Say you've got a house you want to flip. This house is a pretty sorry affair, and it's going to take a lot of contractors, time, energy, and investment to get it up to housing market snuff (let's also say, since we're playing hypotheticals anyway, that we're taking 2006 housing market). However, you've got a lot of money, and you're busy with a lot of other commitments, so you drop a huge stack of cash in the middle of the living room of this house. You're not exactly sure how much it's going to cost to flip this thing, so you estimated high and you're going to trust that the various contractors working on this house will divvy up this stack of cash equitably and it will be put to good use. A very long time goes by and things aren't really getting done and you're afraid you're going to lose money on this deal. You decide to pull out, and go back to retrieve what's left of that pile of cash. Unfortunately, although half seems to have been spent on rebuilding the house (with debatable results), the other half has disappeared with no real explanation... almost as if it was stolen! This is exactly how the Bush administration and the Pentagon approached rebuilding in Iraq after the U.S. invasion, and that is exactly how it turned out.

    In 2003, the Bush administration decided to flood Iraq with money, U.S. dollars, to expedite reconstruction projects and other rebuilding, which was (they hoped) going to greatly decrease the amount of time we needed to militarily occupy the country. According to a recent LATimes article, they found out that they could pack, "$2.4 billion worth of shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills" into a single C-130 Hercules cargo plane. So they did it. They did it 21 times over the course of the next year or more until they'd airlifted $12 billion in U.S. currency to the Middle Eastern nation. There has never been, according to U.S. authorities, a bigger cash airlift. Although the money was stored on various bases and even in a vault beneath one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces, there was little time and fairly few staff to keep accurate financial records. At several points, officials said, millions of dollars were simply stuffed in gunny sacks and transported by pick-up to Iraqi contractors. because of the incredible graft and corruption by many of the reconstruction and security contractors, particularly in the early days after the invasion, it's been difficult to accurately say where all of the money went. However, the Pentagon has been unable to account for $6.6 billion of the total amount, and now federal investigators are conceding that the money may have been stolen. Not hard to believe, considering.

     Though some U.S. contractors are accused of filtering tens of millions in graft, most of the blame by federal auditors is laid at the feet of Iraqi officials. That said, Iraq has already threatened to take the U.S. to international court of over the missing funds. Under a 2004 agreement, U.S. officials were to safeguard the enormous amount of cash, which makes it our responsibility. The Pentagon has contended that, with enough time, they could track down receipts and other documentation for the missing funds. However, in the past six years, the search has proved mostly fruitless. It looks like our little experiment with flipping the country of Iraq went over-funded, under-produced, and taxpayers may still need to foot the bill.