The Jackal's Feast

Blood And Gravy II:
The Jackal's Feast Goes On
By Chris Floyd
10-26-6

The picture below (from the New York Times) speaks most eloquently on the essence of the Bush Regime's brutal, grubby Babylonian Conquest: fat mercenaries guarding the construction of yet another prison.

The picture comes from a story on the "overhead costs" of reconstruction projects, based on a report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, who found astonishing amounts of waste and cost overruns by the crony contractors who came to feast on the carcass that Bush killed for them. Two main points emerge from the report.

First, that the IG's catalogue of gouging, feather-bedding and other profitable forms of war-profiteering is by no means complete, because "the United States has not properly tracked how much such expenses have taken from the $18.4 billion of taxpayer-financed reconstruction approved by Congress two years ago." In fact, the IG's office was only able to examine $1.3 billion of the contracts.

In other words, as oft reported here (and here and here), much of that money has simply disappeared -- into corporate coffers, into copious baksheesh for the Bush-backed Iraqi government, into kickbacks for Congressional vultures, and doubtless into slush funds both for covert ops (including perhaps the Bushists' deliberate fomenting of terrorism and arming of militias) and domestic politics. We are most likely seeing the fruits of some of this blood money wash up on American screens at this very moment, as the GOP's last-ditch "Smear and Fear" campaign goes into hyperdrive.

The second salient point is the fact that most of this "overhead" is not going toward security costs. Apologists for the Dear Leader's war crime have been quick to answer any criticism of the woeful dearth of "reconstruction" -- and the fact that the Iraqi people now have lower levels of electricity, fuel, health care, sanitation, etc. than before the invasion -- by blaming the colossal waste and fraud on the insurgents. But the Inspector General -- appointed by the Bush Administration itself -- tells us that the war-crime apologists are dead wrong: