Maliki is handing money out to random people in the street. That's where a chunk of their oil money is going, giveaways. While we pay for the reconstruction. Heck, there are billions of American dollars that are just missing, supposedly used to buy stuff, but no one can find the stuff the money supposedly bought. Iraq is a very corrupt place. (Not unusual among Muslim communities -- I was in Turkey for a bit over a year, and it's just as corrupt.) I'm sure lots of our money is just disappearing into peoples' pockets.
And of course we're paying buttloads for all our mercenaries, which has gotta be demoralizing for our troops. We pay our troops X to perform job A, but we pay the mercs 10X or 20X to do the exact same job when there are no soldiers available. How would you like to know you're making 20 grand a year and the guy across from you, doing the same job, while enduring fewer hardships, is making 200 grand a year.
And Congress never declared war, so there is no war, just a non-war conflict that's gonna cost two trillion dollars, and growing. That's around $14,000 for each and every taxpayer in the US. That's a hell of a lot of money to basically get one guy. Would have been way more cost effective to just put a billion dollar bounty on Saddam's head; he'd have been dead within a month if we'd gone that route, and that would've saved us taxpayers $1,999,000,000,000. We'd also have a few thousand fewer dead, Al Qaeda in Iraq wouldn't even exist, and we'd be well on our way to defeating the Taliban and Al Qaeda on their home turf.
Iraq was a two trillion dollar error in judgment, the most expensive error in judgment in the history of this planet. I'm glad I don't have any children, because the younger generation is going to be paying for this, probably for the rest of their lives.
