According to The New York Times, The Congressional Budget Office is releasing a report today that shows that 1 out of every 5 dollars spent in Iraq goes to private contractors.
Privatizing the Pentagon has served at least a two-fold purpose: To add sufficient numbers to serve the needs of the Iraq war in order to avoid a draft or any sense of shared sacrifice; and to pay off the friends and benefactors of the Bush administration, particularly VP Dick Cheney. He used run Halliburton. Halliburton's subsidary, Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) is the largest contractor by far in Iraq with 40,000 employees. It has been technically spun off from the mother ship.
Cobbling together what verifiable information they can locate, from 2003-07 the CBO estimated that $100 billion has been spent. Mind you, the CBO under Bush had often massaged its numbers in the administration's favor.
Dina L. Rasor, an author and independent expert on contracting fraud, thinks that's a lowball figure:
[She] said she believed that the $100 billion cost estimate from the Congressional Budget Office might be low, since there were virtually no reliable audits of or controls on spending during the first years of the war.
"It is a shocking number, but I still don't think it is the full cost," Ms. Rasor said. "I don't think there have been any credible cost numbers for the Iraq war. There was so much money spent at the beginning of the war, and nobody knows where it went."
This kind of profligate spending of taxpayer money gives rise to important questions: Are private contractors, such as Blackwater mercenaries, answerable to any laws? Or do they occupy extralegal grounds like Guantanamo? Do they endanger our own troops? Who are they loyal to, the country or the company?
Congress, as our representatives and supposed bulwark against the opaque Executive Branch, appears to be baffled about this out of control spending and its implications. As Senator Byron L. Dorgan (D-ND) said:
"The Truman Committee held 60 hearings on waste, fraud and abuse...It's unfathomable to me that we don't have a bipartisan investigative committee on contracting in Iraq."