Cui bono? The $7.05 switches that cost the US $900, and the $80 PVC elbows, and ..., was a system that was working as designed. :-(

Thanks for the linky.

The report answers something that I had wondered about for a long time:

Answering “What happened to the money?” requires first answering “What money?” There were three primary sources of funding for the rebuilding program: Iraqi, U.S., and international. During the first year of reconstruction, the Coalition Provisional Authority obligated and expended money drawn from the Development Fund for Iraq. Comprising revenues from the sale of Iraq’s oil and gas assets, the DFI was established in 2003 as an Iraqi account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The stream of revenue flowing into the DFI account previously funded the United Nations Oil For Food Program.

During its existence, the CPA controlled over $23.4 billion in Iraqi funds composed of $20.7 billion from the DFI and $2.7 billion in seized and vested assets. In 2003 and 2004, more than $10 billion in DFI cash was flown to Baghdad on U.S. military aircraft in the form of massive shrink-wrapped bundles of $100 bills stored on large pallets. This money was not managed particularly well, either by the CPA or its successors, as SIGIR audits revealed. Iraqi funding, including DFI expenditures and Iraqi capital budgets, amounts to the largest single tranche of spending on rebuilding efforts over the past nine years (about $146 billion).1

(Grr. I've come to hate sentence constructions like this (which seem to have become a pandemic recently). Don't waste my time telling me what something wasn't, tell me what it was.)

The reporting during the war often talked about this money as if it was US taxpayer money that just walked off. It seems that it was actually Iraqi money. That probably explains why nobody at the CPA seemed to care if it walked off.

Cheers,
Scott.