Yet another failure in Iraq by the Bush team. It's no wonder the local population in Iraq is suspicious of the the US because the money being spent over there is going to the likes of Halliburton and Bechtel instead of making its way into the hands of regular Iraqis. These people need real jobs and any administration talk about "they're on their way" has to be viewed suspiciously considering how often they have lied about just about everything in Iraq.
As little as 27 cents of every dollar spent on Iraq's reconstruction has actually filtered down to projects benefiting Iraqis, a statistic that is prompting the State Department to fundamentally rethink the Bush administration's troubled reconstruction effort.
One senior U.S. official familiar with reconstruction suggested as little as a quarter of the funding is reaching its intended projects.
Too much money has been filtered through major American businesses such as Halliburton Co. and Bechtel Corp. on large-scale electricity, water and oil infrastructure projects, and not nearly enough has gone to smaller, more decentralized reconstruction efforts that could be handled by Iraqis, they say.
In a report released a week ago, Iraq Revenue Watch, a watchdog group funded by liberal philanthropist George Soros, analyzed contracts worth more than $5 million that have been funded with Iraqi oil revenue over the past year. Of the 39 contracts so far, U.S. and British firms have received 85 percent of the value, the group said. Iraqi firms have received 2 percent.
On top of that, bribery has become "just the reality of doing business," said Jim Mitchell, a spokesman for the inspector general of the Coalition Provisional Authority. [Chris' note: It is a violation of US federal law for any American company to participate in bribery anywhere in the world. Just ask Cheney about Halliburton operations in Nigeria.]
