The Great Iraq Swindle: : Rolling Stone

It's not just that the decision to invade Iraq was an ill considered, under planned clusterfuck, it's the post invasion craptacular planning and appalling contractor behaviour and costs that have undermined and made hollow George W's "mission accomplished" speech.

The below-linked article in Rolling Stone is a fantastic piece; not just because it outlines a number of cases of corrupt idiocy, but also the fact that it is really rather gonzo and therefore in the tradition of Hunter S- and "balance" be damned. These idiots are so corrupt they don't deserve the "objectivity" of a counter point.

They want shooting; the lot of them.

The Great Iraq Swindle: : Rolling Stone:

"Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam ­Hussein's Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush's war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity -- to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up."