When Scandals Collide  

I imagine Billmon's server logs always show visitors from Halliburton, especially when he starts ranting about Iraqi "reconstruction" money. Some things never change really - I always find these sort of stories remind me of a lot of ancient Roman history where governors were sent to the outer provinces and spent their time plundering as much as they could from the locals. I'm not sure Roman taxpayers got robbed as well though - so maybe the current US government is breaking some new ground.

I'm not sure why the vast corruption, waste and abuse in the Iraq "reconstruction" effort isn't getting more media coverage. The press used to love those kind of stories ($300 military toilet seats, $200 presidential haircuts, whatever.)

But these days, everybody just seems resigned to throwing enormous quantities of taxpayer money down whatever ratholes the Cheney administration and the Pentagon take a fancy to. And when some (but hardly all) of the money being wasted belongs to the Iraqi people -- well, empires have a habit of doing that, don't they?

But at least a few reporters still seem to be interested in documenting the absolutely mindboggling corruption in Iraq -- a Texas-sized boondoggle that began within days after the fall of Baghdad and continues right up to the present day.

A full accounting of these various swindles will, of course, never be made -- except maybe to God, if she can ever take a break from her war crimes deliberations. But it seems likely the Iraq money pit will set some kind of modern record: Instead of skimming some of the funds intended for real projects and diverting them to corrupt uses, the authors of this particular scandal appear to have taken a small fraction of the money intended for corruption and diverted it to legitimate projects.