We went to War because only the U.S. is allowed to engage in blatant graft

The Bush Administration...and yes Fox News, apparently believe that they can persuade Americans that it is a good idea to go to war over dishonest accounting.

The Grand Caymans should be so fucking scared.

President Bush and his vice president conceded Thursday in the clearest terms yet that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, even as they tried to shift the Iraq war debate to a new issue — whether the invasion was justified because Saddam was abusing a U.N. oil-for-food program.

...

The report underscored that "delay, defer, wait, wasn't an option," Cheney said. And he told a later forum in Fort Myers, Fla., speaking of the oil-for-food program: "The sanctions regime was coming apart at the seams. Saddam perverted that whole thing and generated billions of dollars."

Nevermind, of course, that we replaced what FoxNews' plainly honest arbiter Brit Hume called the greatest financial scandal of all time (somewhere Charles Keating and Neal Bush are crying over their Thai hookers and how they have been forgotten).
with our own form of massive graft and corruption in Iraq.

As Kevin Drum points out:

Last year Congress allocated $18.4 billion for Iraqi reconstruction projects. According to a new report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, how much of this money has actually reached Iraqi hands?

a. 23%
b. 14%
c. 6.4%
d. 2.7%
e. 1.5%

You guessed it: the answer is E, or $270 million. The rest of the money has either been left unspent or has been hoovered away by security, corruption, CPA overhead, and foreign salaries. What's left amounts to about $1 per month per Iraqi. Sweet!

I wonder just how much better our allocation of this money to the Iraqi's benefit compares to the 'Oil for Food' disbursement to them.