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 the first time in my visits to Iraq, our delegation was able to drive - not fly by helicopter-- from the airport to downtown Baghdad," said McCain after a trip to Iraq. "The government of Prime Minister Maliki is delivering on its promise to deploy Iraqi brigades to Baghdad. A plan to share oil revenues equitably among all Iraqis has been approved by Iraqi ministers and is pending approval by the parliament. After an important visit by Prime Minister Maliki to Ramadi in Sunni dominated Anbar, he promised a new policy to allay Sunni fears that they will be excluded from sharing in the political future of the country... These welcome developments have occurred even though only three of our five additional brigades have arrived."

Now, as concern grows that the government is not capitalizing on its oil, McCain is staying on the sidelines. His office did not return requests for comment.

In the letter, Levin and Warner expressed unease with the fact that, in 2006, the Iraqi government spent only 22 percent of the oil money set aside for reconstruction.

"We believe that it has been overwhelmingly U.S. taxpayer money that has funded Iraq reconstruction over the last five years," they wrote, "despite Iraq earning billions of dollars in oil revenue over that time period that have ended up in non-Iraqi banks."

The issue of Iraq's oil is emblematic of the country's sectarian fissures and political stalemate. The government, in effect, has the oil money at its disposal. But, analysts say, it is reluctant to send it to provinces or agencies that are not religiously or politically aligned. Skullduggery may, of course, account for wasted dollars, but so to does concern over being accused of corruption.

"The funding tends to go disproportionately to places that are either Shiite or other are places where Malaki's area holds sway," said Steve Biddle, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "Another part of [why the money is not being spent properly] is that the Iraqis, in response to initial concerns to Americans about corruption, set up a special commission designed to investigate corruption cases. The consequence of this is that Iraqi government officials are terrified of the commission. In Saddam's Iraq, if a government commission went after you it meant you were going to a gulag... a lot of Iraqi rank and file, as a result, don't want to do anything at all. Any money they spend they thin carries the risk of being thrown in jail forever. And it has created a huge disincentive to action. Period."