Who wants to be liberated next?

Well the $18.4 billion in reconstruction money will run out by the end of the year. The White House says they're going to do a lot of hard work this summer and get the basic services like electricity, water and sewage treatment back up to pre-war levels. Good luck with that if they're counting on the private companies they hired to get the work done. Lucky $1 billion cost-plus contract holder Parsons Inc. for instance, is finally being fired after after coming up 86% short on completion of constructing medical facilities. They were supposed to build 142 primary health care centers. They're about to run out of money and they've only built 20.

The auditor overseeing the reconstruction effort hopes it's an anomaly but can't rule out more such failures.

He said, ...that U.S. reconstruction overseers overwhelmingly have neglected to keep running track of the remaining costs of each project, leaving it unclear until the end whether the costs are equal to the budget.

All the private companies received cost plus overrun contracts with guaranteed profits and lax performance provisions. We'll be hearing about more of these failures, but probably not until December.

The Army corp of engineers are not doing smuch better on their own projects. So far they have "renovated or built 3,000 schools, upgraded 13 hospitals and created hundreds of border forts and police stations." However they only delivered "300 of 425 promised electricity projects and 49 of 136 water and sanitation projects." I might note Iraqi doctors cite contaminated water as the prime cause of infant mortality.

I find this magnitude of graft and incompetency just stunning. I don't whether to laugh, cry, vomit or just go bang my head against the wall. As Naeema al-Gasseer the World Health Organization's representative for Iraq said, "We're not sending the right message here. That's affecting people's expectations and people's trust, I must say."

I'd say it's an outright betrayal of everything we promised. What a great selling point for spreading freedom and democracy. They oughta start lining up at the White House door just begging to be liberated, any minute now.