With newspaper reports today suggesting that a pullout [or even a phased one] from Iraq is on the cards in the very near future one has to wonder where that leaves the people and country of Iraq. Abandoned it would seem - and confronting a civil war. That the war is said to have cost the US some US$191 billion [yes! - you read correctly] is one thing. The death and carnage is another. It is almost now beyond doubt that the US - and therefore Australia and Great Britain as willing members of the coalition of the willing - had absolutely no plan, let alone an idea, what would happen once that dreadful war of "shock and awe" got underway and the military forces arrived at the gates of Baghdad. Time magazine has an interesting article on its investigation of how the US embarked on and undertook this entire Iraq debacle
Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend. Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades. Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...
Comments