Get there and the game is on.

Rolling Stone has an excellent article on the private contracting swindles that are rife in Iraq.

It serves as stunning indictment of the whole system that was put in place after the end of the War. It also does a good job of indicating the Bush Administration for betraying most of it’s professed principles.

First up, personal responsibility:

But before this milk-faced congressman can even think about suggesting that you give these millions back, you’ve got to cut him off. “So you won’t voluntarily look at this,” Van Hollen is mumbling, “and say, given what has happened in this project . . . ”

“No, sir, I will not,” you snap.

“. . . ‘We will return the profits.’ . . .”

“No, sir, I will not,” you repeat.

Next, Free Market Economics:

In the early days of the war, the idea of “competition” was a farce, with deals handed out so quickly that there was no possibility of making rational or fairly priced estimates. According to those familiar with the process, contracting agencies would request phony “bids” from several contractors, even though the winner had been picked in advance. “The losers would play ball because they knew that eventually it would be their turn to be the winner,” says Grayson.

Responsible, effective, educated Government:

In a much-ballyhooed example of favoritism, the White House originally installed a clown named Jim O’Beirne at the relevant evaluation desk in the Department of Defense. O’Beirne proved to be a classic Bush villain, a moron’s moron who judged applicants not on their Arabic skills or their relevant expertise but on their Republican bona fides; he sent a twenty-four-year-old who had never worked in finance to manage the reopening of the Iraqi stock exchange, and appointed a recent graduate of an evangelical university for home-schooled kids who had no accounting experience to manage Iraq’s $13 billion budget. James K. Haveman, who had served as Michigan’s community-health director under a GOP governor, was put in charge of rehabilitating Iraq’s health-care system and decided that what this war-ravaged, malnourished, sanitation-deficient country most urgently needed was . . . an anti-smoking campaign.

Fighting Terrorist and improving the Security Situation:

They were also given scads of money to buy expensive X-ray equipment and set up an advanced canine bomb-sniffing system, but they never bought the equipment. As for the dog, Ballard reported, “I eventually saw one dog. The dog did not appear to be a certified, trained dog.” When the dog was brought to the checkpoint, he added, it would lie down and “refuse to sniff the vehicles” — as outstanding a metaphor for U.S. contractor performance in Iraq as has yet been produced.

Fiscal Responsibility:

“Yes — $100 bills in plastic wrap,” Frank Willis, a former CPA official, acknowledged in Senate testimony about Custer Battles. “We played football with the plastic-wrapped bricks for a little while.”

This was just the tip of the iceberg.  The article is worth more then a look.

The author’s complete lack of objectivity is understandable, the article paints a disturbing picture.  Every day we’re told that we are rebuilding Iraq, delivering the gift of democracy, but it appear apparent that instead we’ve created a playground for the nepotism, the size of a country.

And the Bush Administration figures blithely quip that history will find them in the right.  Except history will find that we defrauded Americans while killing Iraqis, and covered it all up with lies and down-home drawls.

Somehow, this kind of behavior is supposed to indear not only the Iraqis but the whole Middle East to America.  Like fuck it will.  What this article shows to even the most obtuse is that while we’re fighting them over there, we’re also robbing the American people.  And we’re not doing item one to bring the war to an end.   Even fifty years later, we wouldn’t have rebuilt the country.