That the Americans have spent untold billions of dollars on and in relation to the Iraq and Afghan wars is already known. Less known is the waste of money which has occurred.
First up, from "How the American Taxpayer Got Plucked in Iraq" on TomDispatch:
"As a Foreign Service Officer with a 20-year career in the State Department, and as part of the George W. Obama global wars of terror, I was sent to play a small part in the largest nation-building project since the post-World War II Marshall Plan: the reconstruction of Iraq following the American invasion of 2003. My contractor colleagues and I were told to spend money, lots of money, to rebuild water and sewage systems, fix up schools, and most of all, create an economic base so wonderful that Iraqis would turn away from terrorism for a shot at capitalism. Shopping bags full of affirmation would displace suicide vests.
Through a process amply illustrated below, in my neck of rural Iraq all this lofty sounding idealism translated into putting millions of dollars into building a chicken-processing plant. It would, so the thinking went, push aside the live-chickens-in-the-marketplace system that Iraqis had used for 5,000 years, including 4,992 years without either the Americans or al-Qaeda around. It did not work, for all sorts of reasons illustrated in the story below. We did have great ambitions, however, and even made a video to celebrate opening day. Don't miss the sign at the very the beginning thanking us Americans for "the rehabilitation of [the] massacre of poultry." We sure paid for the sign, but the quality of the proofreading gives you an idea of how much thought went into the whole affair."
From the Wall Street Journal:
"The internal records of a congressionally mandated panel that reported staggering estimates of wasteful U.S. wartime spending will remain sealed to the public until 2031, officials confirmed, as the panel closed its doors on Friday.
The Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan was established by Congress in 2008 and spent three years probing more than $206 billion the U.S. government spent on contracts and grants during a decade of conflict.
In a final, 240-page report issued in late August, the panel estimated that the U.S. had wasted or misspent between $31 billion and $60 billion contracting for services."
First up, from "How the American Taxpayer Got Plucked in Iraq" on TomDispatch:
"As a Foreign Service Officer with a 20-year career in the State Department, and as part of the George W. Obama global wars of terror, I was sent to play a small part in the largest nation-building project since the post-World War II Marshall Plan: the reconstruction of Iraq following the American invasion of 2003. My contractor colleagues and I were told to spend money, lots of money, to rebuild water and sewage systems, fix up schools, and most of all, create an economic base so wonderful that Iraqis would turn away from terrorism for a shot at capitalism. Shopping bags full of affirmation would displace suicide vests.
Through a process amply illustrated below, in my neck of rural Iraq all this lofty sounding idealism translated into putting millions of dollars into building a chicken-processing plant. It would, so the thinking went, push aside the live-chickens-in-the-marketplace system that Iraqis had used for 5,000 years, including 4,992 years without either the Americans or al-Qaeda around. It did not work, for all sorts of reasons illustrated in the story below. We did have great ambitions, however, and even made a video to celebrate opening day. Don't miss the sign at the very the beginning thanking us Americans for "the rehabilitation of [the] massacre of poultry." We sure paid for the sign, but the quality of the proofreading gives you an idea of how much thought went into the whole affair."
From the Wall Street Journal:
"The internal records of a congressionally mandated panel that reported staggering estimates of wasteful U.S. wartime spending will remain sealed to the public until 2031, officials confirmed, as the panel closed its doors on Friday.
The Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan was established by Congress in 2008 and spent three years probing more than $206 billion the U.S. government spent on contracts and grants during a decade of conflict.
In a final, 240-page report issued in late August, the panel estimated that the U.S. had wasted or misspent between $31 billion and $60 billion contracting for services."
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