memorandum that summarizes both what these officials told us about the state of the U.S. anticorruption efforts and what they could not tell us about the state of corruption in Iraq. Without objection, I will make this memorandum part of today’s hearing record.

Sometimes this Committee breaks down along party lines during hearings. I hope that won’t be the case today.

Whether one supports or opposes the President’s policy, we can’t ignore the reality of corruption in Iraq. And we can’t ignore the reality that corruption is undermining the political progress our troops are fighting and dying for.

If we are going to invest more lives and billions more dollars in Iraq, we need to know whether there is the political will in Iraq to succeed. That’s why today’s hearing is so essential.