Ranked 175th worldwide out of 178 countries, Iraq has only fallen on the Corruption Perceptions Index as the war in Iraq has continued. While not ranked before the ouster of Saddam Hussein, Iraq is now perceived as less corrupt than only three countries.
"The corruption has been inherited from the previous regime and increased during the last two years because of the weakness of the state," former interim oil minister Ibrahim Baher al-Uloom told the Monitor in 2005. Since then, Iraq's corrupt and ineffective power structure has been documented in numerous articles.
Today, as the US State Department's 2010 Investment Climate Statement puts it, "corruption in all areas remains a significant problem."
