FINANCIAL TIMES: Eight days after the invasion of Iraq on March 19 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy defence secretary and a leading proponent of the war, told a Congressional committee: “We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.”
A decade later, that assessment could hardly have turned out to be more wrong.
The US has overwhelmingly borne the brunt of both the military and reconstruction costs, spending at least $138bn on private security, logistics and reconstruction contractors, who have supplied everything from diplomatic security to power plants and toilet paper… (more)
SUBJECT: We can think of a lot better uses for that money as well as a lot of lives that otherwise would have been saved.
