Why No Transparency in Iraq Oil Audit?

This past week, two senior members of the Senate Armed Service Committee -- chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) and former chairman John Warner (R-VA) -- penned a letter demanding a full audit of how the Iraqi government was spending its oil revenue.

Absent from the note was the name of the committee's top Republican, John McCain. Why? An aide with knowledge of the process said the presumptive GOP nominee was busy on the campaign trail at the time when the decision was made to ask the Government Accountability Office to look into the uneven disbursement of oil monies. Since then, however, McCain has not made an attempt to put his political weight behind the matter, the aide said.

McCain's decision underscores the difficulty with which he is forced to handle U.S. policy on Iraq: Admission that political progress has been stagnant contradicts the notion that the war has had recent successes, a notion McCain has vocally championed.

In fact, this past April, the senator used the "equitable" sharing of oil revenues as evidence that the country was making progress towards stability. [for more click on the heading]