From there "I shouldn't be surprised about this, but my mind is blown nonetheless" department comes this month's Rolling Stone feature story about the tremendous government waste in Iraq. The source of this waste is government contractors, who are given no-bid contracts independent of their qualifications. (A company called Custer Battles was awarded a $15 million contract, despite being in business for only a year, thanks to Mike Battles' political connections.)

Companies like KBR (formerly a Halliburton subsidiary) and Bechtel charged the government for services it didn't offer, and overcharged it for constructing shoddy buildings that were inhabitable. This is due largely to the "cost-plus" arrangement with private contractors: the more money they spend, the more money they make. Build a building that cost $100,000 in actual supplies and labor, charge the government $5 million, and then pocket not only that difference, but the 3% profit you're guaranteed on top of your spending.

Remember when Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, had $12 billion in cash delivered to Baghdad? Ostensibly it was to pay vendors and contractors. But of that original $12 billion, $8.8 billion -- or 73% -- is unaccounted for.

Not only is it the waste that's appalling, but it's the government's carefree attitude toward it; indeed, the government is allowing and encouraging such fraud to happen because it is deeply in bed with the contractors. Government official gives out cherry contracts; company profits; when government official leaves, he finds cherry job at company. And the cycle continues. Perhaps that person will once again join the government (as with Dick Cheney -- formerly Secretary of Defense, then CEO of Halliburton, now Vice President).

When our president says that he cares about the troops, he clearly doesn't. Let me make myself clear again: President Bush does not care about the welfare of the troops. He only wants meat to fight in his war. I'll leave you with my favorite quotation from the story:

What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureauc racy. This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profit eering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure -- American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.